Authors: Frederick Taylor
‘Well, goddamnit!’ he exploded. ‘What if they are closed? You’re the mayor, aren’t you? It shouldn’t be too difficult for you to make
arrangements so I can get to see that porcelain. I’ve crossed an entire ocean to come here…’
Close to Dreilinden, the limo had to push its way through more crowds of jubilant Berliners. The American commandant, General Watson, took a secret-service detail and cleared a way through the final few yards to the reception podium by the side of the highway. There was a military band, plus the obligatory flock of news reporters and camera crews.
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Finally Colonel Johns was hauled up on to the saluting platform along with the Vice-President, who enthusiastically shook his hand and made an impromptu speech. Johnson’s welcome was echoed by a few brief words in English from Mayor Brandt. Then Johns made his way back to his jeep. Preceded by a Military Police vehicle, the First Battle Group, with Johns at its head, rumbled forward, very slowly, through a vast throng of West Berliners, who threatened to bury the vehicles under a multicoloured torrent of flowers.
The battle group eventually struggled to its destination: the McNair Barracks in the south-western suburb of Lichterfelde. Formerly the AEG-Telefunken factory, since 1948 the buildings had housed the combat units of the American occupation forces in Berlin. The exhausted troops were there belatedly fed, then promptly formed up again and subjected to ‘honest-to-goodness Deep South oratory’ from the Vice-President.
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In fact, all this welcoming was a little too prompt. Several of the newcomers collapsed in the August heat.
Nor were things over once the Vice-President had spoken. The troops were ordered back to their vehicles to prepare for a parade through West Berlin.
Meanwhile, Mayor Brandt had disappeared on city business back at Schöneberg Town Hall and the Vice-President was on his way to the nearby Marienfelde reception camp, one of the visits he had cancelled that morning. He was welcomed by a crowd of East German refugees. He was mobbed, in fact, almost to the point of suffocation. From Marienfelde the tireless visitor returned to Dahlem, to mount yet another saluting stand and start off the big—the really big—parade.
The subsequent drive-past of the battle group was even more memorable. Yet more bouquets hurled by joyful Berliners, yet more cheering
and smiling and handshaking. Even the troops ended up grinning, leaning out and exchanging greetings with the crowd. A lot of them forgot altogether to salute the dignitaries as they passed the reviewing stand. It looked more like a welcome for a victorious football team than a military parade. They drove miles through the crowds, the length of the Ku’damm, every inch packed with humanity. Colonel Johns rode at the head in his open jeep, smiling until his face ached and waving until his shoulder all but came unhinged.
Afterwards, Johnson answered a few questions from the press back at Ambassador Dowling’s residence and then, under pretence of a call of nature, handed over these tedious duties to Charles Bohlen.
Bohlen had avoided the parade and spent the afternoon with various State Department German specialists, plus General Clay and Allan Lightner, the civilian Head of Mission, driving around East Berlin. There they had unnerved the
Vopos
by making an innocent but unscheduled stop at the men’s lavatories in Unter den Linden, just on the Eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate. So varied had been the diplomatic activities of the visitors to the flashpoint city, and so tense was the situation.
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Once Johnson had absented himself, Bohlen was determined to make clear beyond all doubt that America did not want war. ‘We are not going to take any risks in Berlin,’ he told the press.
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Ulbricht and Khrushchev must have loved him.
After the press left, there followed a lively Sunday evening. Vice-President Johnson rapidly acquired a glass of whisky, and kicked back in his inimitable, expansive style. He soon decided that instead of the intimate private dinner at the residence that had been planned, he would invite everyone and their wives out to eat somewhere. The rooftop of the West Berlin Hilton? Great.
The landmark Hilton Hotel had been built in 1958, its black-and-white checkerboard architecture looming above the brashly rebuilt Budapester Strasse and the entire Kurfürstendamm area. As elsewhere, it represented, in Conrad Hilton’s words, a ‘little America’, symbolising the USA’s economic power and reinforcing a near-utopian vision of the superpower’s lifestyle of freedom and plenty. Some other West Berlin politicians were invited. State Department specialists who thought they had the night off were summoned to perform translation duties.
