Berlin in the Cold War : The Battle for the Divided City 9781935902973, 9781935902805

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Berlin in the Cold War The Battle for the Divided City

Thomas Flemming

Berlin in the Cold War By Thomas Flemming First U.S. edition 2011 by Berlinica Publishing LLC, 255 West 43rd St., Suite 1012, New York, NY, 10036; USA © edition q im be.bra verlag GmbH Berlin-Brandenburg, 2009, KulturBrauerei Haus S Schönhauser Allee 37, 10435 Berlin [email protected] Cover photo: Max Schirner, © Landesarchiv Berlin Back photo: Horst Siegmann, © Landesarchiv Berlin Editor (Germany): Martin Regenbrecht, Berlin Editor (USA): Cindy Opitz, Iowa City Translation: Penny Croucher, London Layout: typegerecht, Berlin Type: Excelsior 9/12,5 pt, Folio Printed in the United States by LightningSource All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Law. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. ISBN print: 978-1-935902-80-5 ISBN ebook 978-1-935902-81-2 978-1-935902-96-6 978-1-935902-97-3 LCCN: 2010938105

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Illustrations Alliiertenmuseum Berlin 13, 22 Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte 12, 51, 53, 65, 71 Berliner Mauerarchiv 69, 70, 73 Stuftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz: 50 Hans Dieter Behrendt 43 Landesarchiv Berlin 6, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 49, 55, 57, 59, 61, 66, 72, 74, 75, backcover Andreas Schoelzel 76, 77

Praise for Berlin in the Cold War. ..the whole story of the divided city on just eighty pages, without missing a beat. —Berliner Morgenpost A gripping book about post World War II history in Germany —www.reisetravel.com ... fascinating, compelling, and saddening. Flemming covers a surprising amount of detail without getting tiresome. — Urban Eye Flemming delivers a pithy summary of a not-so-recent past that is simply fabulous — Leselust Berlin

About the author: Thomas Flemming is an historian and philosopher who studied at Free University Berlin. He has written numerous books and news stories about postwar history focusing on Berlin. He has also curated exhibitions on the topic, most importantly, The History of World War I at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

About Bebra: Bebra, founded in 1994 in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, is an independent publishing company specializing in popular nonfiction books about Berlin and Brandenburg, about history, culture, architecture, and city politics.

Thanks Berlinica would like to thank Hans-Dieter Behrend, at www.passkontrolle-ddr.de and Andreas Schoelzel, at http://www.schoelzel.net/ for contributing photos, as well as the friendly and helpful staff of Landesarchiv Berlin for looking up pictures for this book.

Contents Showdown at Checkpoint Charlie

7

Berlin on the Front Line

8

Allies become Enemies The Four Sector City First Conflicts The Founding of Political Parties The Last “United Berlin” Elections

11 11 13 14 16

Blockade and Airlift Competing Currencies “Candy Bombers” Against the Blockade The “Senate Reserves” (Senatsreserve)

18 18 19 25

The Divided City The University as a Political Battlefield Troops in Berlin Cutting Off the West Sectors

27 28 30 31

Uprising Against the SED Regime

32

The Media

35

A Playground for Spies The Espionage Tunnel The Kidnapping of Political Opponents The Task Force Against Inhumanity Exchanging Secret Agents Cooperation Between the Allies

37 38 38 42 43 44

The Battle for Cultural Supremacy Prestige Projects From the Drawing Board  Subsidies and Flourishing Cultures Inviting the World to Berlin

47 47

The Khrushchev Ultimatum

54

The Berlin Wall The Construction of the Wall A Tense Peace Escape and Escape Aid

57 59 62 63

Living With the Wall An Agreement for Berlin Normal State of Emergency “Mister Gorbachev …”

68 68 71 75

The End of the Cold War

76

Berlin Time Table Key Locations in Cold War Berlin Notes

79 80 82

49 52

American troops escort a civilian vehicle across Checkpoint Charlie

7

Showdown at Checkpoint Charlie On the morning of October 25, 1961, American tanks thundered through the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg and took up position at the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing. Their turrets were pointed threateningly toward East Berlin. Shortly afterward, two dozen Soviet T–54 tanks moved in from the east to oppose them and swung their gun turrets toward the American tanks. A ghostly silence prevailed. It was the first confrontation between the two superpowers since the Berlin Wall was erected two months previously. The world held its breath, for one thing was clear: if a shot was fired, it could mean the beginning of a military dispute between the US and the Soviet Union—with unforeseeable consequences, perhaps even leading to a nuclear war that would transform Germany and all of central Europe into a contaminated wasteland. US president John F. Kennedy and Soviet party leader Nikita Khrushchev were kept informed about the explosive situation at Checkpoint Charlie. The crisis was triggered by an incident at Checkpoint Charlie. Allan Lightner, the American station chief at the US embassy in West Berlin, was on his way to the theater in East Berlin. The German Democratic Re-

public’s People’s Police (Volkspolizei) at the checkpoint asked him to show his identity card. Lightner refused, because requiring his ID was an infringement of Allied rights, which allowed members of the Occupying Forces to move freely between sector borders. He returned with a US military police escort and was allowed to pass without an identity check. Over the next few days, several other similar incidents occurred until finally, on October 25, the American tanks took up position. The Western Allies wanted to demonstrate that they insisted on their right to unhindered access to the Soviet sector and, if necessary, they would defend this right with force. The confrontation lasted three days, but the worst did not occur. On October 28, the Soviet T-54 tanks suddenly withdrew—under direct orders from Moscow— and shortly afterward, the American tanks also returned to their bases. Both heads of state had assured each other that they definitely wanted to avoid an escalation in Berlin. When speaking to a journalist later, Khrushchev summed up the situation very succinctly,: “If the tanks had advanced, it would have meant war. If they retreated, it meant peace.”1 They retreated.

8 Kolumnentitel

Berlin on the Front Line The 25th of October 1961, when American tanks were confronting the Soviet Union at Checkpoint Charlie for the first time, was a terrifying day for the world. But it was certainly neither the first nor the last time that Berlin was the focus of attention in the East-West conflict, which on several occasions would bring mankind to the brink of a possible Third World War. But it was a long way to that day. By 1947, the Allies, who had come together six years earlier to fight against Hitler’s Germany, were bitter enemies, and the foursector city of Berlin was frequently the center stage for the power struggle between the US and the Soviet Union—which soon became known as the Cold War. In June 1948, in an attempt to gain possession of the entire former German capital, the Soviet Union set up a blockade and tried to force the Western Allies of Great Britain, France, and the US to withdraw from the three western sectors. For eleven months, West Berlin was cut off from the rest of the world, and the Western Allies had to airlift in all supplies until Moscow gave up its plan and opened up the road and rail links from West Germany to Berlin. Four years later, on June 17, 1953, a spontaneous people uprising against the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, East German Socialist Unity Party) regime broke out in East Berlin and spread throughout almost the entire GDR. SED Party Chairman Ulbricht had to deploy Soviet tanks to remain in power. The rest of the world watched Berlin closely, waiting to see if the Americans would give military support to the rebellion in the GDR and thus force the collapse of

the SED regime. The Americans held back, though, and the division of power and zones of influence remained untouched in Berlin and throughout the rest of Europe. However, Berlin continued to be one of the main areas of conflict in the Cold War. In November 1958, Moscow proclaimed the so-called Khrushchev Ultimatum, and renewed demands for the Western Allies to withdraw from Berlin. At the same time, Soviet Foreign minister Andrei Gromyko even openly threatened that Berlin could turn into a “second Sarajevo,” meaning that it could trigger a third World War in the same way that the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo in 1914 had set off the First World War. In August 1961, Berlin made headlines all over the world again, when the SED regime raised a wall through the middle of the city in order to halt the increasing flow of refugees to the West. On hearing the news from Berlin, US President Kennedy reportedly said, “Not a very pleasant solution, but a wall is a damned sight better than a war.”2 These historic words, which were not published until later, clearly show how close the world came to the brink of war. War or peace was the big question once again in Berlin, but in August 1961, the Cold War did not escalate further. Instead, the Berlin population paid a high price for this precarious peace lived out in the shadow of the Wall; plans for the future were destroyed, and families were torn apart. For the people of East Berlin and the GDR, the West was completely blocked off, apparently for good.

Berlin on the Front Line

A member of the Red Army directing traffic in Ebertstraße

Berlin was still on the front line of the Cold War, only now the front consisted of concrete and barbed wire. Not only did Berlin witness many crizes during the Cold War, but the Cold War even ended in Berlin—with the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989—which set the seal on

German Unification in 1990 and the final withdrawal of all Russian troops from Germany in 1994. The Cold War was conducted on several fronts in Berlin, and wasn’t always a matter of tanks and missiles, but more the mere threat of direct military confrontation. It

9

10 Berlin on the Front Line

Oberbaum Bridge with the sector border sign in four languages

also involved numerous spy missions, by which the Secret Services in both the West and the East tried to undermine their opponents’ positions. Berlin, therefore, became a playground for spies and secret agents whose activities, or at least what we know of them, sometimes took extreme form. There was another sense in which Berlin provided the setting for the Cold War, in which peaceful methods were also used to gain supremacy in the East-West conflict. Especially in the 1950s, when Berlin had not yet been divided by the Wall and it was still possible for people to move relatively freely between the sectors, there was an ambitious “battle between political systems.” Here it wasn’t a question of military might but of which system could offer a better standard of living and more compre-

hensive social services, and which had more modern architecture and a higher quality of cultural life. Last but not least, Berlin was a testing ground for détente. Periods of confrontation and high risk of war—for example the blockade in 1948, the building of the Wall in 1961, or the Khrushchev Ultimatum—were often followed by discussions and negotiations aimed at making life easier for Berliners, in spite of the Wall and the barbed wire. Pass permit regulations and the 1971 Berlin Treaty, for example, made the Wall more permeable and gradually defused the Berlin powder keg. The Cold War in Berlin was a multi-layered and fascinating epoch which produced a large number of dramatic confrontations and daily conflicts and, at the same time, periods of astonishing normality.

Kolumnentitel

Allies become Enemies On May 2, 1945, the last remnants of the German Wehrmacht surrendered to the Soviet forces. In hard-fought battles and with heavy losses, the Red Army conquered and finally occupied the German capital. Six days later, on May 8, 1945, the German Wehrmacht commanders signed an unconditional surrender of all German forces in Berlin-Karlshorst. Nazi Germany and its armed units, which had committed monstrous crimes during the Second World War, was finally defeated. This victory was made possible only because of the alliance created between the US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. However, these Allies, thrown together after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, were very different animals: Great Britain, the cradle of democracy; the US, a democratic economic giant, and the Soviet Union, the third Ally, presided over by the dictator Josef W. Stalin. The politicians put aside any reservations and mistrust between the Western democrats and the Communist Soviet Union in order to achieve one goal—the defeat of Nazi Germany. This goal was achieved in May 1945. The German Reich surrendered unconditionally, and Allied troops occupied all of Germany. The “Big Three” had held several summits and reached agreement on the essential features of the subsequent occupation policy. They met in Teheran (1943), in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula (February 1945), and in Potsdam (August 1945). In keeping with these discussions, the areas east of the Oder and the Neiße rivers (northeast Prussia and Königsberg) were added to Poland, or the Soviet Union, and the rest of Germany was

divided into four zones of occupation, with France joining the Allies as the fourth occupying power. The victorious Allies were even able to agree on the basic principles of their occupation policy relatively quickly, decreeing that German society should be 1) de-Nazified, 2) demilitarized, and 3) democratized. However, what this “democratization” was supposed to look like and how it was to be managed was soon hotly disputed among the Allies. The highest government power in the individual zones of occupation lay with the respective military governments, with a military governor at the helm. These determined all political, economic, and cultural matters in their respective zones. Any matters that affected “Germany as a whole” were dealt with by an “Allied Control Council”, Alliierter Kontrollrat. in Berlin, where all four military governors sat around one table. At first it seemed as if the Americans, British, French, and Soviets were working together relatively harmoniously.

