Authors: Frederick Taylor
Changeable weather did not stop Berliners in East and West heading off to their favourite summer haunts among the woods and lakes. Joachim Trenkner recalls spending the entire day at the beach on the Wannsee, in the south-western corner of West Berlin, bordering Communist-ruled Potsdam. He and his friends took in what sun was available, discussed everything from approaching girls to approaching political crises in the beer gardens that gird the lake.
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Millions did likewise.
As we now know, not everyone in divided Berlin was taking their ease that summer Saturday. At noon on 12 August, under heavy guard, government printers began to run off thousands of copies of a declaration by the GDR’s rubber-stamp Council of Ministers (which had not yet even met), announcing the border closure. Thousands of troops and police had been placed on alert. Honecker and his staff moved into the Keibelstrasse office suite for the final push. They would stay there until the operation was over.
By contrast, the true begetter of the border closure, Walter Ulbricht, was chauffeured out to the Grosser Döllnsee, beyond Wandlitz, to the government guest house. This facility, the
Haus zu den Birken
(House among the Birches) was originally a large, hip-roofed hunting lodge belonging to Field Marshal Hermann Göring’s personal huntsman.
This Saturday afternoon, Ulbricht seemed relaxed, almost jolly. He was throwing a garden party, to which almost everyone who was anyone in the GDR’s government had been invited. He called it a ‘get-together’ (
Beisammensein
).
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It was not unusual for Politburo members and ministers to meet at
Döllnsee for occasional weekends to brainstorm problems or to finalise major decisions. Cooks and other staff from Wandlitz would be present during the daytime, then usually return at night to their homes some miles away. But this weekend things were different, as Ulbricht’s personal chef, who helped prepare the meals, vividly recalled. The domestic staff were commanded to stay overnight in temporary accommodation near by. Only on Sunday morning would they be allowed to leave.
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Invitations had been extended to one or two Politburo members, but mainly to ministers and their state secretaries and leaders of the ‘block parties’. These were the pseudo-independent organisations of the ‘National Front’, including the National Democratic Party, the East-CDU, and Liberal Democratic Party.
The guests were, in short, largely the kind of people that Ulbricht used rather than consulted: people with impressive titles but unimpressive real powers. After coffee that afternoon, they wandered through the birch trees to the tranquil lake. Back at the house afterwards, the leader had ordered up a Soviet comedy film,
Every Man for Himself!
, but few of the guests were interested. Music played in the garden. They stood around, making somewhat awkward small talk, swapping jokes. Some of them noticed that the woods surrounding the guest house were full of soldiers and military vehicles. None of this made for an easy atmosphere.
The president of the tame parliament, Liberal Democratic Party leader Johannes Dieckmann, asked Alfred Neumann, veteran Communist and Secretary to the Central Committee, why they had been summoned here. The extremely tall and impressive-looking Neumann, a decathlon competitor in his youth and an unrepentant crypto-Stalinist throughout his long life, told him he didn’t know. This was a lie. As a Politburo member, Neumann had known for some days about the border closure, but it wasn’t his job to inform the likes of Dieckmann before ‘the boss’ saw fit.
After supper, Ulbricht finally called his guests together. The staff had already cleared away the meal. It was now around ten p.m.
‘We’re going to have a little meeting now,’ he announced in his highpitched bark of a voice. Ulbricht informed the members of the Ministerial Council of ‘their’ decision to close the sector border between East
and West Berlin—a decision which had already been printed up and distributed. ‘Everyone agreed?’ he asked. Unsurprisingly, no one demurred.
Once they had rubber-stamped the Polituro’s plan, the members of the Ministerial Council had served their purpose. Like the domestic staff, they were also not permitted to leave until the big border-closure operation was under way.
Shortly before the blatantly stage-managed ‘vote’ at Döllnsee, Honecker’s staff put the finishing touches to the complex patchwork that was ‘Operation Rose’.
