Authors: Frederick Taylor
Alan Lightner’s initial telegrams to Washington were cool and objective. Relying on reports from an officer of the US Military Mission, who had crossed over into the East during the night, Lightner was able to assure the State Department that the situation there was fairly calm. This was in large measure due to massive numbers of police and soldiers being shipped into the border area by the Communists.
Between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m., security control activity throughout East Berlin was rapidly accelerated. Security units appearing on streets at this time included customs police performing normal police duty,
Vopos
, Bereitschaft Polizei, Kampfgruppen units and East German Army Units. Kampfgruppen units entered almost all buildings on streets adjacent to East/West Berlin sector lines and inspected stairwells, upper floors, and roofs.
Vopos
took up assigned beats of streets, assisted by customs police. Security alert police opened schools, other public buildings and factories to house large numbers of police arriving in motorized columns. Major unit consisting of approximately 80 truckloads police, accompanied by armoured cars, machine gun carriers and other vehicles, arrived at large industrial site near Rummelsburg S-Bahn station.
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In the same cable, Lightner noted that the Soviets, though holding back their military hardware from the city itself, were monitoring events closely. Many Soviet military-licensed cars, he said, had been noticed making observation tours of East Berlin, These indications of Soviet restraint were a positive sign. Lightner judged that the East Germans’
coup d’état
against their own people had been carried out cleverly and might well avoid the kind of extreme reactions feared in Washington:
Most noteworthy feature is that almost all security control measures were completed before most East Berliners were awake from Sunday sleep, Although crowds began to gather at approximately 8:30 a.m. on streets leading to crossing points, most people kept considerable distance from police and appeared to be resigned to passive observation of events…
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No one wanted to risk war. The question was, how to stop things from boiling over without seeming to condone the East German actions? How to continue to oppose the East German regime without destabilising it—with unforeseeable consequences? And finally, how to make a credible protest without driving the Communists into even more extreme measures?
The Allied military commanders finally met at the
Kommandatura
building on the leafy Kaiserswerther Strasse in Dahlem, in the American sector. They had still not decided how to deal with the situation on the border when Brandt arrived.
This was the first time the West Berlin mayor had ever entered the
Kommandatura
building, He routinely met the Allied sector commanders at his offices in Schöneberg Town Hall or at official receptions and social events. Brandt was kept waiting for half an hour, and on being admitted to the mahogany-panelled conference room, was shocked to see that a portrait still hung there of General Kotikov, Soviet commandant at the time of the Berlin Blockade and the last Russian representative to attend the
Kommandatura
. An empty chair at the table indicated that the Soviets could rejoin the body at any time, should they so choose, Berlin was, after all, still technically under the same four-power occupation established at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, and the Western Allies wanted everyone to know it.
This was a pointed indication that the Allied commanders, while sympathetic to the Berliners’ plight, did not necessarily share their perspectives and loyalities. Brandt had been perturbed to see no increased Allied military presence on the streets on his drive from the airport. Once he had their attention, he addressed the commanders and their civilian advisers not in his usual quiet, wry manner, but with a naked passion born of desperation.
Brandt was quite frank. The East German National People’s Army had marched into East Berlin like a conquering power, he said. He compared this annexation of the other half of his city to Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. If, he argued, they accepted this
fait accompli
, then they would be guilty of appeasement, as Britain and France had been a quarter of a century earlier. Moreover, at the same time as he had closed the border, the GDR’s Minister of the Interior, Karl Maron, had also confined Allied military and government personnel visiting East Berlin to three crossing points. Were the Allies going to tolerate this?
Under the 1945 Potsdam Agreement, Allied access to the East was supposedly an untrammelled right. For the past sixteen years, servicemen and officials from Britain, France, and America had simply walked the streets anywhere in Berlin, crossing from sector to sector, West to East and back, as and when they wished. Now, Brandt reminded them, they were to be forced to obey orders from a puppet East German administration whose legitimacy they did not recognise. Like foreign tourists and German civilians, their troops would face border checks by East German officials. The West would risk humiliation before the watching world.
When Brandt emerged grim-faced from his encounter with the Allied representatives, his aides asked him nervously how the meeting had gone.
‘At least those shits are now going to send some patrols to the border,’ their boss growled. ‘So the Berliners won’t think they’re all alone.’
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The Politburo’s decision to mount the operation during Saturday night/ Sunday morning, at the height of the summer vacation period, had been triumphantly vindicated. The East German people woke up, for the most part, to a
fait accompli
.
However, by mid-morning the West Berlin side of the sector border had filled up with angry crowds, especially at the Brandenburg Gate. The
deceptive peace of dawn, when Götz Bergander had first arrived, was a thing of the past. At the front of the throng were young Westerners. Many of them had ridden into the centre on their light motorbikes.
‘There were ten or fifteen of us, all friends from the same neighbourhood in Charlottenburg,’ recalled Wolfgang Baldin, then a nineteen-year-old bakery worker. ‘With our Mambo portable radios and our motorbikes. We’d heard about it on the radio news. We got together and just headed straight for the Brandenburg Gate.’
When Wolfgang and his friends arrived, the limited space on the Western side of the gate was packed. There were many West Berlin police, keeping their own people back from the actual border, on the other side of which the Factory Fighting Groups and the
Vopos
were guarding the construction work. East German armoured cars had arrived. They were visible behind the troops and the workers, blocking the way into the Pariser Platz and the boulevard of Unter den Linden beyond.