The Four-Sector City In the first two months after May 1945, the Soviets were the only occupying power in Berlin. These were gruesome times: Hundreds of thousands of women and girls were raped and sometimes killed; men were rounded up and shot on the spot, often at random. But that would soon change. The Allies had already agreed at Yalta on how Germany would be divided, and that Berlin, as the former capital of Germany, would be divided into four zones, or “sectors,” of occupation. In July 1945, the US Army moved

11

12 Allies become Enemies

Marshal Shukow (with sash) and Field Marshal Montgomery (3rd from right) at a military parade

into Berlin and relinquished control over parts of Thuringia and Saxony to the Soviets, in accordance with the Yalta agreement. In Berlin, the Americans held the southwest (Kreuzberg, Schöneberg, Neukölln, Tempelhof, Steglitz, and Zehlendorf), the British held the western districts (Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg, Spandau, and Tiergarten), the French took the northwest (Reinickendorf and Wedding), and the Soviets occupied the eastern boroughs of Berlin (Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Weißensee, Lichtenberg, Friedrichshain, Treptow, and Köpenick). The three Western sectors comprized an area of 186 square miles, with 2.1 million inhabitants (in 1945), and the Soviet sector contained 156 square miles and 1.1 million inhabitants. At first, the sector boundaries were marked simply by occasional road signs, and people could move freely between

the sectors. In accordance with the London Treaty of September 1944, which also determined the basic features of occupation policy in Germany, a joint government was set up to control the four-sector city of Berlin. The highest decision-making committee was the “Allied Kommandatura” (a combination of English and Russian concepts), comprized of the four City Commanders in Chief. The Kommandatura was based in the wealthy Berlin district of Dahlem, in the American sector, and met for the first time on July 11, 1945. From the middle of July 1945, with its four zones, or “sectors,” the Allied Control Council, and Allied Kommandatura, Berlin’s form and the structure of its occupational governance made it like a kind of “mini-Germany,” which soon became the stage for the conflicts of the Cold War.

First Conflicts

Zone Francaise

PYCCKAR R 3OHA British Zone

American

Zone

Map of the sector borders

First Conflicts While the final battles were still raging in Berlin, ten members of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD, German Communist Party), who had been preparing for this moment in exile in Moscow, moved into the city to start organizing the reconstruction of Berlin. These men were called the Ulbricht Group (Gruppe Ulbricht), after their leader, Walter Ulbricht, who later became the State and Party Leader of the GDR. Because the Red Army had conquered the German capital on its own and the Western Allies did not move into Berlin until months later, the Ulbricht Group, with support from the Soviets, was free to set the political course in Berlin, which would lead to increasingly fierce conflicts with the Western Allies. The Ulbricht Group, for ex-

ample, saw to it that several key positions on the City Council (Magistrat) were occupied by its own people. One member of the group, Kurt Maron, obtained the highly influential position of First Deputy to the mayor, Arthur Werner, who had absolutely no political experience. The aim was not necessarily to fill all the posts with Communists and to gear everything toward the speedy introduction of a Soviet-style Socialist system, but Ulbricht and his associates wanted to exert crucial influence on political development in Berlin and the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ). One of Walter Ulbricht’s frequent­ly quoted remarks was, “It must look democratic, but we must have everything in our hands.”3 Hence, to start with, the group deliberately sought to cooperate with Social Democrats and middle-class con-

13

14 Allies become Enemies servatives, because in the immediate aftermath of the war, the “anti-fascist democratic revolution” was the first priority, even for Communists like Walter Ulbricht, despite the fact that he had secretly stated that “we must have everything under our own control.” While Ulbricht’s Communists in the eastern sector could always count on the support of the Soviet occupying powers or even carried out their directives, they soon met with increasing resistance in the western sectors of Berlin. Before the Western Allies arrived, the Soviets had already created a fait accompli regarding German industrial installations and reparations, setting the stage for potentially serious conflict. As soon as the war was over, they sent special detachments into Berlin to dismantle a large portion of German industrial capacity—eighty percent in the western part of the city, later the western sectors, but only thirty percent in the Soviet sector. When the Western Allies took over their sectors in the summer of 1945, they found that the industrial landscape in their areas was largely destroyed. Most of the machinery and industrial plants that had remained after the bombing and street battles was removed by the special Soviet detachments. The fact that only a small fraction of these machines arrived back in the Soviet Union in one piece and that the dismantling policy proved to be econom­ ically completely senseless for the Soviet Union is another matter. It must be said that the Western Allies, especially the French, also dismantled some of the industrial plants in their sectors, but it was nothing compared with the devastating extent to which the Soviets destroyed the industrial reserves. Toward the end of 1945, the Soviets turned some of the most successful businesses in their sector (those that had not been dis-

mantled) into Sowjetische Aktien-Gesellschaften (SAG, Soviet Joint Stock Companies), which produced goods exclusively for the Soviet Union—in direct violation of the Allied agreements on joint economic policy. With regard to the provision of food and raw materials, the Soviets insisted that the western sectors be supplied by their respective occupied zones. This meant that the city boroughs in West Berlin were actually cut off from their countryside in what had become Soviet-controlled Brandenburg.4

The Founding of Political Parties Most would be surprised to learn how quickly and (apparently) generously the Soviet Occupying Power in Berlin and the GRD-forerunner SBZ got things moving on the political front. Order No. 2 allowed Soviet Commander-in-Chief Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov to found political parties as early as June 1945. In the days that followed, a group of Communists led by Wilhelm Pieck, who had spent the war in Moscow, and the novelist and poet Johannes R. Becher, published an appeal to found the KPD, the German Communist Party. On June 15, 1945, a committee to (re-) found the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, German Social Democratic Party) was constituted, with Otto Grotewohl at its head. The key concepts of the SPD appeal were the “democratization of State and society” and the “socialization of the economy.” On June 26, 1945, there was an appeal to found the Christlich-Demokratische Union (CDU, Christian Democratic Union), and on July 5, the Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, (LDP, Liberal Democratic Party) got its start. Unlike the KPD and the SPD, the CDU and LDP were quite new and

The Founding of Political ­Parties

had no forerunners in the Weimar Republic. The CDU followed the tradition of the Zentrum, the conservative, Catholic Centrist Party, and the LPD was based on the politics of the Demokratische Volkspartei (DVP, Democratic People’s Party) and the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP, German Democratic Party). These parties set to work in Berlin and the SBZ (Soviet Zone of Occupation), but at that point in time there was no thought of founding or refounding parties in the Western Zones of Occupation. Soon it became all too clear to what extent the Soviets made sure that these quickly formed parties pursued policies that suited Soviet interests. In November 1945, when CDU Chairman Andreas Hermes and his deputy, Walther Schreiber, dared to critizize the land reform, in particular the expropriation of large plots of land without compensation, they were immediately forced to resign. The same thing happened to their successors, Ernst Lemmer and Jakob Kaiser, two years later, when they refused to take part in the “Peoples Congress for unity and just peace,” a propaganda event for the Communists. The question of merging the SPD with the KPD also turned into another extremely explosive dispute between the East and the West. In 1945, many SPD members felt that the organizational division of the workers movement fatally weakened its punch. This division had been one of the reasons why the Weimar Republic had failed and the Nazis had been able to seize power in 1933, and also why there was a willingness among wide segments of the German population and among Berlin Social Democrats to join forces with the KPD after the war. However, this willingness on the part of the SPD waned all the more rapidly when it became clear that the Communists intended to win key positions with Soviet help and to ex-

ecute their plans with great severity. Otto Grotewohl, chairman of the SPD in the SBZ, ignored these concerns, put opponents of union with the KPD in their place, and finally led the SPD into a joint party with the Communists—the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, i.e. the Socialist Unity Party of Germany).The first official SED party conference took place on April 21–22, 1946, in the Admiralspalast. Within the Berlin SPD, there was particularly strong resistance to merging with the KPD, and with support from the Western Allies, opponents organized a ballot— held toward the end of March 1946, but only conducted in the three western sectors and forcefully prevented in the Soviet sector. In spite of the Soviet ban, polling stations were set up in the eastern sector but were soon shut down by Soviet soldiers, and the SPD members lining up outside had to go home without casting their votes. The result of the ballot was clear: in the western sectors, three quarters of a percent of the SPD membership opposed joining with the Communists. Their fears soon proved to be well founded. The ink was barely dry on the merger paper of the KPD with the SPD when former Social Democrats within the SED found themselves under political pressure. Through threats and even outright violence, the Communists forced numerous Social Democrats out of their positions of power in the SED and determined the political course of the party, just as the Soviet Occupying Power had wanted and with Soviet support. Flimsy accusations were used to remove thousands of former SPD members in the SED from office, and some even ended up in prison.5 When it came to resurrecting the trade unions in Berlin, which the Nazis had banned in 1933, Communist unionists clashed with moderate groups. Once again, the Commu-

15

16 Allies become Enemies

The Party convention unifying the KPD and SPD into the SED

nists had at their disposal a larger number of well schooled officials returning from exile in Moscow than the Socialdemocratic or Christian Conservative workers. They also had fewer democratic scruples about attaining their goals. The Free German Workers Union (FDGB) was therefore dominated by Communists and increasingly served the SED and the Soviet Occupying Power. However, nontrade unionists succeeded in forming an Independent Trade Union Organization (UGO) which, despite massive Communist opposition, gained thirty-two percent of the votes in the union elections held in spring 1948. In western Berlin, without any help from the Western Allies, the UGO was even able to win seventy percent of the delegates seats. When the FDGB subsequently tried to obtain the majority by means of deliberate manipulation, the UGO split from the

FDGB in August 1948 and set itself up in the Western Sectors as independent liberaldemocratic trade union organisations. The Cold War being fought on all levels had also led to a situation in which even the trade unions in Berlin had split into two enemy camps.6

The Last “United Berlin” Elections Despite the increasing tensions between East and West, in October 1946, there were still free elections for the City Council (Stadtverordnetenversammlung) which had authority over all of Berlin. These elections were the first since 1932 and the last until 1990. The Allies ensured that democratic regulations were observed, so voting was free and secret. It was only in the eastern sector that the SPD election campaign came

The Last “United Berlin“ E ­ lections

up against massive obstructions, including a ban on meetings and confiscation of newspapers and pamphlets. The result was a clear mandate from the men and women of Berlin for their city to be developed along democratic lines. In a 92.3 percent turnout, the SPD won 48.7 percent of the votes cast, just missing a clear majority. Even in the eastern boroughs, the Social Democrats got over 43 percent, and the SED took just thirty percent. The second strongest overall was the CDU, with 22 percent; the SED received only 19.8 percent. After this election setback, the SED newspaper Neues Deutschland commented, “This decision did not favour the […] political and economic demands [of the SED] and the work we have achieved so far, but is a result of weeks of bias used against the SED by the reactionary press  […] Therefore the election result in Berlin should be regarded as a politically wrong decision.” This could only be interpreted as an open announcement that the “wrong decision” made by the Berlin population should be reversed as soon as possible. In the eastern sector, at least, this would eventually be the case. Despite its defeat, the SED belonged to the City Council (Magistrat), which was newly elected at the beginning of December 1948. They tried to obtain as many posts and offices as possible, which in May 1945, without any democratic legitimacy, had been handed over to them by the Soviets The CDU and SPD, however, which held

Election posters for the city council elections in October 1946

a broad majority in the parliament, fought against this. The Soviets vetoed the election of Ernst Reuter as mayor of Berlin. He was a thorn in their side because he was a former Communist and therefore a renegade in their eye. They may have managed to prevent him from taking office, but in doing so they unintentionally turned him into a symbol of democratic resistance against a Communist takeover of all of Berlin.

17

18 Kolumnentitel

Blockade and Airlift 1948. The year of the Berlin Blockade, marked the first crisis in the Cold War in and around Berlin and led to political division. This highly explosive dispute between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, during the course of which the West, at least, considered resorting to atomic weapons, was triggered by the currency reform. However, the deeper reason behind the blockade was Moscow’s attempt to drive the Western Allies from the four-sector city and incorporate all of Berlin into its power base. Moreover, the Soviet Union wanted to use the Berlin blockade to prevent the West’s preparation for the creation of a West German “partial” state,” which would ruin the Soviets’ political ambitions for all of Germany.

