Authors: Frederick Taylor
On 12 May, Ulbricht found his Lord Mayor (
Oberbürgermeister
) for Berlin. His choice was an unpolitical college principal by the name of Dr Arthur Werner. Werner was elderly and becoming somewhat vague. Leonhard recalled the group’s futile attempts to raise this problem with their leader:
‘I don’t know, Walter,’ said somebody. ‘Dr Werner doesn’t seem to me quite the right Sort of man. Besides, he’s too old.’
‘I’ve heard it said sometimes that he’s not quire right in the head’, said one of the men we were intending to put in the city government.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Ulbricht. ‘His deputy will be one of our men.’
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As Dr Werner’s deputy, Ulbricht brought in 42-year-old Kurt Maron, one of the hard core Communist group. The directors of education and personnel were also trusted Communists. The latter was the son of KPD leader Wilhelm Pieck. Arthur Pieck had been serving, until discharged earlier that week, with the political department of the Red Army.
Either because Stalin wished to keep good relations with the West, or because he genuinely believed that the German people could be seduced over to the Soviet side, his initial policy appeared to encourage democratic diversity. Ulbricht expressed this in a directive:
In working class districts the mayors should as a general rule be Social Democrats. In bourgeois quarters—Zehlendorf, Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg and so on—we must appoint a bourgeois member of the Centre, the Democrats or the German People’s Party. Best of all if he has a doctorate, but he must also be a anti-Fascist and a man we can work well with.
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He added an instruction belying the notion that Moscow’s carpet-baggers had abandoned Leninist toughness in favour of wishy-washy bourgeois democracy:
And now to our comrades. The first deputy burgomaster and the heads of the personnel and the education departments have to be our people. Then you have to find at least one absolutely reliable comrade in each district whom we can use for building up the local police.
This was the ‘regime of deputies’, of which Dr Werner’s appointment was a fine example. The figurehead would be a non-Communist, but the deputies must be Ulbricht’s men. Communists would also be in charge of the police, giving them a monopoly of institutional force. Last but by no means least, they controlled the hotline to the true power in the shattered land, the Soviet Military Administration (SMA).
Wolfgang Leonhard was twenty-four when he accompanied the party veterans back to Berlin. As an adolescent, he had left Germany for Moscow with his Communist mother and had studied at the Comintern Political School, learning ideology and conspirational tradecraft as if it were geography or maths. He spoke fluent Russian. Ulbricht’s Russian was serviceable, but he preferred to use Leonhard as an interpreter during meetings with his Soviet masters. He also sent the young man out to rustle up an administration for the middle-class suburb of Wilmersdorf. A respectable member of the bourgeoisie was required as the usual ‘front’. Leonhard solved the problem by approaching every male he saw wearing a necktie until he found someone who would do.
It was at this time that Ulbricht uttered to Leonhard the famous sentence that perfectly summed up Communist strategy in newly occupied Berlin: ‘It has to look democratic, but we have to hold everything in our hands’.
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The Ulbricht group’s agenda in Berlin was urgent. Within a little less than eight weeks, the three Western allies would enter ‘their’ sectors of the city. Meanwhile, the Communists’ task was to establish as many ‘facts on the ground’ as possible.
The division of Berlin between the three wartime allies—Britain, the
USA and the Soviet Union—had been agreed by the inter-Allied European Advisory Commission (EAC). This was set up in January 1944 in London. Its task was to draw up plans for the temporary administration of the defeated country, pending its political rehabilitation and the establishment of a German government. The Allied Control Commission, which would meanwhile rule Germany, would be based in Berlin.
The capital itself was too far east for the occupation zones to abut each other there, so a mini-occupation regime was set up in the capital. Each ally was assigned a chunk of Berlin, known as a ‘sector’, reflecting the areas controlled by the allies in Germany as a whole.
So far, so good. There were, though, problems that were either ignored or unforeseen in the warm glow of allied unity and the euphoria of approaching victory.
First, the three-power government of the city increased to four when the French demanded and were given a bit of Germany (and Berlin). Government was to be conducted by a collective
Kommandatura
, whose decisions must be unanimous. This gave any one ally a veto over the government of Greater Berlin.