So, everyone set off for the Hilton. But the bewildering blur of activity that was Lyndon Baines Johnson had not yet settled in one place. Just before they left for dinner at the Hilton, that other basic need—shopping—came up once more. After Brandt rejoined the party, Johnson noticed his loafers, and took a liking to them. Where did they come from? Leiser, the mayor replied, naming a well-known German manufacturer of quality shoes. Well, the Vice-President wanted to buy some…today. Brandt gave up resisting and put his chief of protocol on to the problem, asking him to also contact the porcelain factory as well. The American way had triumphed.
The Vice-President’s renewed retail offensive proved successful. By the time they arrived at the rooftop restaurant of the Hilton, with its panorama of all Berlin, the manager of the State Porcelain Factory’s showroom had agreed, given everyone’s gratitude to the emissaries of freedom, to open up his store on the nearby Kurfürstendamm for the Vice-President alone. Everyone waited for dinner while Johnson was whisked along to investigate the precious wares on display. The manager, Herr Franke, agreed to supply his guest with a full dinner service for the LBJ ranch and also a set of rocaille plates bearing the vice-presidential seal.
At last, Johnson returned to the Hilton and dinner could begin. At the Vice-President’s insistence, they all tucked into southern fried chicken, which to the Germans’ mild alarm LBJ consumed as he would at home, in absolute hands-on fashion. He broke off only to receive a full inventory of purchases from the punctilious Herr Franke, who had stayed on in his showroom to do the paperwork.
Herr Franke refused the Vice-President’s offer of a huge wad of dollar bills. He would, he explained with dignity, first ship the china to Texas, where the goods could be inspected and then, when found satisfactory, paid for. So impressive did Johnson find this reasonableness that he then ordered a host of ashtrays, likewise emblazoned with the vice-presidential seal, as a possible gift for honoured visitors in Washington. They agreed on the spot on a bulk-purchase price. As Johnson explained triumphantly to Brandt when the manager had left the room, ‘They look like a dollar and cost me only twenty-five cents!’
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As the evening wore on and on, and the tireless Johnson insisted on going out to the edge of the terrace to take a thorough look over at East
Berlin, just a couple of kilometres distant, someone nervously asked one of the Secret Service detail if this was normal. Or…was the Vice-President ‘on something’? ‘Oh no,’ the man answered, dead-pan, ‘the Vice-President is just his usual bubbling self.’
After returning to the ambassador’s residence, Johnson found samples of Leiser and Company’s loafers waiting for him, Sunday or no Sunday. Before going to bed, he happily tried them all on, and ended up ordering half a dozen pairs.
The Vice-President left just after dawn for the return trip to the States, still unwearied, though his right hand was swollen from shaking. He had been in West Berlin for less than forty-eight hours.
The Johnson whirlwind was over, but the calm was yet to come.
Use of cement and brick had commenced the previous Friday, but records show that the leadership in East Berlin was still not necessarily committed to the massive, deadly engineering project that the border would later become. Although approval had been given for a cement wall, about the height of a human being, to be erected in the built-up areas of central Berlin (beginning with the Potsdamer Platz and extending over the next few days as far as the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag), the barrier would for the next few weeks still consist mainly of barbed wire, wood and cement slabs and bollards placed across traffic routes, closely patrolled by armed police. The cementing-up of the doors and windows of buildings bordering the West also proceeded apace within a few days of the formal border closure.
Meanwhile, the escape rate continued at a level that Ulbricht and the leadership found distressing, humiliating, and even—strange as this may seem—surprising. Around 417 East Germans would manage to reach the West during the month following 13 August.
Many of them were former ‘border-crossers’ who had jobs, friends and family in West Berlin. They had a motive, and they knew where they were going.
Just such a perfect escape candidate was Ursula Heinemann, seventeen years old and a waitress at the Plaza Hotel on the Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin. Every day since she left school, she had commuted with the S-Bahn from the family flat in the East Berlin suburb of Johannisthal,
heading over the sector border—which lay just a little over a kilometre northwards—into the borough of Neukölln in the American sector, and from there to work.