Competing Currencies On June 20, 1948, after months of preparation, a currency reform came into force in the three Western Occupation Zones. The old Reichsmark became invalid, replaced by the new west mark. The necessity for a change in currency was universally accepted due to galloping inflation and the rampant black market. All over Germany, the economy was in urgent need of a reliable currency. Even the Soviet Union recognized this, and after talks broke down in the Control Council between the four Occupying Powers about a currency reform for all of Germany, the Soviets started preparing for a currency reform for their zone as well. On June 23, 1948, the Soviet Union introduced its own, separate currency reform. There was a great deal of controversy surrounding the question

of which currency would be valid in Berlin. Should it be the west mark or the ostmark? The Western Allies had specifically excluded their sectors in Berlin from the currency reform, in view of the “special agreements which exist for the Four-Power Government in this city,” as US military governor Lucius D. Clay informed his Soviet counterpart, Wassili D. Sokolowski.8 The Soviets, however, had their own way of interpreting things, which meant that all of Berlin, including the western sectors, was part of the Soviet economy, and that therefore the ostmark ought to be used in the western sectors. The Western Allies were even prepared to accept this, with the proviso that the currency reform in Berlin would be carried out under the instructions and supervision of the joint Control Council and not just by the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) alone. The Soviets, however, rejected this idea. They clearly saw the currency switch as an important step toward

Banknotes for the western sectors of Berlin with “B” stamped on them

“Candy Bombers” Against the Blockade

Queues of people in front of a bureau d‘échange in Neukölln

gaining complete political power over all of Berlin. On June 25, the western allies put a stop to the Soviet plan by issuing new money in their own sectors. The notes were the same as those issued in the Western Zones, except they had a “B” stamped on them. In addition, use of the ostmark was permitted in the western sectors, whereas the West Mark, or Deutsche mark, as it soon was called, could not be used by Berliners living in the Soviet sector. This meant that from mid-June 1948 onward, there were two currencies in West Berlin. However, what seemed like a compromize on the surface was actually the result of a heated confrontation.9

“Candy Bombers” Against the Blockade On June 24, 1948, the Soviets blocked all road, rail, and water links between Berlin

and the western zones, and no cars, trucks, or trains were allowed through. This meant that all of Berlin’s land links to the zones in West Germany were completely closed, with only three air corridors remaining open. Even the electricity supply was cut off. The official explanation of the Soviets was that this was a direct response to the currency reform introduced in West Germany on June 20, and that they had been forced to interrupt the flow of traffic between the zones “to protect the interests of the population and the economy of the Soviet Union and to prevent the disorganisation caused by the circulation of the new currency.” Actually, the Soviets had already closed off land routes several times in prior months, due to alleged “technical faults.” On January 24, 1948, a British military train was stopped at the Marienborn border checkpoint and was not allowed to continue its journey; in the weeks that followed, it

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20 Blockade and Airlift

A Berlin family without electricity or coal during the blockade

became clear that Moscow was testing the resolve of the Western Allies by increasing incidents of hindrance and harassment against Allied vehicles. The Soviets were now taking revenge for the fact that the Western Allies had not come to a binding agreement with them in 1945 about the land routes to and from Berlin. The only international agreements in existence concerned the three air corridors, and Stalin apparently intended to adhere to them. However, the Western Allies were not going to be easily driven out of Berlin and repeatedly insisted on free access to the city by land routes as well. When the full blockade was imposed on June 24, land access was denied. The Western Allies now had a difficult decision to make. Should they give in to Soviet pressure and give up their position in Berlin? This would inevitably mean that the western sectors would come under Soviet rule. Or should they insist on main-

taining their presence in Berlin and thereby run the risk of an exchange of blows which could rapidly turn into a major war between the superpowers? Washington’s initial reaction was one of helplessness. Any thought of sending vehicle convoys to Berlin under military protection were quickly rejected, as that would probably mean the start of a military conflict. So was retreat necessary— for the sake of sacred peace? It was the US military governor of Berlin, Lucius D. Clay, who took the initiative to launch a daring operation on June 24, the very first day of the blockade; if the land routes were blocked, then the three western sectors of Berlin would have to be supplied by air. With an estimated daily requirement of 10,000 tons of supplies for 2.1 million West Berliners, this was an enormous task, but Clay was convinced that it was also possible. He immediately requested all available aircraft of the US Air Force for

A “candy bomber” landing at Tempelhof Airport

22 Blockade and Airlift

The Allied air corridors secured the delivery of provisions to West Berlin

an “airlift” (Luftbrücke), in order to supply Berlin’s needs—everything from food and medicine to fuel and toys. US President Harry S. Truman gave the green light. Stalin had left a door open—the air corridors. The West intended to use them and simultaneously keep the conflict with the Soviet Union from escalating into a “war.” On the morning of June 25, barely twenty-four hours after the blockade was declared, the first C-47 Dakotas, two-engine transport aircraft with a 2.5-ton capacity, landed at Tempelhof Airport. “Operation Airlift” had begun, and over the coming weeks and months it became the largest supply operation in history. Initially, the daily delivery of supplies amounted to 1,201

tons—a fraction of what was actually needed—but by the beginning of August, it had risen to 4,200 tons, and by spring 1945, the airlift brought 8,000 tons of supplies to West Berlin every day. The airlift was planned and implemented with military precision and involved a total of over five hundred American and British aircraft, using three air routes to Berlin; the north corridor (over Hamburg), the middle corridor (over Hanover), and the south corridor (over Frankfurt). The south corridor was like a one-way street for flights into Berlin; the middle corridor was for return flights; and only the north corridor was used in both directions. Because the aircraft frequently landed at two-minute in-

“Candy Bombers” Against the Blockade

A nightly landing at Tempelhof Airport

tervals at the West Berlin airports of Tempelhof, Gatow, and the provisional airstrip at Tegel, they required a cleverly devised timetable and the very latest technology, including radar, which was still in its first stages of development. An American pilot who took part in the operation recalled, “If a pilot messed up his landing approach for some reason, he had to take off again immediately and leave Berlin through the middle corridor. His flight was wasted—but in those days there was no other way to avoid dangerous tailbacks.”10 The roar of the aircraft engines became “the sound of hope” for the Berliners, and they began disrespectfully yet affectionately to call the aircraft themselves “candy

bombers.” It must be said, however, that despite the success of the airlift, the blockade remained a time of great sacrifice and hardship for the population in the western sectors of Berlin. The Soviets had also cut off the supplies of gas and electricity from the east, such that power outages were a daily occurrence. Even coal and other heating fuel had to be flown in, which meant that by the beginning of autumn, cold weather added to the deteriorating food situation, making matters worse. “Warm rooms” were set up, because private homes could barely be heated. Numerous businesses shut down, lacking the materials and energy required for production, resulting in a sudden increase in unemployment.

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24 Blockade and Airlift

An old woman in athering wood in the Tiergarten, the main Berlin park.

If the blockade was a strategic move by Moscow on the chessboard of world politics in the battle for power and supremacy in Europe, the first and direct victims were the inhabitants of West Berlin. However, Berliners could not be forced to their knees any more than the Western Allies—on the contrary: during the blockade, Berliners developed a political self-determination which was to prove its worth in similar explosive conflicts in the years that followed. Some people in West Berlin crossed the border to buy goods in the eastern sector, by foot or by S-Bahn (urban rail), which still connected the city, and the Soviet Union even encouraged this movement as part of its propaganda battle. However, it was frowned upon in the West, and even considered by some to be an act of treason. Berliners also had to register in the East, because they had to use food stamps, and the supply

situation in the impoverished East was not great either. Whatever vague sympathy the West Berliners may still have had for the Soviet Union and Communist ideals from the days of the Weimar Republic or the anti-Fascist resistance was totally destroyed by the brutal attempt to use the blockade to take the population of half a city hostage. On the other hand, the airlift markedly improved the relationship between West Berliners and the Western Allies. The huge financial commitment meant that in 1948–49, the “occupying forces” in West Berlin came to be viewed as the “protecting powers” or even as “friends,” as they were frequently described in official reports. Over three hundred thousand Berliners clearly demonstrated their will for selfdetermination on September 9, 1948, at a rally in front of the ruins of the Reichstag. The mass demonstration was staged to coincide with the negotiations being held by the four victorious Allies in the Berlin Control Council building, because many people feared that the Western Powers and Moscow might still find a way out of the blockade crisis, but at the expense of Berlin’s western sectors. Ernst Reuter, the elected mayor of Berlin (whom the Soviets did not recognize), sent a direct, fiery appeal to the “peoples of the world”: “Today is the day when the people of Berlin raise their voices … In all this trading and negotiating, we Berliners do not want to be exchange goods … You peoples of the world, people in America, in England, in France, in Italy! Look at this city! And recognize that you may not and cannot betray this city and these people.” Reuter’s appeal had an effect on the Western Allies, at least. They stuck firmly to their position with Moscow and expanded the airlift further. They even declared a small “counter-blockade,” by shutting off West Berlin to traffic in and out of the Sovi-

The “Senate Reserves” (Senatsreserve)

et Zone of Occupation, which meant, among other things, that the East had to build expensive alternative road and rail routes. Overall, the blockade backfired for the Soviet Union, which was unable to achieve any of its goals; the Western Allies remained in Berlin and persisted in their legal position with regard to status. Preparations for the foundation of a West German state continued unhindered; and finally, as mentioned above, a deep feeling of solidarity developed between the West Berliners and the Western Powers. From then on, the East—the Kremlin leadership and the SED—had not only the Western Powers and the anti-Communist politicians in Berlin against them, but the majority of the population as well. With all this in mind, in April 1949, the Moscow leadership signalled that it was prepared to make concessions. The UN ambassadors for the Soviet Union and the US met to negotiate lifting the blockade, which led to the New York Treaty of May 4, 1949. During the night of May 12, 1949, the road and rail links to and from Berlin were opened once again. The West Berlin population was able to breathe a sigh of relief after eleven long months, during which the western sectors had received all their provisions exclusively by air. The first trucks to arrive were greeted with enthusiastic rejoicing, and at last there was enough food, clothing, and other daily necessities, and the shelves in the shops filled up again. American and British aircraft had made a total of over 200,000 flights into the blockaded city and delivered almost 1.8 million tons of goods, of which just under one third (28 percent) was food. The highest proportion (63 percent) was coal, and nine percent was industrial goods, including the building materials for a complete power station that was erected in Spandau during the blockade, in order to improve the energy

Berliner Mayor Ernst Reuter appeals to the “peoples of the world”

supply to the Western Sectors. In July 1951, a memorial to the airlift was unveiled in front of Tempelhof Airport. On its base are carved the names of the seventy-five Americans, Britons, and Germans who lost their lives during the airlift. The blockade and the airlift had certainly turned Berlin into a political symbol. From that point, the city’s name stood for the determination of the Western Powers to stop any attempts at expansion by the Soviet Union, even by military means, if necessary.

The “Senate Reserves” (Senatsreserve) The blockade caused a further curiosity in West Berlin, which was no stranger to such things. Nowhere else in the world was there anything like the Senate Reserves or Ber-

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26 Blockade and Airlift

Sometimes, candy bombers also sufffered accidents, like here in Handjerystraße

lin stockpile, which were set up by order of the Western Allies right after the end of the blockade. Thousands of tons of food and consumer goods were stored in 250 secret locations, so that West Berlin would be prepared for any future blockade measures. These supplies included nonperishable groceries (canned food, etc.), clothing, fuel, coal, and even bicycles. The amount of goods was calculated based on how much the West Berlin population would need for six months (one year for some goods). The various goods, especially

groceries, were regularly exchanged for new ones and sold in the shops. Despite the enormous costs involved— maintenance and storage alone cost about 100 million DM (about fifty million Euro) per year—the Berlin stockpile continued throughout the years of division. The reserves were not finally dissolved until the reunification of Berlin in October 1990, when, ironically, most of the food supplies, valued at approximately two hundred million Euros, were delivered to the Soviet Union as humanitarian aid.