Second, no formal written arrangements were set down concerning the Western allies’ access to Berlin, even though it lay 160 kilometres (100 miles) inside the Soviet Zone, entirely surrounded by territory under Stalin’s control.
VE Day found the Americans often hundreds of kilometres east of the demarcation lines, occupying Leipzig, Magdeburg, Halle, Weimar, and other major German cities earmarked for the Soviets. The British had part-occupied Mecklenburg on the Baltic coast. Western forces had taken a third of the territory due to be Soviet-controlled. The question was, would America and Britain withdraw from those places before the Soviets allowed them to take over the proposed Western sectors of Berlin?
Churchill was aware of the importance of ‘facts on the ground’. He had wanted to march on to Berlin during the final weeks of the war. He warned Washington of the ‘Iron Curtain’ that a Soviet presence in the heart of Europe would create. The British Prime Minister was in favour of retaining all conquered territories until ‘we are satisfied about Poland and also about the temporary nature of the Russian occupation of Germany’.
Churchill was overruled by the new US President, Harry S. Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt after the wartime President’s death on 12 April 1945. Truman, busy finding his feet, did not want to upset the Russians.
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To the distress of German civilians, the Anglo-Americans withdrew honourably and in orderly fashion to their side of the river Elbe early in June. The Soviets, including the NKVD, swept into the vacated areas, and did what they had done elsewhere.
The West faced the task of getting its forces into Berlin. This was not easy. The Russians claimed that ‘mine-clearance operations were not yet complete’ or that roads were blocked by ‘re-deployment of Soviet troops’. This went on for six weeks after peace had allegedly broken out.
Finally, on 23 June 1945, permission was given for an American ‘Preliminary Reconnaissance Party’ to go to Berlin. One hundred vehicles and 500 men set off, commanded by Colonel Frank L. Howley. The column was stopped when it reached the river Elbe at Dessau. Half the force was allowed into the Soviet Zone. It proceeded under close Red Army escort to Babelsberg, just short of Berlin. There it was again held up. Personnel were forbidden to leave their vehicles. Eventually, they had to turn around and go back west.
Stalin, whose men were hard at work dismantling factories, looking for gold and other valuables, and each day introducing more proxies and agents into positions of power, was in no hurry to hand over two-thirds of the Reich’s largest, richest city to his erstwhile allies. What Stalin had, he held—at least until it was prised from his stubby grasp, from the fingers that the long-since liquidated Russian poet Osip Mandelstam had described as ‘thick…fat like worms’.
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It took a flying visit to Berlin eight days later by General Eisenhower’s deputy, General Clay, and the British Deputy Military Governor, Sir Ronald Weeks, before progress was made. The Soviet commander gave a verbal assurance that their people could travel to Berlin via one main highway, one railway line, and two air corridors. Later Clay would write:
We did not then fully realise that the requirement of unanimous consent would enable a Soviet veto in the Allied Control Council to block all our
future efforts…I was mistaken in not at this time making free access to Berlin a condition of our withdrawal into the occupation zone.
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Colonel Howley tried again on 1 July. He manoeuvred through a series of obstreperous Soviet checkpoint squads into the American sector, to find the Russians
in situ
resentful at having to abandon districts they had won at such terrible cost two months earlier. When Howley posted proclamations of the Americans’ arrival, the Soviets tore them down. He had to place the placards under armed guard.
The British experienced similar difficulties. Their advance group was stopped at the Magdeburg Bridge. It was ‘closed’. Undaunted, His Majesty’s Forces found an unguarded bridge elsewhere on the Berlin perimeter and sneaked in that way. Further Russian obstruction prevented sufficient Western troops from establishing themselves in Berlin in time for the parade the Americans had planned for 4 July.
Two weeks later, the conference of the victorious ‘Big Three’ opened, at Potsdam just outside Berlin. The city was festooned with huge posters of Stalin, Marx, Engels, Lenin and other heroes of socialism. Under these circumstances Truman, Churchill and Stalin met to decide the final shape of post-war Europe. A few days into the proceedings, Churchill was voted out of office and replaced by a new prime minister, Labour’s Clement Attlee. With Roosevelt’s death in April, and Churchill’s election defeat in July, two of the wartime ‘Big Three’ were no longer on the scene. The third, Josef Stalin, seemed more powerful than ever.
