The Berlin Wall (41 page)

The restrictions on foreign visitors were worrying enough, and inspired the usual protests, as did the reduction of the West German crossing points to two. But there was a far worse sting in the tail for West Berliners. The designation of four crossing points for them was misleading. They had hitherto simply shown their identity card to go East. Now they must apply for visas from two yet-to-be-established branches of the ‘Travel Agency of the GDR’, which the Communists demanded be set up in West Berlin at Westkreuz and Zoo stations.

The answer from Brandt’s city hall came back quickly. No deal. How could Brandt agree to such a thing? To allow East German visa offices in West Berlin would be to recognise the legitimacy of the regime, and to retroactively vindicate Ulbricht’s illegal border-closure measures, thus effectively undermining the entire Allied position in the city. Moreover, what was to stop the East Germans using such offices, once established, as a means of political destabilisation and subversion? The East must have known that the West’s agreement was extremely unlikely. The new visa order therefore, in reality, halted all access by West Berliners to East Berlin, dividing families, friends and lovers for the foreseeable future.

The next day came the first killing--the first death caused deliberately by those administering the alleged ‘defensive’ system.

Günter Litfin, twenty-four years old, was a qualified tailor at a fashion house in West Berlin, near Zoo station. Since he lived with his parents and brothers in the East Berlin suburb of Weissensee, he travelled daily to the West and was therefore a so-called ‘border-crosser’.

Young Litfin was suspected not just for working in West Berlin, in a ‘decadent’ industry, but also for his politically untrustworthy family. His father, a master butcher, had been a post-war member of the East Berlin CDU. In 1948, when this party was robbed of its independence and its
leaders forced to flee to the West, Litfin senior refused to join the leftover shell that was the Communist-controlled ‘block’ CDU. He remained loyal to the independent party. This survived in the underground and held meetings in West Berlin for its Eastern members, who until 13 August 1961 could cross the border to attend.

In that summer of 1961, Günter Litfin had planned to move to West Berlin. He had found a flat not far from the fashion house where he worked. On Saturday 12 August, he and his brother, Jürgen, took the S-Bahn over there and spent the whole day preparing the place for Günter to move in. They worked until late, catching an S-Bahn home at around one a.m. on Sunday 13 August. It must have been one of the last through trains to travel into East Berlin before the line was closed.

The young man’s anger and despair at the border closure was under-standable. He had worked hard, and now, at the very last moment, found himself robbed of the future he had planned. Instantly unemployed, like Ursula Heinemann he could also expect to be victimised by the East German state. Günter spent the days immediately after 13 August touring the border areas on his bicycle, seeing how the barriers were being strengthened and extended. Sections were being walled off. Litfin decided to take his chances on what looked like the weakest point of the new border: the waterways. He was a strong swimmer.

At around four in the afternoon on Thursday 24 August 1961, Günter made his way along Alexanderufer, a road running along the bank of the ship canal that connects Berlin’s North Harbour with the river Spree. Here a bridge carried the S-Bahn between East and West, crossing what for eleven days now had been the heavily guarded border. The waterway was actually wider than elsewhere, about 150 yards across, forming a basin known as the ‘Humboldt Harbour’ (Humboldthafen). The advantage was that the far side, the Listufer, lay in the British sector of West Berlin. If Günter could just clamber ashore there he would be safe.

He continued to walk along the canal bank until he drew level with the railway bridge, under and around which were several mooring jetties. Suddenly Günter heard a guttural voice call out ‘
Stehenbleihen!’
(Halt!) and froze.

There were transport police,
Trapos
, stationed atop the railway bridge,
and they had spotted Litfin. But the young man was not going to just give up. He sprinted towards one of the jetties, from which he launched himself straight into the water of the Humboldt Harbour. Keeping the bridge to his left, he struck out strongly in the direction of the West. One of the
Trapos
stumbled after him along the bridge, and fired several shots in the direction of the swimmer, who was soon twenty-five yards or so from the eastern shore and moving fast towards his goal. Then one of the other guards locked his machine-pistol on to automatic and sprayed shots around the young escaper. After he let loose this ‘targeted burst’ (as the
Stasi
report would call it), Günter Litfin slumped in the water. A bullet had entered the back of his neck as he swam, emerging through his chin. It was, to all appearances, a deliberate kill-shot.

The sound of gunfire attracted a crowd on the Western side. Three hundred Westerners were forced to watch in helpless rage as, some hours later, East German police dragged Günter Liftin’s lifeless body from the murky waters of the Humboldt Harbour. Like Ursula Heinemann, he was a ‘border-crosser’ who wanted to go back to his job and the life he was used to. Unlike her, he had been fatally unlucky.
²²

The shock on both sides of the border was tangible. In the first few days, shooting had been infrequent and confined to warning fire. The depths of the inhumanity involved in the new ‘border regime’ were now revealed for all to see. Within a few days, on 29 August, another young East Berliner, 27-year-old Roland Hoff, was also killed while swimming to West Berlin, this time across the Teltow Canal to the American sector.

A week later, a breathtakingly tasteless article appeared in the SED newspaper,
Neues Deutschland
, lumping together Litfin’s and Hoff’s deaths. Litfin’s work for a fashion house sufficed for the paper to brand him a homosexual and to exploit this supposed lifestyle for their grubby purposes. Litfin, it was implied, had been seduced by the West Berlin
demi-monde
for who knows what disgusting ends.

The fiction was nevertheless maintained that it would have been possible for Litfin and Hoff to have applied for exit visas (which, though this was theoretically true, would never have been granted). The article says, with nauseating self-righteousness, that instead the two young men chose ‘dark, forbidden routes’:

…It is usual that soldiers or border policeman guard the borders of a state. All over the world, these border guards are armed, in order that they can prevent illegal movement across these borders. Our border guards did their duty, when they used their weapons against attempts to break through the border by force. Those who abused the border consciously and with aforethought put themselves in danger of their lives, and thereby died.