Kolumnentitel

The Divided City On September 6, 1948, Communist demonstrators stormed City Hall (Neues Stadthaus), headquarters of the Berlin City Assembly (Stadtverordnetenversammlung). The demonstrators wanted to put pressure on the city Parliament, where the SPD and the CDU were in the majority, and prevent the upcoming elections in December 1948 because of the renewed threat of defeat for the SED. In addition, they demanded that the ostmark be introduced in the western sectors of Berlin. City Hall was in the eastern sector of Berlin, and so the parliamentary president, Otto Suhr (SPD), asked for protection from the Soviets. When his request was turned down, he closed the session and moved the venue to the student headquarters near the Zoological Gardens in the British sector. The SED members of Parliament refused to move, and from then on, the Berlin City Assembly was divided. Since the end of June 1948, tensions had mounted not only between the two superpowers—the US and the Soviet Union—but also within the political realm in Berlin, which had continued to have a joint parliament and was governed by the joint City Council. In several departments of the City Council, the Soviets ordered the dismissal of leading officials who opposed Communist influence. Consequently, the departments in which the SPD and CDU held the majority were moved to the western sectors. There were also increasing conflicts about the police. Paul Markgraf, installed as commissioner by the SED, simply discharged any police officers he didn’t want. On July 26, 1948, the incumbent mayor of Berlin, Ferdinand Friedensburg (CDU),

subsequently suspended Markgraf from his post, but Markgraf refused to go. Beginning at the end of July, there were two police authorities in Berlin: the West Berlin Police under Acting Commissioner Johannes Stumm, comprized of about 70 percent of all Berlin police officers; and a police force in the Soviet sector, led by Markgraf and controlled by the SED. The SED instigated the next decisive step in Berlin’s division, with a so-called extraordinary City Assembly meeting which convened on November 30, 1948, in the East Berlin Admiralspalast, attended by the twenty-three remaining SED members of Parliament and, quite illegally, several hundred representatives of Communistcontrolled organizations, such as the FDGB, the Frauenbund (DFB, i.e. Women’s League), and the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ, Free German Youth). This meeting, which had no democratic legal status, declared the elected City Council deposed and elected a “temporary democratic City Council.” This 1948 Magistrat was a perfect example of how the less democratic a committee in the Soviet Sector was, the more likely it was to be described as “democratic.” SED politician Friedrich Ebert, son of the first President of the Weimar Republic, was elected head of this SED-controlled council and thus became the new mayor of Berlin. The Western Allies immediately lodged a protest against this unconstitutional act with the Soviet Occupying Power, which was promptly rejected. The planned City Assembly elections were held a few days later, on December 5, 1948, but only in the western sectors and without any SED candidates. With 64.5 per-

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28 The Divided City

Communist demonstrators storm the City Council (Magistratsgebäude)

cent of the vote, the SPD won decisively. The CDU received 19.4 percent, and the Liberal Democrats (LDP) 16.1 percent. SPD politician Ernst Reuter was duly reelected as mayor, who, in light of the extremely difficult political situation vis à vis the blockade and the political division of the city, formed an all-party City Council. With the introduction of the “minor occupation status” of May 14, 1949, the West Berlin City Council also gained extensive decision-making powers, which meant that the Allied Kommandatura no longer had exclusive control over the city’s future development. However, the Allied victors still maintained some authority, in the areas of security and demilitarization, for example, as well as control over the police and banks. From the end of 1948 onward, therefore, there were two competing governments and parliaments in Berlin, each denying the

other’s legitimacy. The political and administrative division was complete, and the border between the eastern and western Sectors had become a real front line, where the Cold War opponents faced each other with increasing mistrust.

The University as a Political Battlefield Soon even Berlin University, where teaching had already resumed in January 1946, by order of the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD), became the scene of political disagreement between the East and the West. The university, located on the Avenue Unter den Linden and therefore in the Soviet sector, was subjected to increasing pressure by the Soviets and the SED, with regard to both course content and personnel. Professors or students who did not willingly

The University as a Political Battlefield

Inaugural ceremony of the Free University of Berlin; Lucius D. Clay (front, left) talking to Ernst Reuter

submit to this influence were harassed and pressured. In March 1947, several students were arrested, most of them members of the SPD or the CDU. In spring 1948, the situation intensified further when the SED reacted to student demands for more freedom in research and teaching by expelling numerous students

and making serious threats. About two dozen students and lecturers took the initiative to found an independent university, free of any political influences, in the western part of the four-sector city. They were supported above all by the Americans, in particular by US Military Governor Lucius D. Clay, and the new institution was officially founded

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30 The Divided City

Allied Forces Victory Parade in 1945

on December 4,1948, as “The Free University,” situated in the idyllic area of Dahlem in the American sector, just a stone’s throw from the Allied Kommandatura building. From then on, the Cold War in Berlin was also manifest in the existence of two competing universities. Both of the other two higher-level educational institutions, the Academy of Arts and the Technical University, were in West Berlin and were therefore shielded from the East–West confrontation, since the East did not have competing institutions.

Troops in Berlin The expression “front-line city” (Frontstadt) was a very apt description for the situation in Berlin at this time, because both sides had a massive military presence. In addition to their job of deterring any possible attack on West Berlin, the Western

forces were also tasked with demonstrating the Western powers’ legal claim to a permanent presence in Berlin. The Western Allies had, on average, about 12,200 soldiers in Berlin: 6,000 American, 3,600 British, and 2,600 French. In the Western sectors, there were 60 tanks, 80 armoured vehicles, and six artillery guns, but no fighter aircraft or air defence systems. On the other side, within a radius of about twenty miles, there were about 9,000 troops belonging to the “group of Soviet forces in Germany” and, from 1956 onward, units of the National People’s Army of the GDR. After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, an additional 11,000 men from the GDR Border Troops were deployed on the border fortifications between East and West Berlin. Meanwhile, relations between the occupying powers were officially severed when the Soviets walked out of the Allied Kom-

Cutting Off the Western Sectors

mandatura in the middle of June 1948, rendering it useless as the four-power instrument for the administration of Berlin. On December 21, the three western City Commandants resumed Allied Kommandatura sessions without a Soviet representative. From then on, they referred to the absence of the Soviets as an “abstention” and not as a “veto,” and continued to claim that their resolutions were valid for all of Berlin. However, these were actually just little diplomatic or legal games, because the Soviets doggedly refused to recognize any resolutions made by the Western Allies for all of Berlin, let alone implement them in their own sector.

Cutting Off the Western Sectors After the blockade was lifted in May 1949, Berliners were able to move around relatively freely, both inside the city and in the surrounding areas. This all changed in May 1952, when the government of the newly founded GDR gave the order to close most of the tram lines between West Berlin and its hinterland. GDR inhabitants were no longer able to take their cars into the western sectors, and West Berliners could not drive into the GDR. Sector borders between West Berlin and the GDR could only be crossed on foot, by bicycle, or by S-Bahn, the commuter railway. The sector borders within the city, between East and West Berlin, however, continued to remain open. The closure measures were a reaction on the part of the GDR (and Moscow) to the signing of the German Treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Western Allies on May 26, 1952, which granted the West German state extensive self-determination rights and even paved the way for its membership in NATO. At the same time, the GDR government set a further boundary measure by cutting off all telephone lines

between East and West Berlin. In January 1953, the tram network, which up to that point had been operated jointly, was divided in two. Beginning in November 1952, West Berliners were officially prohibited from buying food and so-called industrial goods in East Berlin. Before then, a large number of West Berliners had taken advantage of the artificially low prices set by the GDR government for Socialist political reasons. Even at the height of the Cold War in and around Berlin, for example during the blockade in 1948–49, the three air corridors continued to remain untouched. However, since the beginning of the 1950s, there had been an increasing number of incidents, even in the air corridors. There was a particularly serious one on April 29, 1952, when an Air France passenger plane flying over Dessau was shot at by two Soviet Mig-15s. The plane was hit eighty-nine times, and five passengers sustained injuries. The pilot managed to steer the plane into the clouds and to land safely at Tempelhof shortly afterward. The Western Powers lodged a vehement protest against the attack, which could easily have led to a catastrophe. The Soviets rejected the protest, maintaining that the Air France plane had strayed from the corridor and was therefore forced to land. Barely a year later, a much graver incident could easily have led to a direct confrontation between the East and West. On March 12, 1953, Soviet interception aircraft shot at a British military aircraft on a flight from Berlin to Hamburg, and the seven members of the crew were killed. In this case, however, Soviet Commander in Chief Vasily I. Tschuikow considered it appropriate to express his regret for this tragic incident.

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32 Kolumnentitel

Uprising Against the SED Regime On June 16, 1953, about two hundred construction workers from Stalinallee in East Berlin (today Karl-Marx-Allee) and from the building site at the Friedrichshain hospital, gathered in protest and marched to the Haus der Ministerien (House of Ministries) in Wilhelmstraße, the seat of the GDR government. As the group made its way through the center of Berlin, more and more people joined them, and the crowd was eventually over four thousand strong. They chanted demands for rescinding the raising of work norms and for lowering prices in state-owned shops (HO-Läden). They tried to communicate their demands to Party Chairman Ulbricht in person, but when neither Walter Ulbricht nor Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl made an appear-

Demonstrators burn the red flag that they took down from the Brandenburg Gate

ance, the demonstrators dispersed without having achieved anything, chanting, “We will return.” When they did return the following morning, Wednesday, June 17, there were already sixty thousand people laying siege to the government headquarters. This time they demanded not only a withdrawal of the work norms, but also the resignation of the government and free elections. A central demand for the removal of the hated Ulbricht echoed through the streets: “The goatee must go!” Within just a few hours, what had started as a worker’s protest had turned into a full-blown revolutionary movement, the aims of which were democracy and an end to the SED government and the division of Germany. Furthermore, the uprising was no longer confined to East Berlin, but had spread throughout almost the entire GDR. On June 17, 1953, there were demonstrations in about seven hundred towns and communities, and dozens of SED party offices and several prisons were besieged. Over a million people took to the streets all over the GDR, demanding a better standard of living, freedom, and democracy. The SED government stood on the brink of defeat; a dejected Ulbricht thought that he had already been ousted and fled to the headquarters of the Soviet Occupying Power in Berlin-Karlshorst. The rest of the world watched expectantly to see how the superpowers would react, because of the possibility that the US would support the rebellion against the GDR government and might be able to force the Soviets to leave Berlin and East Germany. This would correspond exactly with the plans of the new Republican US

Uprising Against the SED R ­ egime

East Berliners use stones to fight against the Soviet tanks on June 17th, 1953

Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who rejected the “containment” politics of Democratic President Harry S. Truman and was passionately in favor of an offensive “roll back,” which meant ousting the Soviet Union from all Soviet-occupied territory. But would Moscow allow that to happen? As the situation intensified in East Berlin on June 17, 1953, Moscow sent in tanks. At 1 p.m., a state of emergency was declared, all demonstrations were broken up by armed forces, and numerous rebels were arrested. The rebellion against the GDR regime was also defeated by force in all other centers of unrest, for example, in Halle, Bitterfeld, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Dresden, and Görlitz. Ulbricht and his comrades had only managed to remain in power on June 17 because of Soviet military intervention; the majority of the population had long grown tired of them. One of the tragedies of the June 17 uprising was that even the leadership in the

Kremlin no longer agreed with Ulbricht’s rigid methods and had already more or less decided to remove him. Paradoxically, or rather tragically, it was the attempt at rebellion against his repressive regime that actually saved Ulbricht from being removed from office, because Moscow was no longer inclined to risk a change of state and party leadership in light of the uncertain situation in the GDR. The Western Allies protested the bloody defeat of the people’s rebellion in the GDR, but they acted with restraint. They wanted to avoid a military confrontation with the Soviets in Berlin, as they had already managed to do in 1948, when the blockade was imposed. However, US President Eisenhower left it open as to whether this restraint would apply in future situations. The time to get actively involved in the Eastern Bloc had not yet arrived. Things could change, and in fact, follow.

