Authors: Frederick Taylor
Who would blink first?
Not Ulbricht. Still in Moscow, he fired off furious telegrams to the Politburo in East Berlin via his trusty supporter, SED organisation man Hermann Matern. On 27 October, as the tanks were moving into position, he told Matern to play down the actual confrontation between the three Western powers and the Russians for domestic consumption in the GDR. The protests of the American commandant, General Watson, and Colonel Soloviev’s response were not to be reported in the East German press. The press was also to hold off attacking the West ‘in exaggerated form’ because other measures were being planned and at this point Ulbricht did not want unnecessary provocation. Nevertheless, ‘previous instructions to the effect that civilian personnel of the three Western powers must show their identity documents are to be precisely carried out’. In other words, no giving-in to the Americans.
Mielke, the
Stasi
Minister, was commanded to ensure that within three days a steel barrier extending the whole width of the Friedrichstrasse had been constructed. This would be installed at a time to be advised.
Colonel Soloviev [Ulbricht concluded] has declared unambiguously to the Western powers that border controls are a matter for the German People’s Police. He has protested at the act of provocative penetration into the GDR. He has announced counter-measures. Foreign Minister Gromyko has summoned the American ambassador, Thompson, to convey an identical declaration to him.
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In fact, although this may have been what was happening publicly, unknown to Ulbricht, in private something very different was already in train.
According to Clay, when he spoke with Kennedy that evening, the President asked him if he were nervous.
‘Nervous? No, we’re not nervous here,’ Clay remembered answering. ‘If anybody’s nervous, Mr President, it will probably be people in Washington.’
This dig at the State Department faint-hearts and congressional liberals, who had opposed Clay’s appointment to Berlin and continued to criticise his alleged brinkmanship on the matter of the Wall, failed to ruffle the President.
Kennedy conducted the entire call to Berlin with his feet up on his desk. ‘Well,’ he told Clay, ‘there may be a lot of nervous people around here, but I’m not one of them.’
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The reason for the President’s insouciance was simple. He almost certainly already knew that moves to defuse the situation were under way. Kennedy’s brother Robert had been cultivating a relationship with Georgi Bolshakov, a personable press attaché at the Soviet embassy in Washington, and had already used the man as an alternative, unofficial channel to the top leadership in Moscow. In fact, Bolshakov was a colonel in the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) and his job at the embassy a cover, as the Americans well knew. RFK had contacted his friend Bolshakov soon after the 27 October tank confrontation brought things a little too close to the edge. Within hours, messages had passed back and forth between the President of the United States and the Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Since this material remains classified, we do not know exactly what was said. What we do know is that at 10.30 the following morning,
Khrushchev spoke to Marshal Konev, who had hastily returned to Berlin. According to Khrushchev’s memoirs, Konev told him that the situation at Checkpoint Charlie was unchanged. No one was moving, he told the Soviet leader, except for when the tank crewmen on both sides would climb out and walk around to warm up.
‘Comrade Konev,’ Khrushchev said, ‘I think you’d better order our tanks to turn around and pull back from the border. Don’t have them go very far. Just get them out of sight in the side streets again.’ The Americans, he added, had got themselves into a very difficult situation. ‘They’re looking for a way out, I’m sure. So let’s give them one. We’ll remove our tanks, and they’ll follow our example.’
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And that was exactly what happened. The Soviet tanks withdrew. Between twenty minutes and half an hour later—just enough time to confirm high-level instructions—the Americans also pulled back.
In his memoirs, Khrushchev makes it seem as if he had a sudden rush of common sense to the head. This led him to suggest a withdrawal, which his instincts told him the Americans would match. In fact, the suggestion had probably been put to him during the night of 27/8 October by President Kennedy via the RFK/Bolshakov connection, sweetened with a White House promise to ease up on the border-pass issue. So, Khrushchev had a little quid pro quo to save face, and knew that any unilateral Soviet withdrawal of tanks would be reciprocated by the other side.
During the confrontation on 27/8 October, London was wielding as much pressure as it could to avoid war over access to East Berlin.
British civilian personnel entering East Berlin had for some time now been showing ID if requested, and so London’s sympathy for the American stance was limited. Moreover, the British managed, with evident satisfaction, to blame the French for the latest problem. ‘The French,’ a note from an aide to the British Prime Minister, Macmillan, asserted, ‘have been caught bringing people across the border who were in fact not Allied personnel at all, although they were travelling in official cars.’
After reading a report from his embassy in Washington on the Friedrichstrasse crisis, the Prime Minister scribbled some marginal
comments. ‘What does the Foreign Office intend to do about this?’ Macmillan asked. ‘It’s rather alarming’ He wondered how long Britain could continue to ‘be associated with this childish nonsense’.
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Few in London were of the hardline persuasion. The Foreign Secretary wrote on 27 October claiming that he was ‘pretty close to an understanding with Rusk’, who did not not want the question of showing passes to be made into a major show of strength. ‘He has accepted our advice to try and reach a face saving compromise with Moscow.’ Home considered Clay the chief problem. He advised Macmillan: ‘The trouble is that the US soldiers do not yet seem to have been brought to heel on this point. I am sending an immediate telegram urging that specific instructions be sent. You might mention this to the President.’
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Whether British pragmatism (or weakness) actually played a role in taking the heat out of the crisis is uncertain. Downing Street tended to overestimate its influence on the White House.
The resolution of the Checkpoint Charlie stand-off showed the stark reality of superpower relations. Neither superpower leader was about to go to war over who showed what bit of paper to whom in the streets of Berlin. The only person to whom this was actually of vital importance was Walter Ulbricht, and at anxious times such as this a satellite leader like the East German strongman could be and was overruled. The Berlin Crisis was, arguably, over at the moment both sides withdrew their tanks on the morning of 28 October 1961.
