Authors: Frederick Taylor
The escapes in the Bernauer Strasse soon turned into a human drama watched by an entire world, which, through the cameras of the press and the recently established television stations, enjoyed a grandstand seat. Crowds, police and fire fighters arrived on the Western side. They shouted encouragement as Easterners hesitated at upstairs windows. Fire fighters extended jumping sheets to break escapers’ falls. In one case, as a man slid from a first-floor window, he found himself seized by
Vopos
from inside the room he had just left. Westerners in the street below managed to grab his ankles and pull him down. A tug-of-war ensued. In this case, with gravity on their side, the escaper and his Western helpers won.
Others were not so lucky. A number of would-be escapers died in the hours and days before the buildings were cleared. Ida Siekmann, fiftynine years old, fell into the West from an upper floor and died,
3
as did Rudolf Urban, forty-seven, who suffered terrible damage after a fall from his apartment window. He lingered almost a month in a West Berlin hospital before succumbing to his injuries.
4
Even after the windows were bricked up, people tried to escape over the apartment-block roofs.
One of the last victims in the Bernauer Strasse was Bernd Lunser, a
Berliner who on 4 October was spotted by
Grepos
as he prepared to abseil from the roof of 44 Bernauer Strasse to the West, using a washing line. East German police rapidly appeared in the building. Lunser was forced to move elsewhere, pursued across the rooftops by the representatives of the Communist state. All the while, he called out for help from the West.
Below, on the street, the fire brigade set up a jump sheet. Several hundred Western onlookers assembled. As the police closed in, Lunser sprang from the roof. He missed the sheet and died on the ground minutes later. He was thirty years old.
5
There was as yet no ‘wall’ in place, as it would later be understood, but even the improvised barrier erected during the night of 12/13 August proved surprisingly effective.
The Marienfelde reception centre in West Berlin remained full of refugees, but mostly ones who had arrived before Sunday and were awaiting processing. On Monday, when registration began, several thousand fugitives presented themselves, but they were mostly East Germans who had been visiting West Berlin for the weekend and decided to stay after the border was closed. The same applied to the few hundred who registered on Tuesday.
Twenty-eight escapers, according to official figures, managed to make it over during Sunday night, and forty-one the next. Some swam the Teltow Canal; another, a fifty-year-old railway worker, Alfons Dubinski, managed to sneak through the no man’s land covering the remains of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery and find his way through the barbed-wire fence of the Ebertstrasse into the Tiergarten and the safety of West Berlin. On Monday night, shots were fired at a couple swimming the as yet sparsely fortified Teltow Canal towards the American sector. No one was hurt, and they had made it safely to the West, but it was a grim warning of what might happen to future would-be escapers.
6
Again, the East German regime’s leaders could congratulate themselves on their success in carrying out their mission with minimum cost. And they did.
The party’s official mouthpiece,
Neues Deutschland
, crowed over the triumph that the ‘anti-Fascist protection barrier’ represented. This was ‘a black day for the warmongers…the track-switch has been set to peace
…the workers’ response: production records’. A front page editorial was headlined ‘Clear Conditions!’ and said of the West Berlin authorities: ‘With one stroke it becomes evident how bankrupt is their policy, how hopeless their position.’ A crestfallen Brandt, according to a report of his rallying speech to the people of West Berlin, had ‘held a funeral oration for the traders in human beings’.
7
To a young journalist on the paper and convinced Communist, Günter Schabowski, this feeling of triumph was genuine. The regime he supported had won a wonderful victory. It had outwitted the capitalists, and for him and his colleagues this was a ‘great day’.
8
Beneath the façade of self-congratulation, though, the SED state was as insecure and paranoid as ever. The party was never satisfied. It was not enough that the GDR’s citizens were quiescent. They had to love the party and everything it did.
Those who could be regarded as not loving the party were both obvious and less obvious. Obvious were the tens of thousands who had previously chosen to work in the West. They were the so-called border-crossers, and the regime had been persecuting them for years with every measure short of an outright ban. Equally obvious were those young East Berliners who had chosen (or their parents had chosen for them) to be educated in the West. Less obvious were those who put on a positive face in the workplace or at compulsory political meetings, but in private complained.
Now that the party had all these people in its clutches, unable to leave via the escape hatch of the open Berlin border, its policy towards all of them could, and would, change.
The former ‘border-crossers’ were easily dealt with. They were directed to labour exchanges to be found work in East German factories. But their status as doubtful elements would still cost them dear. They were subjected to a policy of discrimination. ‘Concentrations’ of such people in workplaces were to be avoided. They were not to be employed ‘in key positions and especially crucial areas of production’
9
. By the middle of September, the
Stasi
reported that of 32,000 registered former ‘border-crossers’, 24,000 had accepted new employment ‘within democratic {i.e. East} Berlin’.
10
Significantly, and given the regime’s preoccupations unsurprisingly,
all qualified teachers who were resident in the East but had taught in the West were to be barred from the GDR’s education system for life.
As for so-called
Weststudenten
(‘West-students’), who had chosen to study in West Berlin or West Germany during the time of the open border, they were also to be punished. An element of ‘class war’ was clearly present in handling those who might be seen as privileged traitors to the ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’. Such college or university students were ‘categorically’ not to be permitted to finish their studies in the East. Those studying technical subjects were to be directed into jobs in socialist industry where their knowledge might be exploited. They might after a while, with the agreement of their managers, be allowed to return to higher education in the GDR.
Those who had studied what might be called liberal arts subjects were to be treated with special vindictiveness. As the order put it: ‘West-students who have been studying a social science subject in West Berlin—including those in their final semester—are to be placed without exception into the production process.’