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34 Uprising Against the SED R ­ egime

Demonstrators on Potsdamer Platz seek cover from machine gun fire

ing the events of June 17, the US strengthened attempts to undermine the Communist leadership in the Eastern Bloc countries. On the other hand, the Communist regimes increased their repressive measures, which even certain “thaws,” or phases of relaxation could not disguise. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill went even further in his restraint with the Soviets. Churchill granted the Soviet Union the right to take care of law and order behind closed doors inside its own zone of occupation and to resort to military methods where necessary, as had already happened. “Were the Soviets simply supposed to stand and watch the Eastern Zone collapse into chaos and anarchy?”11 When assessing the defensive attitude

of the Western Powers in June 1953, one must consider that, since 1950, a heated war had been raging between the East and the West in another region of the world—Korea. There the conflict was between North Korea, supported by China and the Soviet Union, and the pro-West South Korea, supported mainly by the US. In June 1953, the two sides in the Korean War were close to agreeing on a ceasefire, which probably decreased America’s desire to become involved in a conflict in Berlin and the GDR. The people’s rebellion of June 17, 1953, and its bloody defeat resulted in the consolidation of the respective spheres of influence in Germany and the strengthening of the demarcation lines of the Cold War within Berlin.

Kolumnentitel

The Media RIAS, a radio station in the American sector, played a fairly significant role in the events of June 17, for example, by broadcasting the demonstrators’ demands to East Berlin and throughout the entire GDR. In general, radio stations and the press were important “weapons” in the Cold War fought in Berlin. At the same time, it was much easier for the broadcasting stations in the West (especially RIAS and the US soldiers’ radio station, AFN, and television stations, especially after 1960) to reach audiences in East Berlin and the GDR, than the other way around. Western pop music was much more appealing than the old-fashioned, stolid, light music that characterized

the GDR stations until the 1980s (by order of the SED). For most young people in East Berlin, RIAS, Deutschlandfunk (German Radio), and AFN were a kind of “acoustic gateway to the world,” through which they could get a glimpse of the Western way of life—or what they thought it was. To some extent, RIAS and AFN actually contributed a bit on a daily basis to undermining the SED regime. In the GDR, a special youth radio station called DT64 started up in 1964, and its mixture of modern music, including pop music from the West, and some relatively snappy dialogue soon made it very popular among young GDR listeners. With its unorthodox program, DT64,

Loudspeaker vans from the Berlin Senate intended to carry information and slogans to the other side of the Wall

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36 The Media

RIAS reports on an outside broadcasting unit

affiliated with Berliner Rundfunk (Radio Berlin), competed mainly with RIAS and AFN for listeners in the GDR. In spite of repeated objections and reprimands from the SED leadership, DT64 was able to become an independent station with its own frequency in 1987 and continued broadcasting after the demise of the GDR. In 1993, the name changed to “Radio Sputnik.” GDR television was a more ambiguous area—on both sides of the Wall. The East German news and politically propagandist programs broadcast into people’s homes

from Berlin-Adlershof attracted little interest. Children’s programming and (old) feature films were an entirely different matter and had loyal viewers on both sides of the Wall. Many people in the West enjoyed the GDR’s Sandmännchen (Little Sandman) and old Ufa films just as much as people in the East, even if a certain Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler on “the black channel” vented his spleen against the “class enemy” in the West. One could always turn the television off (which is how he earned the nickname “Karl-Eduard von Schni…”).

Kolumnentitel

A Playground for Spies Of course, the second oldest profession in the world always stood in a prominent position on the front line of the Cold War. Spies and secret agents in Berlin enjoyed especially favorable working conditions, because until the Wall was built in 1961, it was relatively easy to move between the East and the West, particularly for members of the Occupying Powers. Berlin quickly became a playground for the secret services on both sides of the Cold War, the Soviets as well as the Americans, who had founded the CIA 1947, shortly after World War II had ended. The agency had its heyday in the 1950s, when Allen W. Dulles became director. Nowhere else than in Berlin could they gather information at such close quarters to their opponents and so easily run operations against the other side. As a CIA agent once described it, “If the Soviet Military Commander in Bucharest or Warsaw telephoned Moscow, the call went via Berlin.”12 Secret service agents were naturally present in large numbers. On July 4, 1945, the very first day that they had access to Berlin after it had fallen to the Soviets, the Americans had a group of secret service personnel flown into the city. At that point in time, the construction of a Soviet secret service was already in full swing. The Berlin headquarters of the KGB was in Berlin-Karlshorst, in the former St. Antonius hospital. By the beginning of the 1950s, there were about eight hundred secret service employees working there. After the people’s rebellion of June 17, 1953, that number increased significantly. The CIA was based in the residential suburb of Dahlem, at 19–21

Föhrenweg. MI6, the British secret service, was lodged on the Reichssportfeld, in buildings constructed as part of the Olympic Games complex in 1936. Only Vienna, which had also been a four-sector city after 1945, could also claim such a high concentration of spies at the time. In the 1950s, there were about eighty secret service agencies active in Berlin. They attempted to camouflage themselves behind various façades, ranging from jam factories to research institutes.13 Both sides stopped at nothing in the spy war. In the 1950s, in particular, there were countless undercover operations,

One of the men suspected of espionage is brought before the American military court

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38 A Playground for Spies including spying on the enemy, military and economic espionage, and kidnapping, the latter being a particular favorite of the Soviets and their helpers in the GDR Ministry for State Security. The CIA and other anti-Communist groups were also not terribly selective in the methods they used to inflict damage on the Soviets and the SED regime.

The Espionage Tunnel The espionage tunnel under the sector border, which would be one of the most costly and most productive operations mounted by the American and British secret services in Berlin, actually turned out to be a relative disgrace. On April 24, 1956, the Soviets held an outdoor press conference, in which they presented an 1,800-foot tunnel that had been dug from the West into the eastern borough of Treptow, and which was equipped with the most modern bugging devices. The CIA and the British SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) had apparently been tapping the East Berlin telephone network there and bugging the conversations and telegrams of the Soviet military in a major way. A Soviet officer vociferously vented his indignation and explained to the clearly impressed journalists that the tunnel had been accidentally discovered during maintenance work on the telephone network. However, this was not the case at all. The Soviets had actually known about the bugged tunnel, right down to the last detail, because British double agent George Blake had already told them about it during the planning stages and had kept them informed about its progress.14 Work on the tunnel had begun in the spring of 1954. First of all, for camouflage purposes, the Americans erected an alleged US Army warehouse directly on the sector

border. From there, the fifteen-foot-deep tunnel was dug eastward. During construction, US agents practiced on a dummy tunnel of similar construction in New Mexico. In May 1955, the original in Berlin was ready for use. The Soviets were now faced with a dilemma. Should they bust the tunnel before the bugging began? This would have meant placing double agent Blake, their source within the SIS, at considerable risk. Moscow decided to protect its source and let its opponents carry on, until the most harmless opportunity for “discovering” the tunnel presented itself. Moreover, the Soviets could also have used their knowledge about the tunnel to misinform the enemy. For whatever reason, they chose not to take advantage of that opportunity. Having discovered that the Western Powers were bugging them, the Soviets simply increased internal security measures for telephone conversations (codes, encoding, etc.), which meant that about half a million reels of tape, on which the CIA and the SIS had recorded roughly 443,000 individual conversations, contained only “rubbish,” or rather, verbal fog transmitted from Karlshorst. The operation was meant to provide the West with much more important information, such as details of the growing atomic power of the Soviet air force in Poland and the GDR. In this regard, the whole operation was somewhat of a disgrace for the West, but not entirely fruitless.

The Kidnapping of Political Opponents Secret services are not squeamish, and the KGB and the Stasi (the GDR’s national security service) in particular often resorted to kidnapping as a means of dealing with people they didn’t like. This was especially

The Kidnapping of Political Opponents

Soviet soldiers and a GDR policeman (Volkspolizist) show the espionage tunnel to the press

easy for them in Berlin, where the sector border was open until 1961. One of the most spectacular cases was the kidnapping of Walter von Linse, an anti-Communist activist. Suspecting nothing, he left his apartment in the Lichterfelde district of the American sector of Berlin on July 8, 1952. Suddenly, he was pulled into a car disguised as a taxi and driven over the sector border into East Berlin. The KGB and Stasi had hired four professional criminals for the kidnapping, who each received thousand marks for their work. The forty-nine-year-old attorney had caught the attention of the secret services in the East, because he was one of the leading activists of the “investigation branch of liberal lawyers” (UfJ). The mission of the organization, founded in 1949 and based in Berlin, was to document legal injustice in the GDR and give legal advice to GDR citi-

zens, for example, when they visited West Berlin. The UfJ had set up a network of informers in the GDR to help them achieve their aims and were financed mainly by the CIA, which from 1951 to 1952 pressed the network to prepare for paramilitary deployment.15 Linse’s kidnapping was followed by the arrest of several dozen of his connections and informants for the “liberal lawyers.” Two days later, at a rally in West Berlin, Maoyr Ernst Reuter addressed a crowd of over twenty-five thousand people and vehemently protested the abductions. After months of interrogations, first in the Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen and then in a Soviet secret service prison in Berlin Karlshorst, Walter von Linse was sentenced to death by a military tribunal and in December 1953, he was shot in a Moscow prison.

39

40 A Playground for Spies Another victim of kidnapping—Heinz Brandt—was at first very sympathetic toward the establishment of Socialism and had even been actively involved as an SED official in 1945. However, as a member of the Communist anti-Nazi resistance, he was locked up for years in a concentration camp, and after the violent defeat of the people’s rebellion of June 17, 1953, he began to have doubts about the SED regime. In 1956, Heinz Brandt finally broke his allegiance to Communism when the full extent of Stalin’s crimes became known, and in 1958, he fled to the West and worked as a trade union journalist committed to liberal-democratic Socialism. The KGB and Stasi pursued renegades with a special hatred, and on June 16, 1961, Heinz Brandt was lured into a trap in West Berlin. While out on a date with a woman, Brandt drank spiked whisky, collapsed shortly afterward, and lay unconscious on the street. A Stasi detachment bundled Brandt into a car and transported him across the open border into East Berlin. Following a secret trial, Brandt was sentenced in 1962 by the highest court in the GDR to thirteen years in prison, as an alleged spy. In Brandt’s case, continuous protests by the West finally bore fruit—not least because of the involvement of the recently founded aid organization Amnesty International. After three years behind bars, Heinz Brandt was released from a GDR prison and deported to the West. A further kidnapping case that caused a sensation might not have been an abduction at all. At least federal German judges did not believe there had been any kidnapping when they sentenced Otto John, the former head ofagency for the defence of the constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) in Bonn, to four years in prison for offences against the Official Secrets Act.

John’s assertions—that he had been abducted by the Stasi, taken to East Berlin, and forced to make incriminating statements—fell on deaf ears, and even large segments of the West German public thought that John was a traitor. Abduction or high treason? To this day, the “John case,” one of the biggest political scandals in the Federal Republic, has not been fully explained. This much is certain: late in the evening on July 20, 1954, forty-five-year-old Otto John drove over the sector border into East Berlin with his friend, a doctor named Wolfgang Wohlgemut. The critical question is whether he was drugged beforehand by Wohlgemut, as instructed by the Stasi, or had changed sides of his own free will. It must be said that John did not look much like a kidnapping victim when he held a press conference in East Berlin, during which he sharply criticized conditions in West Germany. He specifically denounced the growing influence of ex-Nazi sympathizers or perpetrators in West German politics and criticized Adenauer’s rearmament plans. In the months that followed, he repeated these accusations on various occasions, and the GDR press made propaganda capital out of them. It was actually true that Otto John, who had been involved in preparations for the assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944 by Graf Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and subsequently fled to Great Britain when it failed, had shown increasing concern at the return of ex-Nazi sympathizers and perpetrators to key positions in the Federal Republic. To this extent, he was only speaking out publicly in the GDR about what he actually thought. Whether his repeated assertion that the GDR was the better German state was also his own idea remains an open question. Just as spectacular—and veiled in mys-

An anti-Stalinist balloon campaign mounted by the “task force against inhumanity”

42 A Playground for Spies tery—as his move to East Berlin was Otto John’s return to the West, when he simply registered at a West Berlin police station on December 12, 1955. He stated that he had used a lecture at the Humboldt University to shake off his Stasi guards and flee to the West, hidden in a Danish journalist’s car. In the weeks that followed, John never tired of explaining that he had been the victim of a kidnapping and that his appearances in East Berlin and the GDR were all acts of self-protection and simply tactical. However, neither the majority of West Germans nor the judges at the Federal Court believed his version of events. They aligned themselves with Reinhard Gehlen, head of BND, the West German news service and one of those Nazi sympathizers whose advancement had sickened John so much, when he said, “Once a traitor, always a traitor!” By this, Gehlen meant to belittle John’s resistance to the Nazi regime and his statements in the trial against former Wehrmacht Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, as well as John’s critical attitude toward certain developments in the Federal Republic. Since numerous public archives were opened in 1989, it seems certain that a former KGB officer’s summary best fits the “John case”—John “came of his own free will but was not willing to stay.”16 In fact, there is much to suggest that Otto John went on his own initiative to talk with political leaders in Moscow and East Berlin about alternatives to the course taken by the Adenauer government. He seemed to accept, at first, that his stay in the GDR would be used for propaganda purposes by the SED. However, both the ideological dogmatism he encountered and the depressing conditions in the GDR soon seemed to have convinced him of the hopelessness of his undertaking. His return to the West was a logical consequence. The fact that he was

then viewed mainly as a traitor in the Federal Republic, or at least of dubious character, and not as a resistance fighter or as someone sending a critical warning, is part of the tragedy of Otto John’s story, a very German story.