As for attempts to make heroes our of these ne’er-do-wells, we are familiar with this procedure. When the pimp Horst Wessel was killed in the pursuit of his not unrisky profession, he was turned into an object of Nazi hero-worship. Why then should not the homosexual with the nickname ‘Doll’, who jumped into the Humboldt Harbour, be turned into a hero of the Frontline City of West Berlin? Everyone should have the heroes they deserve. These attempts to create new heroes for the western world will subside into absurdity…
²³

This was a distortion worthy of Goebbels’ lie factory. The truth was, of course, that most border guards throughout history and all over the world tended to be there to keep foreigners out, not their own citizens in. The East would always claim that escapes, successful or otherwise, were the work of ‘agents’ or ‘criminals’. The developing Wall, and the armed border patrols, the fortifications and the death-traps, were thus purely ‘defensive’ in nature. The Communist authorities began to refer to the border as the ‘anti-Fascist protection wall’ (
antifaschistischer Schutzwall
).

Ulbricht himself was quite shameless in promoting this myth. On 28 August, in
Neues Deutschland
, his prose was more purple than ever:

Counter-revolutionary vermin, spies and saboteurs, profiteers and human traffickers, prostitutes, spoiled teenage hooligans and other enemies of the people’s democratic order have been sucking on our Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic like leeches and bugs on a healthy body. Naturally, they would have liked to continue sucking the blood and life force from our people…but if one does not combat the weeds, they will smother the young seed…this is why we have sealed the cracks in the fabric of our house and closed the holes through which the worst enemies of the German people could creep…

Precisely how cynical was this distortion of the Wall’s true purpose can be seen from secret documents of the time. Marshal Konev played the twinkling uncle to the Allied military-mission representatives a few weeks earlier to deceive them over the coming border closure, bur his correspondence with the East German leadership from the weeks after 13 August tells a totally different story.

Konev was a man who had survived the hard school of the Stalinist purges, led a vast army from Stalingrad to Berlin through the hell of the Eastern Front, then crushed the Hungarian revolt of 1956. His task, once the border closure had been decided, was to make it tight. Saving East German civilians from the consequences, as he saw it, of their foolish, anti-Soviet actions, was not his business.

‘The military engineering and technical extension of the border,’ Konev wrote to East German Defence Minister Heinz Hoffmann, ‘is to be undertaken in a direction calculated to deal with the main quarter from which border-violations can be expected’. Konev recommended that in the hundred-metre restricted zone on the
eastern
side of the border a ‘military regime’ should be instituted and ‘firearms used against traitors and those who violate the border’. He could be referring only to people who, like the tragic victims of 24 and 29 August, committed ‘border violations’ by trying to flee from East to West.
²⁴

Despite the shootings, there was continuing concern about the effectiveness of the new border controls. The question of what to do about the canals and lakes (which, given Berlin’s geography, marked a substantial part of the border) or the so-called ‘green border’ areas that wound their way through woods, parks, and other open spaces, had still to be settled. This sense of unfinished business was increased when during September and October the escapes and escape attempts continued, growing more dramatic and ruthless in their methods as the border regime tightened.

On 20 September, a spectacular escape occurred, in which a truck was driven at speed through a concrete-post-and-wire barrier of exactly the kind that the experts had been concerned about. It happened between the boroughs of Treptow (East Berlin) and Neukölln (West Berlin) at a place where, by some vagary of pre-war local-government regulation, the sector border stopped following the Landwehr Canal, and a West Berlin salient therefore jutted out into the East.

The official report submitted to Ulbricht described the sequence of events:

On Sunday 17 September 1961 at around 18:25 a truck of the type H6, approaching from the direction of Graetzstrasse, travelled along the Bouchéstrasse (Treptow District) in the direction of West Berlin. Just before t.he Heidelberger Strasse, the vehicle signalled right. Presumably, this was to fake a right cum into the Heidelberger Strasse.

After it continued across the Heidelberger Strasse, the guard stationed at the top of the Schmollerstrasse observed that the vehicle increased its speed. After a slight cum co the right on the Bouchéstrasse, with the aim of aiming for a favourable breakthrough point the vehicle turned again in the direction of the pavement on the left side of the street, then drove through the barbed wire fence situated there (attached to posts) and reached the left section of the pavement. Here the anterior limit of the left pavement, which becomes a front garden, forms the state border with West Berlin.

As it turned in the direction of West Berlin, from his post at the top of Schmollerstrasse, the People’s Police Guard fired a burst with his automatic weapon. It is thought that one of the occupants of the vehicle was injured as a result. The three occupants were able to escape to West Berlin.

The vehicle came to a halt…it stood on West Berlin territory, only the right-hand rear double-tyre extended out across the edge of the garden boundary (state border). The vehicle was later cowed back.

The breakthrough point was then closed by a party of engineers.

We have sent in a responsible Party commission, which is checking all street crossing points independently of the staff of the Border Brigade co see to what extent the former transit routes co West Berlin have been made completely impassable. A report will be prepared for each of the streets concerned.
²⁵

Soon the Border Brigade reported that points along the border vulnerable to the methods used in the Bouchéstrasse escape were being worked on. Concrete slabs were cemented in like tank traps, and streets torn up and rendered impassable. Existing stretches of ‘barrier wall’ were improved by topping them with bent-steel uprights, to hold the barbed wire and deflect escapes from the Eastern side.
²⁶

PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT

Victor and vanquished–Berlin, August 1945