The final operational orders for ‘Rose’ and a copy of the planned official announcement left Honecker’s office and were couriered a few blocks to the white-stone fastness of the Soviet embassy in Unter den Linden, within whose mazelike complex of offices the texts could be quickly translated into Russian for Moscow’s benefit. The ‘big brother’ had to be paid his due.
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All day, thousands of police units and ‘factory fighting groups’ had been on stand-by in barracks and training grounds. At eight that evening, the sealed orders for ‘Rose’ were opened. Senior officers were initiated into the plan, the police in Berlin and the army people at the commander-in-chief’s headquarters, Schloss Wilkendorf, just north of Strausberg. Then middle-ranking and battalion commanders were summoned by telephone. At nine they too were briefed on their role in the operation. By ten, Honecker knew that the huge machine was ready to move.
At midnight, Honecker rang army HQ and gave the crucial order: ‘You know the assignment! March!’
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General Heinz Hoffmann, commander-in-chief of the Nationale Volksarmee (NVA), immediately put his forces on a state of ‘heightened combat readiness’.
Three thousand one hundred and fifty soldiers of the 8th Motorised Artillery Division, based in Schwerin, rumbled towards the capital. Their 100 battle tanks and 120 armoured personnel carriers would take up position in the leanstock yards at Friedrichsfelde, just outside the centre of East Berlin. Four thousand two hundred more troops of the 1st
Motorised Division, in 140 tanks and 200 personnel carriers, left their barracks in Potsdam to cover the outer ring around West Berlin. Both sets of troops were positioned at least a thousand metres back from the sector borders; their task was to prevent any mass attempts to break through into the border area with West Berlin, so that the border police and the constructions gangs could carry out the border-closure operation undisturbed.
All units of the East Berlin People’s Police were placed on combatalert level II, and the 1st Brigade of Readiness (Riot) Police and the Berlin Security Command—10,000 men in all—were given their orders. These were to seal off to pedestrian and vehicle traffic all streets that gave access to the Western sectors, with the exception of the thirteen designated crossing places.
A changeable day had turned into an exceptionally cool night. The temperature was very low for August. All the better when there was work to be done.
At one a.m., the actual border-sealing operation began.
Sentries were placed at two-metre intervals along the entire Berlin sector border to prevent escapes, while border troops, factory paramilitaries and construction units barricaded the streets by means of barbed wire, tank traps and improvised concrete bolsters. Street lights were turned off, masking the nature of the operation. Only at the Brandenburg Gate did searchlights bathe the terrain in a cold, pale-blue light as soldiers laboured with hydraulic drills to tear up the surface of the great East-West boulevard on which the gate stood.
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Sixty-eight of 81 crossing points were to be barricaded. All 193 streets that straddled the border would be closed. And then there were the transport systems. Twelve underground (U-Bahn) and surface (S-Bahn) city railway lines were to be blocked off at the sector borders. Dozens of stations on or near the border were to be closed and sealed. The police, including
Trapos
, had charge of that. The most challenging task was at the busy Friedrichstrasse station complex, favoured route for refugees, where U-Bahn, S-Bahn and international passenger trains all stopped on the east bank of the Landwehr Canal, just metres from West Berlin. The
Vopos
were even ordered to regularly check the entry shafts to the sewer systems that connected East and West.
Honecker, the bespectacled organisation man who had spent so many years as Communist youth leader, ensuring that festivals, camps and demonstrations ran smoothly, was in his element. Overcome by restlessness once the work began, Honecker had himself driven around the various parts of the border to check that all was in order, to talk with the commanders, praise the troops and fine-tune the operation where necessary.
By four a.m., Honecker was back in his office. The tireless Security Secretary continued for two more hours to rasp orders, make and take phone calls. Then, at six, he was told that the provisional sealing of the border between East and West Berlin was complete.
With dawn creeping across the sky outside, Honecker turned to his staff. ‘Now we can go home,’ he announced with weary satisfaction.