The Task Force Against Inhumanity When the SED-controlled press kept publishing reports of Western agents and saboteurs who were “stirring things up” against the GDR, it mainly served as a cheap explanation for the economic problems and lack of provisions in the GDR and as justification for more severe repression. The true reasons for the mismanagement of the economy and repression had to be kept hidden, especially if they had their roots in the Stalinist system. These tales of espionage were not complete fantasy, however, as there were definitely groups, mainly of young people, who worked zealously to plot the fall of the SED regime. The Kampfgruppe gegen Unmensch­ lichkeit (KgU, Task Force Against Inhumanity) is one example—founded in West Berlin in 1948 by Rainer Hildebrandt, an idealistic firebrand who in 1944 had contact with the military resistance against the Nazi regime. At the beginning of the 1960s, he was responsible for the construction of the Berlin Wall museum, the “Haus am Checkpoint Charlie.” At first, the group’s main concern was caring for released prisoners and documenting acts of injustice committed by the GDR legal system. They also collected data on the economic, political, and military situation in the GDR, gleaned from an extensive network of informants. The group, partially financed by the CIA, became more radical from 1951 onward, and distributed

Exchanging Secret Agents

Exchanging agents on the Glienicker Bridge on 12th February 1986

pamphlets by means of air balloons, for instance, and organized targeted sabotage and disruptive actions. In 1952–53, the group succeeded in disrupting production by faking instructions and orders for goods, diverted freight trains, and managed to severely restrict any contact that GDR companies had abroad. The GDR reacted extremely harshly. In 1952 alone, two hundred KgU members and associates were arrested and given draconian sentences. In 1955, two “task force” contacts in Weimar, who had supplied military information, were sentenced to death and executed. In October 1951, eighteen senior students from Werdau in Saxony, who had

among other things distributed leaflets for the KgU, were given long prison sentences. All of these arrests led to increasing public accusations in the West that the KgU was unprofessional and careless. In 1953, the group stopped undertaking operations which were too risky, and in 1959, the “task force against inhumanity” was disbanded altogether.

Exchanging Secret Agents The Glienicke Bridge, idyllically situated between Potsdam and Zehlendorf, a wealthy district in Berlin’s South [...] a misty November evening, dim light from

43

44 A Playground for Spies a few streetlamps, not a soul or vehicle to be seen for miles around. Suddenly, several cars with tinted windows drive onto the bridge. Military vehicles approach from the other side of the bridge and move toward them. The cars face each other. Some men get out and walk toward each other. This is how many postwar spy thrillers depicted spy exchanges, and indeed several secret agents were exchanged on this bridge. Among them were many small fry, but there was also the occasional big fish, like US pilot Gary Powers, who was shot down over the Soviet Union in his U2 spy plane in 1960. In October 1962, the Americans released Soviet “master spy” Rudolf I. Abel, who had worked in atomic espionage in the US, in exchange for Powers. The most extensive operation on the Glienicke Bridge took place on June 12, 1985, when twenty-seven people were exchanged. Twenty-three agents and associates of the CIA busted in Poland and the GDR, were traded for four Eastern Bloc agents who had fallen into the hands of the agency. This process of exchanging agents usually occurred quietly and secretly and was only made public after the event. In February 1986, however, the international press got wind of plans for a spectacular spy exchange, and for several days, crowds besieged the western side of the bridge. On February 11, 1986, after spending years in a prison camp, Soviet dissident Anatoly Schtscharanski walked across the Glienicker Bridge to freedom and was picked up by car by the US Ambassador at the time. In exchange for Schtscharanski, the West released eight Eastern agents, who crossed the bridge into the East. Paradoxically, this bridge between Potsdam and West Berlin, the middle of which formed the border between East and

West and the front line of the Cold War, was called the “Bridge of Unity,” a name given to it by the GDR government in 1949 and not changed until after reunification.

Cooperation between the Allies Among all the conflicts, there were also some areas of life in Berlin in which the four former allies worked together relatively harmoniously: air traffic control and the administration of the Spandau War Criminals Prison. After the Allied Control Council disintegrated and the Soviets withdrew from the Allied Kommandatura in 1948, those were the only two institutions in which the four former Allies still worked together. The Berlin Air Safety Center was established in December 1945 and began operation in February 1946, to guarantee the safe handling of flights to and from Berlin. It was responsible for a total area of thirty-thousand square feet, of which twenty-three thousand were outside Berlin and housed in a wing of the Allied Control Council building in Schöneberg (in the American sector). Beginning in 1949, the air traffic control department of the Berlin Air Safety CenteP was located at Tempelhof Airbase. The Four Powers controlled all air movement above the Zones of Occupation and ensured a safe route for each flight. When disputes arose, they were discussed in a special “confrontation room,” but this was seldom used. The Soviets and Western Allies worked together constructively in the Berlin Air Safety Centre, right up to the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Berlin—even during the blockade and the airlift. The Spandau War Crimes Prison was set up by the Four Powers in October 1946

The Spandau War Criminals Prison where Hess was held, under the guard of the four Allies

46 A Playground for Spies

The Berlin Air Safety Centre in the Allied Control Council building

in the Spandau Prison, a brick building dating from the year 1876. The only inmates there were the seven main Nazi war criminals given custodial sentences at the Nuremberg military tribunals. These included Rudolf Hess, once the Deputy Führer, former Armaments Minister Albert Speer, and the former head of the German navy, Karl Dönitz.

Each of the Four Powers provided the prison guards for a month at a time, and the prison was run by four equal-ranking commandants, who also had monthly tours of duty. After Albert Speer was released in 1966, Rudolf Hess was the only remaining inmate, and when he committed suicide in August 1987, Spandau Prison was demolished.

Kolumnentitel

The Battle for Cultural Supremacy The Cold War was not always fought with the gloves off, as it was during the blockades, tank duels, and kidnappings. Particularly in Berlin, where the borders remained open until 1961, the East–West conflict was fought mainly in the form of a comparatively peaceful “ideological battle,” which was all about which side had the better social model. The “battlefields” for this “soft” ideological rivalry were, for example, in housing, urban planning, arts and culture, consumer goods, and, last but not least, social politics. As Soviet Party Leader Khrushchev stated so clearly in 1956, “[In Berlin] not only an ideological battle is raging, but also an economic battle between Socialism and Capitalism, to see which system can create the better material conditions.”17 This weapon-free battle left numerous traces in the city—some really positive— which are still visible today. These include the apartment blocks on the former Stalinallee in the borough of “Mitte” (now called Karl-Marx-Allee), the Hansa District in the West, and the relatively large number of theaters and opera houses.

Prestige Projects from the Drawing Board In the early 1950s, the Stalinallee project in the boroughs of Mitte and Friedrichshain demonstrated the SED’s concept of a “Socialist city” and “Socialist housing.” Plans for the apartment blocks and shops along the 1.5-mile-long avenue connecting Alexanderplatz and Frankfurter Tor were drawn up by a collective of architects led

by Hermann Henselmann, and construction started in 1952. These buildings, up to nine floors high, contained a total of twentytwo hundred apartments, most with two or three bedrooms, and numerous shops and restaurants on the ground level. The style was largely influenced by the Soviet “wedding cake” model, and the apartments were equipped with private bathrooms, a district central heating system, and parquet flooring. The blocks were meant to be a workers’ paradise and very inexpensive. But the building construction and materials were of an extremely high standard, such that the “Stalinallee” soon became a most desirable area to live. The grand avenue (Magistrale) widened twelve hundred feet in places and was repeatedly used for military parades and mass processions. The Hansa District (Hansaviertel) in West Berlin, constructed for the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in 1957, seemed almost like an alternate draft of the Stalinallee, “the GDR’s first Socialist street.” Financed mainly by the social housing budget, the Hansa District was comprized of forty-eight individual high-rise buildings containing a total of thirteen hundred apartments, built on the edge of West Berlin’s central park, the Tiergarten. Before the Second World War, the area was middleclass residential, with some rather palatial housing, almost completely destroyed in bombing raids in 1943. The Hansa District was characterized by its high-rises and its expansive lawns. Designs for the individual buildings came from the most renowned modern architects of the day, including Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier,

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48 The Battle for Cultural Supremacy

Stalinallee in 1954 (today Karl-Marx-Allee)

and Oscar Niemeyer. The fact that so many architects took part in the project meant that the Hansa District’s overall impression was one of rich variety. After the Berlin Wall divided the city, it became harder to compare two later large metropolitan building projects. As a result of the destruction inflicted by the war, both halves of the city faced the task of creating affordable housing on a massive scale in the 1960s and 1970s. In West Berlin, the Märkisches Viertel and the Gropiusstadt provided an answer to this structural and social dilemma—two spectacular, somewhat controversial, large housing projects, each with seventeen thousand apartments housing nearly sixty-thousand people. They initially attracted only praise from residents and urban planners, because they offered a combination of good-quality accommodations at a reasonable price, but in

the 1980s, the Märkisches Viertel in particular fell into disrepute as an anonymous “housing machine” and a hive of social problems. In East Berlin, everything developed on an even larger scale. Erich Honecker, who took over after Walter Ulbricht as Party Leader and head of state in 1971, declared “the solution to the housing problem by 1990” as one of his central policies. In fact, the provision of inexpensive housing for the people served as a central, legitimizing argument for GDR’s Socialism in general and the SED’s power politics in particular. In 1976, not just a large housing project but the whole new urban district of Marzahn was created on East Berlin’s sandy soil. In just fifteen months, dozens of concrete-slab complexes were built, containing sixty-two thousand apartments, numerous shops, children’s day-care centers, schools, and leisure facilities. New transport links

Subsidies and Flourishing ­Cultures

View from one of the tower blocks in the Hansa District (Hansaviertel)

and a new S-Bahn line (commuter rail) were also constructed. The sheer size and architectural uniformity of Marzahn seemed rather repulsive to visitors, but for many East Berlin families, it fulfilled a long-held dream of a modern apartment with a private bath, central heating, and other amenities. This meant that for a long time, Marzahn was also a rather desirable residential area, until social problems and tensions increased in the wake of the economic and social decline that followed the collapse of the SED regime and the reunification of Berlin. In general, it might be said, somewhat cynically, that the grand projects of the 1970s and 1980, like the Märkisches Viertel in the West and Marzahn in the East, were not as different from one another, as the prestige projects of Stalinallee and HansaViertel had been in their time.