11
In other words, anyone who had studied political subject matter in the West was to be put straight into unskilled factory work.
A thornier problem was that of children and young people from the East who had attended schools in the West before 13 August, and would now have to finish their studies in the GDR. Here, fear of ‘contamination’ was a major determining factor. If there were concerns about politically tainted border-crossers undermining innocent socialist factories, there were equal worries about these corrupted young people poisoning pure socialist schools. A concentration of ‘former West-pupils’ in individual classes or schools was ‘absolutely to be avoided’. Questions of convenience or proximity to a particular school should not mitigate this policy.
At least most of the younger pupils were to be allowed to continue studying. Things got tougher as the subjects of the rule got older. In the case of ‘West-pupils’ from the 11th and 12th classes (the last-but-two and penultimate year of high school) they would not be allowed to finish school but would be assigned apprenticeships. No access to university, except in cases where this was considered ‘appropriate in the interests of society as a whole’—which would decisively depend on ‘the attitude of
parents with regard to our government’s measures and their willingness to help educate their children in accordance with our educational laws’.
The price for (possible) educational reprieve for their children was therefore the total, abject conformity of the parents.
West-pupils in the 13th (pre-university) year were, like the errant social-science students, to be tossed straight into the work-force with no chance of higher education.
Although, or perhaps because, the East German regime distrusted the educated middle classes so strongly, the attitude of the intelligentsia, of whatever age, was a matter of intense concern to the authorities.
Papers submitted to the Central Committee included surveys, based on informants’ reports, detailing the educated class’s concerns. There were doctors complaining about the sudden shortage of Western medicines, and fears that they would no longer be able to treat some private patients along with the state-supported ones. There were actors who considered themselves cut off from their German heritage. There were self-employed members of the middle classes who feared that the government would now clamp down on their independence. ‘Why do they ask us now?’ one complaint went. ‘This business {i.e. the building of the Wall} was a foregone conclusion. There should be consultation and discussion first, to see if we agree. That is democracy.’ This view was reported to be ‘widespread’ in educated circles.
12
Occasionally criticism went public. At a chemical works in Halle, open dissent was expressed at a meeting to ‘discuss’ the 13 August border closure. Workers declared that ‘the measures were a crime’. The report curtly described the consequences of such frankness: ‘Two bandits were consequently arrested’.
13
Elsewhere, a certain ‘colleague Richter’ announced that he did not agree with the ‘measures’, which he said would harm the GDR. His own life, he declared, was in any case already ‘ruined’ (
verpfuscht
). In this case, the government informant confined himself to enclosing photographs of the ‘ruined’ man’s pleasant apartment and penning a few sarcastic remarks. ‘Richter also possesses a Trabant De Luxe automobile,’ the report noted, ‘a refrigerator, a television set, new furniture for his apartment, and two fat pigs’.
14
The choice of a weekend for the sealing of the border was calculated to
catch the West asleep; but it also aimed at managing the response among the domestic work-force.
In June 1953, during the uprising, workers had downed tools to discuss their grievances, then streamed out of factories and construction sites on to the streets. It had taken Soviet tanks to quell their resistance. The party had learned a bitter lesson. On an August Sunday, it was calculated, those same workers would be with their families, relaxing at home, perhaps visiting their traditional German weekend allotments (
Gartenlauben
), or even off on vacation in the countryside. Much less likelihood of mass meetings and strikes.
By Monday, the East German authorities reasoned, the
fait accompli
would be unassailable. They were right.
Unlike 1953, the government arranged for meetings to be addressed by party officials and agitators, and for discussion to be tolerated. Iron glove in velvet fist. Only critics who went too far, like the fearless workers in Halle, were classified as ‘bandits’ or ‘negative elements’. They were scooped up by the security forces.
There were thousands who did come into that category. Around 1,500 East Germans were arrested for political offences in the first half of 1961. That number increased almost fivefold in the second half to 7,200.
15
As reigns of terror go, it was not comparable to 1953, when the jails had brimmed over, but it was bad enough. Those swept up by this purge entered a world that was little known to outsiders or even most GDR citizens, but that they would, if they survived it, never forget.
The East German gulag.
At the end of that weekend, nineteen-year-old Klaus Schulz-Ladegast returned to the city from his romantic rural interlude. He settled back into the comfortable family home in the inner-city East Berlin district of Mitte.
In the meantime, of course, ‘Barbed-Wire Sunday’ had intervened and the great world had changed. So had Schulz-Ladegast’s smaller personal world, though he did not yet know this. Because he had no overwhelming feelings about the new ‘border measures’—the woman he was in love with also lived east of the new barrier—he assumed his life would continue along much the same course. Considering where to study,
meeting his lover and his friends, hanging out in the cafés and bars of the city’s historic centre.
It was not to be. Five days later, on Thursday 17 August, they came for him.
A car slid in alongside the kerb as he walked down a quiet suburban street in the August sunshine. Two men got out and he found his way blocked. They asked him to accompany them to ‘clear up a matter’. Their polite language belied the firmness with which they took him by the arms and bundled him into the waiting Wartburg. A third man had kept the engine idling while the arrest took place. He now pumped the accelerator and the car took off quickly, rumbling over the cobbled street to God knew where.
Schulz-Ladegast’s destination was a place that since the 1950s had been known as the ‘forbidden area’. Catching the ordinary tram that started at the Alexanderplatz and trundled eastwards five or so kilometres along the broad boulevard of the Leninallee, the casual traveller would get out at the Gensler Strasse stop. Only when one tried to enter the small maze of streets north of the Leninallee did orientation difficulties begin.