Frustrated at their inability to get close to the action, the boys ducked around the corner, where the Ebertstrasse ran south along the sector border several hundred metres down to the Potsdamer Platz. Barbed wire had already been laid here, several densely spiralled layers thick. It looked formidable, but there were spots where it could be pulled aside by groups of determined Westerners, and where East Berliners waiting on the other side could dart through the gaps. Several escaped. The boys gave a hand. But then more Eastern armoured cars appeared, and more labour teams laid more barbed wire.
The boys moved southwards, with the open spaces of the Tiergarten—the West—on their right, and the barbed wire of the newly imprisoned East to their left. Towards the Potsdamer Platz, instead of wire there stood lines of East German troops with fixed bayonets. Some shouting and abuse went on, but faced with armed guards there was little the Westerners could do. Their own police tried to move them back from the border, but initially had little success.
Soon the protesters had spotted new quarry over on the other side.
We saw some types over the on the Eastern side, inspecting things. They must have been from the SED. You know, they had their party badges on. Well, we started to chuck stones at them. Quite a hail of them
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To the resentment and disappointment of the demonstrators, reinforcements of West Berlin police appeared and forced them further back into the Tiergarten, away from the sector border. The message was: no provocations.
Over in East Berlin, as Lightner noted in a later cable to Washington, ‘crowds of curious and sullen onlookers’ had gathered. A few risked rushing the nascent barrier, like the escapers in the Ebertstrasse, but the vast majority held back from the border. The now-trapped East Berliners were, however, often close enough to gesture towards the West, or to gaze over at the scenes on the Western side and harbour whatever thoughts they might behind their practised mask of impassivity.
It was not just soldiers, police and construction workers who were busy behind the new border. The East German government sent groups of professional party agitators among the crowds, and to East Berlin’s S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations. Their job was to ‘work’ gatherings of civilians, promoting the official view of the ‘protective barrier’. As early as 5.30 a.m., individual teams were busy at nearly thirty locations, with reinforcements planned for large S-Bahn stations such as Alexanderplatz, Ostbahnhof and, of course, Friedrichstrasse.
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In a bizarrely human touch, the internal SED report was also forced to note that even in a well-ordered, disciplined Communist state there were, in fact, drawbacks to staging such a major operation under conditions of high secrecy and on a Saturday night:
Most leading functionaries of the Berlin Transport Company (BVG) were attending a parry, which meant that the necessary measures were delayed. The Director of the BVG, Comrade Paschau, declared, ‘Well, you have picked a very unfavourable time.’ Despite repeated demands, the active service units of the Transport Police did not arrive until close co six a.m.
Nor were all the East Berliners as reticent as Lightner reported from his vantage point on the Western side. The regime’s agents were everywhere, keeping an eye on the situation at street level and observing large groups of East German citizens that might be accumulating at potential flashpoints. The agents’ reports to party headquarters were not entirely encouraging.
Just as Western youths like Wolfgang Baldin and his friends reacted passionately to the outrage, in the East it was also the young who threatened trouble. As the day wore on, gatherings of young people caused real concern to the Communist authorities. Some confined themselves to complaining about how the closing of the border would affect their shopping and movie-going habits. Others presented a greater challenge. A hundred-strong crowd assembled in front of SED district headquarters for Berlin-Mitte, close to the Brandenburg Gate. The party’s agents reported ‘provocative speeches’. Members of the district leadership appeared and engaged the young people in discussion. After a while the crowd dispersed.
However, the trouble had merely moved on. At the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, a couple of blocks away, larger crowds soon assembled. The participants’ statements, reported to the party that same day, ran along the lines of ‘Over there in West Berlin they do things right. Why do we have tanks on the streets?’ and ‘Arm yourselves! The West Berliners are freer than we are. At least now you can see who’s responsible for the tension in this city!’
Worryingly from the point of view of the authorities, there was also talk of a mass attempt at a breakthrough into the West, maybe the next day.
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There was constant, hour-by-hour feedback to the Central Committee on the public mood in the Ease The party’s spies throughout East Berlin reported that the banning of ‘border-crossers’ was on the whole popular—they were perceived as gaining an unfair advantage by working in the West for hard currency and then buying cheap in the soft-currency East, where they continued to live. All the same, the average citizen was well aware what the closing of the border meant for their own personal freedom, and didn’t like it.’
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The chief problem, the same report added, was that young people especially were inclined to listen to, and trust, Western radio and television broadcasts.
The influence of ‘West-TV’ was to be a constant problem. As the saying went, many Easterners ‘spent their days in the East and their nights in the West’. With the exception of the area around Dresden, where the topography of the Elbe valley made it impossible to receive Western broadcasts (for which reason Dresden was known mockingly in
the rest of the GDR as
Tal der Ahnunglosen
or ‘Valley of the Clueless’), any East German could tune his TV or radio to the West.
Listening to Western radio was certainly the order of the day. Even in the country cottage of a certain ultra-loyal East German comrade, on the rural far-eastern edge of Berlin, nestled within a remote arm of the Müggelsee lake.
This person, an actor of leftist convictions, had moved from West to East in I949 in order to ‘help, as a cultural worker, with the construction of Socialism in the GDR’. Since then, he had laboured with success in the East Berlin theatre, as well as in the state-owned DEFA film studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg that had once been the famous UFA dream factory. In its I920S heyday, classics such as
The Blue Angel, Nosferatu
and
Metropolis
had been filmed at Babelsberg, and in the I93Os, under the rutelage of Propaganda Minister Goebbels, such notorious films as Jew
Süss
and the pro-euthanasia
Ich Klage An
(‘I Accuse’).
The actor’s problem was that this weekend, he had invited his teenage nephew, Till Meyer, to stay. Till’s war-widowed mother, with whom the boy lived the rest of the time, was still resident in West Berlin.
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