Subsidies and Flourishing Culture One especially positive aspect of the ideological rivalry in divided Berlin was the rich cultural life that both East and West Berlin were prepared to fund, because theater and opera were supposed to contribute to the higher standing of the respective political systems. Culturally minded citizens on both sides benefited from this rivalry, because until the Wall was built in 1961, they were able to enjoy top-notch productions, especially in theaters and opera houses. All they needed was an S-Bahn ticket. In the first years of the Cold War, the East had the edge in this competition, partly due to the fact that most of the historic theaters, like the Deutsches Theater and the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, were in the Soviet sector, but the performing arts also flourished because

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50 The Battle for Cultural Supremacy

Bertolt Brecht at a rehearsal of Mother Courage in the Deutsches Theater, East Berlin

the Soviet Occupying Power promoted them. In the 1950s, Wolfgang Langhoff’s productions at the Deutsches Theater in Schumannstraße or Bertolt Brecht’s performances of his own plays (beginning in 1953 at the Berliner Ensemble on Schiffbauerdamm) received particular international acclaim. On the operatic stage, Walter Feinstein’s powerfully realist productions at East Berlin’s Komische Oper enjoyed high international acclaim. West Berlin responded to the challenge, with the help of American intellectuals. Melvin J. Lasky, the left-wing, anti-Communist editor of the magazine Der Monat, launched the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Titania Palace movie theater on June 26, 1950, coincidently just one day after the Korean War broke out. The congress, funded partly by the CIA and with Marshall Fund money, promoted Western

values. In 1951, the Schillertheater opened on Bismarckstraße, with Boleslaw Barlog directing, which enjoyed considerable success until the late 1960s and featured many highly regarded productions of classics, as well as plays by contemporary authors, such as Samuel Beckett. After the Berlin Wall went up, it was no longer possible to make direct comparisons between the two very lively worlds of theater and this “fertile” chapter of the Cold War—during which cultural rivalry in Berlin actually helped business—came to an abrupt end. In West Berlin in the 1970s, a new generation (e.g. Peter Stein, who founded the “Schaubühne”) gave fresh impetus to the world of theater and was received with considerable enthusiasm. In East Berlin, the innovative creative force of the postwar years gave way to a gradual “stultification” in the world of theater and opera, caused to a large extent

Advertising poster for the World Festival of Youth in 1951

52 The Battle for Cultural Supremacy by the increasing influence of the SED’s cultural bureaucracy. Nevertheless, a number of people still managed to create some space of their own, in which artistic originality flourished throughout the 1970s and 1980s, such as operatic productions by Ruth Berghaus and Harry Kupfer, and the plays of a certain Heiner Müller. It wasn’t just on the arts that a lot of money was spent in Cold War Berlin. Because of the political circumstances, both halves of the city were granted privileges not enjoyed by other towns and regions, in some respects. East Berlin, for example, always enjoyed preferential treatment regarding the provision of food and consumer goods. On the other side of the Wall, half of West Berlin’s budget was paid for decades by federal funds, and every employee in West Berlin enjoyed an eight percent “Berlin allowance” in his or her monthly paycheck. On the other hand, these subsidies were not just “gifts,” but compensation measures necessary to mitigate the economic consequences of division. After 1948, many industrial firms left Berlin because of the uncertain political and economic situation, costing tens of thousands of jobs. Until a 1972 Four-Power Agreement, long and insecure access routes to and from West Berlin made the transport of goods both difficult and costly. Financial support and subsidies were essential to prevent the collapse of the West Berlin economy. However, the fact that these subsidies created a certain men-

tality of dependence among West Berliners—whether they were workers, employers, teachers, or members of the city council— and attracted crooks and subsidy cheats, is another story.

Inviting the World to Berlin After twelve years of Nazi rule and the devastation resulting from the war, Berliners in both halves of the city began to long for cosmopolitan flair. In 1951, the International Film Festival started to bring back some sparkle and glamour to West Berlin. In just a few years, it became one of the three most important international film festivals, alongside Cannes and Venice, and attracted countless stars to the city each June. Until the Wall was built in 1961, East Berliners could also watch most of these new films— provided they could get hold of a ticket— and get a taste of the big wide world. From time to time, even the SED regime invited foreigners into East Berlin, although this usually took the form of strictly organized mass events. Twice, in 1951 and 1973, East Berlin hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students—mammoth events, which each involved several hundred thousand young participants from the GDR and tens of thousands of guests from all over the world. These included, of course, the inevitable parades and rallies, but most of the participants used the “Festival” to meet informally with young people of the same age, from home and abroad.

At the Film festival in 1952 “astronauts” advertise the film Last Station Moon (Endstation Mond)

54 Kolumnentitel

The Khrushchev Ultimatum For several years after the suppression of the uprising on June 17, 1953, relative peace reigned in the “frontline city” of Berlin. For a while, the Cold War was waged elsewhere: in Vietnam, where French colonial troops suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh, the Communist Liberation Front supported by Moscow and China; and in Hungary, where in November 1956, Soviet tanks rolled in to squash a people’s uprising against the Stalinist regime. Similarly, in November 1956, the British and French failed in their attempt to use military force to recapture the Suez Canal, which had been put under Egyptian state control. All of these conflicts were part of the global battle between the East and West for power and spheres of influence. In November 1958, Berlin dramatically became the focus of Cold War attention once again. In the so-called Khrushchev Ultimatum of November 27, 1958, Moscow demanded nothing less than the total withdrawal of Western Allied troops from Berlin. The three western sectors were to be “demilitarized” and turned into a “Free City of Berlin.” The actual text read: “The… most correct solution would be the reunification of the western part of Berlin…with the eastern part, whereby Berlin would be a united city belonging to the country wherein it lies”—namely the GDR.18 However, Khrushchev himself admitted that, at that point in time, such a huge demand was a total illusion. “Basically, the US, Great Britain, and France are only interested in West Berlin because they are using this frontline city […] as a deployment zone for enemy activity against the Socialist states […] Ending the illegal occupation of

West Berlin would not inflict any damage to the US, Great Britain, or France; on the contrary, it would considerably improve the international atmosphere.”19 Moscow was thus making a direct grab for Berlin, which instantly intensified the confrontation between the Soviets and the Western powers. If the US and its allies did not meet the Soviets’ demands within six months, Khrushchev threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with the GDR, handing over full “sovereignty over land, water, and air.”20 This alarmed the West, because it would mean that if tensions increased, Ulbricht and his comrades would be able to declare a blockade against West Berlin and even close the air corridors. The Western Allies could not possibly back down in Berlin now, even if the Soviet Foreign Secretary openly threatened war, declaring in a speech on December 22, 1958, that Berlin could become a “second Sarajevo,” by triggering another world war. (He was referring to the Bosnian city of Sarajavo, where in June 1914, Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was murdered by a Serbian terrorist, which caused a chain reaction that culminated in the First World War. (Short version: Austria moved against Serbia; Germany sided with Austria and also invaded Belgium and France; Russia rushed to Serbia’s aid and attacked Germany, while England stood up for France and Belgium.) A war of nerves began, lasting several weeks. French President Charles de Gaulle was certainly not far off the mark in early 1958, when he spoke to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of the “the most dangerous situation since the end of war.” In fact, Western leaders did not rule out the possibility of

Nikita Krushchev on a visit to Berlin on May 19th, 1960

56 The Khrushchev Ultimatum an atomic weapons exchange. When asked by the Americans at the time, West German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauß named a military exercize area in the GDR as a possible target for an atomic bomb that would signal a “final warning before the big atomic attack against the Soviet Union would occur,”21 because Western politicians were convinced that everything depended on demonstrating strength and resolve to the Soviet Union.22 However, much to the annoyance of the US and other allies, the British government, under the conservative leadership of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, generally failed in this regard. The British government considered granting far-reaching concessions to the Soviet Union, for example a de facto recognition of the GDR, which the other Western Powers strongly rejected. Macmillan also doubted the willingness of many of his compatriots to fight a war on behalf of West Berlin, which would mean fighting for “the freedom of a people who had tried twice in this century to destroy [Great Britain].”23 When London wanted to grant concessions to the Soviet Union, the governments in Washington and Paris showed even greater resolve, strengthened by urgent appeals from Bonn, not to back down one iota from their positions in Berlin. At the same time, the world also saw Khrushchev bursting with self-confidence and proclaiming that the Soviet Union and

its allies would “overtake” the West in the foreseeable future. In fact, the Soviet Union had recently racked up a few successes, which had not gone unnoticed in the West, especially the October 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. Even the rate of growth of the Soviet economy at the end of the 1950s seem to justify the Kremlin’s optimism, to a certain extent. Though it was objectively outside the realm of reality that the Soviet Union might “overtake the West”—in 1960, the economic situation in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries had dramatically deteriorated— the Soviet Union was certainly still an opponent to be reckoned with, especially militarily and in matters of weapons technology.24 May 27, 1959, arrived, and the ultimatum passed without anything happening. On the contrary, the Four Powers had begun negotiating again, and in mid-May 1959, a conference of foreign ministers was called in Geneva. Despite several months of talks on questions affecting central Berlin and Germany, however, there was no rapprochement, although at least there was also no more mention of the Soviet Union’s “ultimatum.” Without saying a word, as it were, both sides had come to an agreement that the problem of “West Berlin” should be de-dramatized. But only until the next confrontation, which would follow soon after. ...

Kolumnentitel

The Berlin Wall Berlin in the 1950s was an “open city,” in the sense that, despite the political division, it was possible to move around between the four sectors relatively easily. The three and a half million Berliners weren’t the only ones who benefited from this situation—especially West Berliners who worked in East Berlin (of whom there were over fifty thousand) and could go to the theater and buy cheap groceries there, and East Berliners who were able to watch the latest Hollywood films in the western part of the city. Many GDR citizens, too, used the special status of Berlin to ultimately turn their backs on “The Workers and Farmers

State.” The inter-German border had been sealed since May 1952, but getting to Berlin was no problem at all. Upon arriving in East Berlin, one merely took the S-Bahn to West Berlin. Year after year, over hundred and fifty thousand GDR citizens used this loophole to flee to the West. All they needed was an S-Bahn ticket—and a bit of caution, because the GDR Volkspolizei (People’s Police) watched the access routes to East Berlin more carefully. Whole families with a lot of luggage aroused suspicion, so people took just the essentials to make it look like they were simply enjoying an outing for the day. This mass exodus to the West, which West-

The building of the Wall in August 1961 near Friedrichstraße

57

58 The Berlin Wall ern politicians liked to describe as people “voting with their feet,” became more and more of a problem for the GDR. The refugees, who were mostly young and well-qualified, were needed in industry, hospitals, and universities. Between 1945 and the end of 1960, over two and a half million people had fled to the West, indicating a real threat that the GDR might eventually be bled dry.25 The SED leadership began to talk fairly openly among themselves about the causes for the mass exodus. For example, in early 1961, Ulbricht bluntly announced in the Politbüro that over 60 percent were leaving the GDR “due to [mainly] economic reasons [associated] with shortcomings in the workplace.”26 All of this internal self-criticism, however, did not deter Ulbricht from taking radical steps. Even the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin and the Western governments were aware that the flood of refugees meant that the SED regime was heading for a crisis that threatened its very existence. In February 1961, the situation in and around Berlin intensified dramatically. There, on the open border between two opposing powers, the future of the GDR was decided. At a conference in Moscow in March 1961, Walter Ulbricht suggested halting the flood of refugees with “a barbed wire fence.” Khrushchev vetoed the idea, stating, “a total sealing off” was not part of the “current Soviet tactics,” but Ulbricht did not give up and continued pursuing his aim to stop the mass exodus from the GDR. In the meantime, a summit between Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy took place in Vienna. Once again, Berlin was the topic of discussion, the eternal bone of contention in the Cold War. Instead of détente, however, the summit resulted in a dramatic heightening of tension. Khrushchev persisted with his familiar demands: the withdrawal of the Allies

from Berlin and the creation of a “free city of West Berlin” without any internationally recognized ties to the Federal Republic. These demands were completely unacceptable to Kennedy, who had been hit hard by the Bay of Pigs disaster in April 1961, the failed attempt by CIA-supported Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro. The atmosphere in the discussions between the two most powerful men in the world became increasingly frosty. Both openly threatened war. Khrushchev said, “I would like peace, but if you want war, then that’s your business.” Kennedy replied, “Then it will be a cold winter.”27 Kennedy’s depression, which was testified to many times after this conversation, proves that they were both serious. Khrushchev, on the other hand, seemed to fail to recognize Kennedy’s resolve in this dangerous game. One of his close associates later said, “Kennedy believed that Khrushchev could use atomic weapons—a mistake. Khrushchev thought that Kennedy was too soft to use atomic weapons—another mistake. Both of them had miscalculated. It was only by chance that the world got away with it.”28 On July 25, 1961, President Kennedy made a televised speech in which he clearly spelled out the American position. “We have given our word that an attack upon [Berlin] will be regarded as an attack upon us all, … We do not want to fight, but we have fought before ... We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin.”29 This was the first time that Kennedy had spoken so clearly about the threat of war. Khrushchev also demonstrated greater determination than ever. He told John McCloy, the American High Commissioner in the Federal Republic, that Kennedy’s televised address was a “declaration of war, an ultimatum,” and to inform Kennedy that, “we accept his ultimatum… We will not start the

The Construction of the Wall

The Wall at Potsdamer Platz in November 1961

war, but we will not shrink back from it if it is forced upon us.”30 Berlin lay under the shadow of the threat of nuclear war.