Wolfgang Leonhard, who as a 24-year-old in 1945 had accompanied Ulbricht’s group from Moscow, and who in 1949 had decamped to the West, knew Honecker well. Of the devastating achievement that was the first phase of ‘Operation Rose’, Leonhard wrote later that it was ‘strange, even terrifying’ that Honecker seemed not to have experienced
even the slightest twinge of doubt…[at] dividing a city with a wall and with barbed wire and fortifications, so preventing human beings from exercising their full natural freedom—something that did not just contradict the general principles of humanity, but also the original concepts of socialism.
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Honecker’s greatest organisational triumph was now a fact. The Security Secretary’s official car was waiting to take him back to Wandlitz, the tranquil, fortified Communist VIP settlement in the forest.
Soon Erich Honecker would be snatching a little sleep, secure behind his own wall. The difference was, of course, that the Wandlitz wall was designed to keep the millions out, not in.
WITH MOST OF BERLIN
asleep, it was the round-the-clock workers, the professional night owls, who first realised that the East-West border was being closed: transport workers, police officers, journalists.
Robert H. Lochner was probably the first American to know.
Born in New York in 1918, at five years old Lochner moved with his family to Berlin, where his journalist father was for many years correspondent for Associated Press. Lochner was educated there, and spoke German like a native by the time the family returned to the US in 1936. After wartime military service (which included interrogating Nazi war criminals), he went into radio. Having worked for many years in Washington for Voice of America, by March 1961 he was back in Berlin as newly appointed director of the US-sponsored German-language station, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), a post that lay in the State Department’s gift.
At one minute past midnight on Sunday 13 August 1961, Lochner was woken by a call from his station’s monitoring section. East Berlin had announced that traffic from East to West Berlin would be halted until further notice.
This was ‘the big one’. Lochner and the senior members of his broadcasting team gathered quickly at RIAS headquarters on the Hans-Rosenthal-Platz in West Berlin, not far from Schöneberg Town Hall. They turned the station over to solemn music and a fifteen-minute cycle of news bulletins. RIAS possessed the most powerful transmitter in Europe; everyone was aware that whatever it announced could be heard in almost every corner of the GDR. All the more reason to ensure that their information was accurate and first-hand.
Twice during the small hours Lochner drove alone over to East Berlin.
The
Vopos
might have blocked the border for East Germans, and West Berliners also had been forbidden access (allegedly temporarily), but as an American citizen with a diplomatic passport the RIAS director could travel without hindrance. He wore a coat to conceal the portable tape recorder he carried on his lap. As he drove, he murmured his thoughts into its microphone. In consequence, the first direct, on-the-spot radio reports of barbed wire being laid across Berlin’s streets came from Robert Lochner.
A third trip, after dawn, took him to the Friedrichstrasse station, normally the last stop on both the main railway and S-Bahn lines before they trundled over the river Spree and into the West. A few hours earlier, the East German transport police had suddenly closed the ticket halls and barred all access to trains scheduled for the West.
In the tunnels and halls below the embarkation area, Lochner found hundreds of East Germans milling around in bewilderment and growing desperation. As yet unaware of the border closure, they still hoped to catch trains for the West. Most would-be refugees carried suitcases or, in a pathetic attempt to disguise their intentions, parcels and boxes tied up with string. Access to the trains was blocked by lines of black-clad transport police (
Trapos
), who stood shoulder-to-shoulder blocking the ‘up’ steps to the platforms, semi-automatic weapons slung ready for use. Lochner found himself irresistibly reminded, by their uniforms and their arrogance, of Hitler’s SS, whose unattractive qualities he knew well from pre-war days.
As Lochner stood by, watching the miserable scene, he saw an elderly lady gather up her courage and slowly climb the steps until she reached the line of
Trapos
.
‘When,’ she asked nervously, ‘is the next train to West Berlin?’