In the kitsch splendour of the Cäcilienhof Lodge (built in 1913 for the German Crown Prince in English villa style), fine words were said about the ‘five d’s’—demilitarisation, de-Nazification, de-industralisation, decentralisation and democracy. Nothing was done about Poland, where borders were being redrawn at the point of a bayonet and a bloody purge of non-Communist elements was under way, or about the fates of other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, where the Red Army was likewise enforcing Stalin’s will.
The Russians must have been delighted that America proposed to withdraw from Europe by 1947. There was still nothing in writing about access to Berlin.
Harry Truman announced that America had the atom bomb. The
Soviet dictator did not seem especially impressed. This was, as so often, misleading. Stalin knew about the bomb through a spy within the American atomic establishment. He had already ordered his scientists (and the German rocket experts the NKVD was busy kidnapping) to accelerate the Soviet nuclear programme.
Walter Ulbricht had undertaken visits to Moscow twice during June 1945. He was again instructed to resist attempts to initiate a dictatorship of the proletariat and the wholesale state seizure of industrial and financial companies.
Calls to this effect came especially from home-grown Communists. When the German Communist Party was re-founded on 10 June, of the sixteen signatories to its appeal, only three had spent the Nazi period as ‘illegals’ in Germany. The rest were Moscow-trained exiles, blooded in the savagely conformist cockpit of the Hotel Lux on Tver’skaya Street.
Slowly the British, the Americans and the French established themselves. The Berliners’ welcome was complex, but on the warm side. One British officer wrote:
Germans are by no means sullen or resentful…they gaze fixedly, but many smile and wave, a few almost cheer. It is indeed a more sober liberation welcome than a triumphant entry into a conquered city, and for that, without doubt, we have the Russians to thank. Who would ever have foretold this, the most amazing irony of all, that when we entered Berlin we would come as liberators, not as tyrants, for the Germans.
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George Clare had come to Britain in 1938 from Vienna as a young Jewish refugee, and now returned as a British soldier to work with the Control Commission. His route to Britain seven years previously had led via Berlin. He had become attached to the Kurfürstendamm:
Its wide tree-lined pavements were always crowded with strollers…Wherever you looked, at people, at shop windows, at the dense traffic, you saw the signs of prosperity. In the early autumn of 1938 life in Germany—unless one was either a Jew or valued justice, liberty, individuality—was pleasant…I, however, was a Jew…
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He was shocked by the changes war had wrought. And yet life continued:
Berlin was not a lifeless moonscape. It lived—albeit in something of a zombied trance—mirrored in the dazed looks of many of the people I passed, more often noticeable in men than in women. But then the men were mostly old or elderly, bowed and bitter-faced; the few youngish ones who were about—emaciated shadows of the soldiers who had almost conquered an entire continent—looked pathetic and downtrodden in the tattered remnants of their Wehrmacht uniforms.
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Sadly, one particular part of Berlin that no longer lived was the family of George Clare’s mother’s aunt, Frau Bartmann, with whom he and his parents had spent evenings while awaiting their visas in the autumn of 1938. The Bartmanns, also Jews, had never emigrated. Clare knew enough to guess what that probably meant.
One day, Clare found himself outside a familiar apartment block. Seven years before, this was where they had lived: sixty-year-old Frau Bartmann—Aunt Manya—and her daughter, Clare’s cousin, the attractive, quick-witted Rosl, who had worked for Air France in Berlin, avoiding the Nazis’ ban on employment of Jews in public bodies. He examined the door of the apartment, but found only names he didn’t know. On careful examination he saw ‘a small oblong space on the upper-left door panel where the name plate “M. and R. Bartmann” had kept it free of Berlin’s grime’. As Clare wrote many years later: ‘That little rectangle, a shade lighter than the rest of the door, was their only epitaph. The only one they would ever have.’
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