The next day, Sunday, President Kennedy attended mass in Washington as usual and then flew to Fort Smith, Arkansas, for an official appearance.
Khrushchev continued with his congress, which had two days still to run.
Ulbricht continued to harangue his comrades in East Berlin by cable, chiding them for not having made the main flash points, such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Potsdamer Platz, tank-proof, and ordering them to begin immediate construction of tank traps at all crossing points, especially at Friedrichstrasse, to make it impossible for tanks of ‘the occupation forces’ to force an entry to East Berlin.
Before he left Moscow, Ulbricht complained to Khrushchev about his failure to announce a separate peace treaty. ‘I do not agree that the more
the conclusion of a peace treaty is postponed, the worse the GDR economy will be,’ the Soviet leader responded irritably. ‘We are having an old conversation with you.’
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To Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka, Khrushchev made his true felings plain:
There will not be a war, bur signing a peace treaty with the GDR might exacerbate the situation…Although there will be no war, we should not exacerbate the situation. We must continue our game. We are not afraid, but we do not want war.
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And although the time of truly perilous international confrontation was over, Khrushchev did continue his ‘game’. Soviet forces in Germany stayed on their heightened state of alert for another two and a half months, until 11 January 1962. There were more minor provocations against American officials in December, but the West did not rise to the bait and the small storm blew over. In February there would ensue an elaborate game of aerial cat-and-mouse over the flight corridors into Berlin, but in general this was shadow-boxing.
Khrushchev wanted to show everyone, including Ulbricht and the Chinese, that, despite abandoning the East German peace treaty, he had nor given in. It was easy to keep the Berlin issue ‘live’, and he continued to do so. He had, however, transferred his attention to the Third World, and specifically to Cuba. There, almost exactly a year after the Friedrichstrasse incident, another, even more perilous confrontation would again place humanity on the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
The British were hugely relieved that the Checkpoint Charlie incident went no further than it did. For some time they continued to worry that the supposedly aggressive attitude of the Americans in Berlin might lead to renewed confrontation.
A report to Macmillan on 1 November expressed fears that Kennedy, under pressure from the West Germans, the French, and a section of opinion at home in the USA, might ‘be tempted to think that a prolongation of the present tension could be safely endured’ and spoke of the risk of an ‘accidental war’ due to ‘General Clay’s game of chicken in Berlin’. P.F. de Zulueta, the Prime Minister’s Personal Secretary,
noted glumly: ‘I am afraid that no one knows what the Americans may do.
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In fact, for East as well as West, the near-simultaneous pull-back of American and Soviet tanks on 28 October represented a symbolic recognition of the status quo established on 13 August. After that day, the Americans no longer forced entry for their civilian personnel into East Berlin, and neither the East Germans nor Soviets made serious attempts to block access. The crisis was over.
New research is uncovering even more secrets of the Friedrichstrasse crisis. There is now a strong suspicion that, while Khrushchev’s abandonment in October 1961 of pressure for a separate peace treaty meant a reduction in international tension, it also meant that Germany and Berlin were forced to swallow the bitter pill of a permanent, fortified Wall.
That does not mean that the East had ‘won’. The persistence of Allied rule in West Berlin-including free air and land access-was implicitly recognised. The East Germans got their Wall in recompense. Until Khrushchev gave up his peace-treaty plan, both Moscow and East Berlin could continue to see the Wall as possibly a temporary measure, to be confined to barbed wire and in places a simple cement barrier. After all, once a peace treaty had been signed, would not the East Germans control travel between West Berlin and West Germany, and might a Wall therefore be no longer necessary? That had been Ulbricht’s dream. And Khrushchev’s too, because he knew the Wall would represent a defeat for the system he represented.
The Wall was in the long run a propaganda catastrophe for the East. Every day it existed, it screamed aloud one simple, damning statement: in Berlin we Communists stood in direct competition with capitalism, and we lost. Khrushchev and his successors had to live with this permanent mute accusation until a Soviet leader came along who just couldn’t or wouldn’t do it any more. But that miraculous moment lay almost half a lifetime in the future.
By this argument, the Wall originated not on 13 August 196 I, when the wire went up, but on 17 October, when Khrushchev reluctantly abandoned his hope of a settlement that would nullify the Potsdam Agreement, force an Allied withdrawal from West Berlin, and give control of the entire city to his East German satellite.
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As a result, from early 1962 the East Germans began building a horribly ingenious system of fortifications, more ugly and more sinister still than simple breeze blocks and cement, a thing for which the term ‘Wall’ was wholly inadequate.
SOON AFTER ULBRICH’s RETURN
from the Moscow congress, work began on transforming the still-largely-improvised Berlin barrier into something durable and impregnable.
It had already been strengthened with anti-crash devices at points considered particularly vulnerable to heavy vehicles such as trucks and buses. Following the experts’ report to Honecker’s ‘Central Staff at the end of October 1961, military engineers began to ‘extend’ the existing arrangements. The aim was to make them both more secure and-at certain symbolic or notorious places, such as the Brandenburg Gate or Checkpoint Charlie-a little less brutally unattractive.
The need for further tightening of border security was made more urgent by disturbances that accompanied the ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ confrontation confronation between 22 and 29 October. On the night of 27/8 October, in the French Sector, a sizeable force of West Berlin police was required to break up a crowd of 150 youths, who were attempting to cut down the barbed-wire border fence. According to the
New York Times
, twenty-two Easterners took their chance to flee during that single night, including a customs official in uniform.
1
The propaganda barrage in East Germany continued, as did the arrests-though the wave of repression began to tail off towards the end of 1961. Superficial resignation was soon the dominant mood among the GDR’s population.