Ursula had been shocked by what happened on 13 August, but with the courage of youth she had no intention of passively accepting her fate, She could see that the situation on the nearby Teltow Canal was frightening, Guards were stationed along the banks, motor boats patrolled the waters, She travelled with a girl friend the long route around the rim of Berlin in the middle of that week of enforced idleness, to see if things looked a little easier at Gross Glienicke, which sat on the border near Potsdam. They didn’t. A day spent doing casual waitressing work at a beer garden frequented by border guards, some of whom affirmed their intention to shoot at escapers, convinced them that they were risking too much. Two days later, some close relatives, both disillusioned Communists, told her to ‘Get out and over to the West as quickly as you can’, Once the East German state got around to dealing with her, as a known bordercrosser, she would probably be shipped off to some collective farm in Mecklenburg or Thuringia.
It was on Saturday 19 August, the day of Johnson and Clay’s arrival, that Ursula and her mother took a walk, They headed north-west, with a cemetery and crematorium on their right and woods to their left, crossing a bridge that took them to the far side of the branch canal, the Britzer Zweigkanal, that connected the main Teltow waterway with the river Spree.
Both sides of the canal were still in East Berlin, but just two or three hundred yards away lay the Sonnenallee crossing point. This was still open, though only to Westerners coming East. Mother and daughter did not approach the checkpoint head-on, but took a path leading through neglected vegetable allotments. At this point, Ursula quietly told her mother she was going to investigate the possibilities.
Ursula advanced alone into the deserted garden area, knowing that the border between the Soviet and the American sector lay a few score yards distant, over a grassy moat known as the Heidekampgraben, A small, apparently deserted dwelling stood near by and, immediately ahead, a newly erected barbed wire fence, Although she was dressed just in a
sweater and slacks, and she knew her mother was waiting for her, Ursula decided to try to get through, It felt like now or never.
There was a gap beneath the lowest strand of barbed wire, just wide enough for her to squirm under. With agonising slowness she did so, forcing herself to ignore the barbs as they ripped the wool of her sweater. She had to use one hand to lift the wire to let her through, She winced with pain, ending up with a bleeding gash on her palm. All the same, she made it. Only to find a second fence, which had been added just recently. She repeated the procedure, acquiring further lacerations, tearing more pieces out of her sweater.
Ursula could see the sign indicating the sector border just ahead. Her heart leapt. If she could make it through this final barrier, surely she must be safe? Then Ursula noticed cigarette smoke drifting through the air towards her. Somewhere, within a matter of a few feet, was a border guard, maybe more than one. But it was too late to turn back. She eased her legs through the last of the wire, then crawled as quickly but as quietly as she could past the border sign.
Ursula had arrived in West Berlin, a fact confirmed by a man standing in the garden on the other side of the sign. Whether the border guard had seen or heard her, but had decided to let her go, she would never know.
So unprepared was Ursula for the huge step she had taken that she carried only her identity card and a handkerchief, but no money. Some kind soul lent her a couple of marks so that she could take a bus to the reception centre and register in the West.
Ursula’s big advantage was that she had a job to go to. Within twenty-four hours of registering, she was back at the Plaza Hotel, where the management was eager to employ her again and provided her with accommodation.
The young woman even managed to set her mind to rest about her mother. Immediately after making it through to the West, Ursula was consumed by concern, After all, she had gone off to ‘explore’ and never come back. What would her mother think? But the Sonnenallee checkpoint was still open at this stage. The man she met in the garden willingly bicycled off, crossed into East Berlin, found her mother and reassured her that Ursula was safely in the West.
The situation of trouble-free access for West Berliners soon changed.
Having successfully pulled off the border closure without Western counter-measures, Ulbricht decided to turn the screw a little tighter. His government announced that from one a.m. on 23 August, the number of crossing points would be further reduced, from twelve to seven. Of these, only one would be open to foreigners and diplomats (Checkpoint Charlie on the Friedrichstrasse), two to West Germans, and four to West Berliners (including the Sonnenallee checkpoint near where Ursula had made her escape).