The Construction of the Wall During those tense weeks, observant onlookers must have noticed how often the US government included in its declarations on Berlin three so-called essentials which the US would defend at all cost: 1) a Western military presence in Berlin, 2) free access to Berlin, and 3) freedom of movement in West Berlin. There was no mention of East Berlin. At the end of July, Kennedy stated even more clearly to his closest advisors, “I can hold the alliance [NATO] together in order to defend West Berlin, but not to keep access to East Berlin open.”31 Six weeks earlier, Ulbricht had held a thought-provoking press conference in East Berlin. In response to a question from

a West German journalist as to whether a “free city of West Berlin” would mean that the state border would then run along the Brandenburg Gate, the SED leader replied, “I understand your question to mean that there are people in the Federal Republic who would like us to mobilize the construction workers in our capital to erect a wall. … No one has the intention of erecting a wall.” In the meantime, less than two weeks later, Ulbricht met the Soviet ambassador in East Berlin and once again described to him the precarious situation in the GDR. “The growing flood of refugees is affecting every aspect of life in the Republic. Things will soon explode. [The Ambassador] should inform Khrushchev that if the current situation of an open border is maintained, collapse is inevitable.”32 This dramatic appeal had its desired effect in Moscow. At the beginning of August 1961, the Kremlin leadership gave its con-

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60 The Berlin Wall sent, and Ulbricht was given the authority to seal the border. Shortly after midnight on Sunday, August 13, 1961, West Berlin was sealed off. GDR border police rolled out barbed wire along the sector border and the border with the GDR hinterland. They ripped up road surfaces and drove concrete posts into the ground. All the subway and S-Bahn lines running between the two halves of the city were cut off. The “Berlin loophole” had been closed. Two days later, troops of construction workers began to build a wall through the middle of the city. People around the world watched as if spellbound. Would the West accept the violent division of the city, or would it forcibly remove the barriers, possibly with military means? Yet again, the question in Berlin was “war or peace?” A West Berlin policeman recalls the dramatic moments at the Brandenburg Gate on that fateful August 13, 1961: “At first we thought that the [GDR Border Police] were going to overrun us and march into West Berlin, but they remained precisely on the sector border, right down to the inch.” That was the decisive point: the border police stopped at the border. As President Kennedy had said, “I can hold the alliance [NATO] together in order to defend West Berlin, but not to keep access to East Berlin open.” That meant that as long as the barriers remained restricted to East Berlin, the Western Alliance would keep quiet. In fact, construction of the Wall had not infringed on those “three essentials” that Kennedy would defend at any cost: free access to West Berlin for the Western Allies, a Western presence in Berlin, and self-determination for West Berliners. Of course the Western governments vehemently protested the closing of the border but took no concrete countermeasures to keep open that “loophole into freedom” between East

and West Berlin. To his closest advisers, Kennedy even seemed relieved: “Khrushchev would not have had a wall built if he really wanted West Berlin… it’s not a pleasant solution, but a wall is a damned sight better than a war.”33 There was no lack of political irony here. What most of the world saw as the problem, the construction of a wall through the middle of Berlin on the front line of the Cold War, was for Kennedy the solution to the problem. Democratic Senator William Fulbright, a Kennedy adviser, agreed, saying in a televised interview two weeks before the wall went up, “I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t just close their border, because I think they have the right to close it.” Moscow and East Berlin had brutally stopped the flood of refugees and at the same time had refrained from attempting any access to West Berlin. The building of the Wall was thus not the beginning of a new Berlin crisis, but the end of the crisis. In Paris and London, people seemed to take a similar view and acted accordingly. French President De Gaulle continued his vacation in the capital, while British Prime Minister Macmillan continued his hunt in Scotland, uninterrupted.34 The West Berliners, however, were extremely disappointed by the apparent calm of their allies. (Of course many East Berliners and GDR citizens were also disappointed, but unlike their compatriots in the West, they had to keep these feelings to themselves.) A few days after the closure of the borders, West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt sent a telegram to President Kennedy, in which he clearly expressed the West Berliners’ disappointment. Among the population there were already serious “doubts about the three Western Powers’ ability and determination to react.” Kennedy might have been annoyed by the undiplomatic and imperious tone in the telegram, but he recognized the

The Construction of the Wall

Sketch representation of the border installation from a GDR border guard‘s textbook, ­cynically entitled “modern border”

necessity of taking a tough stance in order to maintain the trust that the Berliners and the West Germans as a whole had placed in the American leadership. So a few days after the Wall was built, Kennedy risked direct confrontation with the Soviets by sending a military convoy of fifteen hundred GIs down the highway from West Germany to West Berlin. When they had passed unhindered through the GDR border crossing points, it became clear that the Kremlin and the GDR government were not interested in aggravating the situation either. At the same time, US Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson landed at Tempelhof airport and received a warm welcome from the West Berliners. At last the US had hoisted its flag. A few weeks after the border was closed, at the end of October 1961, one of those East–West confrontations described in the

opening chapter occurred at Checkpoint Charlie. For three days, US and Soviet tanks faced off there, gun turrets pointing right at each other. They finally retreated, on direct orders from Moscow and Washington. The trigger for this “tank duel” was the SED leadership’s attempt to restrict the rights of the Western Allies throughout all of Berlin by demanding that American officers show their identity cards when crossing the sector border. The Americans flatly refused to do so, as it represented an inadmissible infringement of the Allies’ right to unrestricted movement in all four sectors. By sending their tanks, the Americans were unequivocally demonstrating their claim to this right—to move freely and without border checks throughout the entire city, even after the Wall was built—and would use weapons if necessary. Ultimately, Moscow

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62 The Berlin Wall and East Berlin had to accept this freedom of movement. Two years later, in summer 1963, Kennedy visited West Berlin to demonstrate American solidarity. He spoke to a huge crowd of people in front of Rathaus Schöneberg, where West Berlin’s city government was housed at the time. The crowd greeted Kennedy enthusiastically, and he spoke those famous words: “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’...All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’” Yet the territories were marked out and the borders fortified with cement. The Wall divided streets and houses, such as Bernauer Straße, which was cut in half, right down the middle. Both blocs of power had in effect recognized their respective spheres of influence within Europe: the West recognized the existence of Communist states in Eastern and central Europe, including the GDR and East Berlin, and the East the presence of the Western Allies in West Berlin. Now Berlin could return to a precarious state of relative normalcy, albeit a bitter normalcy for Berliners, of course, who now lived in the shadow of the Wall, in a divided city. A main aim of the GDR government was to prevent escape from East to West. Border installations were therefore continually strengthened over the coming months and years. The first barriers consisted of barbed wire and fences. The first sections of the Wall were erected in mid-August 1961, using concrete blocks and bricks, with barbed wire along the top to stop people from climbing over them. After some refugees succeeded in driving vehicles through this twelve-inch-thick “1st generation Wall,” (there were four stages of extension, or “Wall generations” between 1961 and 1989), it was replaced by sheets of concrete layered

on top of each other. Guard towers, initially made of wood and later concrete, were built along the border, along with a road for patrol vehicles. The “3rd generation” Wall of 1968 consisted of concrete squares topped with piping, which was gradually replaced by the “4th generation,” beginning in 1976— concrete sections measuring twelve feet by four feet, with 1.3-foot piping along the top. Forty-five thousand sections of Wall surrounded West Berlin, until 1989.

A Tense Peace As painful as the Wall was for those immediately affected, it marked the end of an era during which the four-sector city represented a permanent trouble spot and a frequent and potential cause for war. In Berlin, at least, the balance of power between the East and West seemed clear, despite—or perhaps because of—the unnatural division of an entire city by concrete and barbed wire. The Cold War was not over, of course, but its main focus shifted to other regions of the world. It shifted first to Cuba where since 1959 a social revolutionary movement had ruled, led by political hothead Fidel Castro, who proceeded to build a Socialist state right on America’s doorstep. When the Soviet Union installed its first medium-range missiles in Cuba in summer 1962, the US considered it a threat to national security and vigorously demanded that the missiles be removed. The crisis came to a head in October 1962, when Soviet freighters carrying more missiles moved toward Cuba. Had they actually been installed, Washington would have viewed it as an imminent threat of a massive military strike against the US. Kennedy’s strength and resolve worked. Before things could get any worse, Khrushchev ordered the ships to turn around on October 28. In the weeks that followed, The

Escape and Escape Aid

Soviets withdrew all their weapons from Cuba. In exchange, the Americans dismantled their missiles in Turkey, which had posed a threat to large areas of the Soviet Union.35 Berlin was even present in the Cuban Missile Crisis. US President Kennedy wrote to the British Prime Minister Macmillan, “I don’t need to point out to you the possible connection between this dangerous step by Khrushchev and Berlin.” Kennedy was convinced that Khrushchev’s main reason for using Cuba as a threat was to achieve concessions from the Western Allies in Berlin, perhaps even their withdrawal from West Berlin. According to information available today, Kennedy made an error of judgement. Khrushchev had already accepted the fact that there was nothing to be done about the presence of the Western Allies in West Berlin in 1961–62.36 Krushchev’s concern in Cuba was not Berlin, but Moscow’s strategic position in Latin America and Asia. In Vietnam—the new focus of Cold War attention—a war was developing at the same time that Berliners were coming to terms with the consequences of the Cold War. In 1960, when the Viet Cong, backed by Communist Moscow and Peking, advanced farther into French-backed South Vietnam, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower increased military support for the South Vietnamese government. After Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, continued this policy of intervention, aiming for a “rollback” of Communist troops. Following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in August 1964, when US ships were supposedly attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats (an attack that did probably not happen), Johnson committed US troops to a direct role in the war. In 1968, the number of US troops in Vietnam had reached 540,000. However, despite a massive military ef-

fort, which included the poisoning of entire tracts of land with Agent Orange, the carpet bombing of Cambodia, and massacres like the one at My Lai, the Americans were unable to defeat the Viet Cong. In 1975, under pressure at home from the American public then-president Richard M. Nixon ordered the evacuation of the last US troops and the American embassy staff from the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon (known today as Ho Chi Minh City), and the North Vietnamese took control of the country. The fallout of the Vietnam War was quite devastating: it lead to anti-American demonstrations all over the world, including Berlin. It also marked the beginning of a rift between America and West Berlin, where the 1960s student movement gained momentum.

Escape and Escape Aid Despite constant improvements to border installations, GDR citizens kept trying to escape over the Wall into West Berlin. Over a hundred of them paid for it with their lives. On August 24, 1961, twenty-four-yearold tailor Günter Litfin was fatally shot by a border guard in Humboldthain, close to Friedrichstraße Station, when he tried to swim across the river border there to West Berlin. He was the first refugee to be shot along the Wall. GDR border guards were instructed to prevent any escape or “border breakthroughs” at all cost, even if it meant using a gun. The SED regime stubbornly refused to admit the existence of the “order to shoot” along the Wall and the inter-German border. In reality, however, this was more or less the case. Even the GDR border law of March 25, 1982, contained an actual order to shoot in the case of escape attempts. Paragraph 27 reads: “…when using [a gun] a person’s life should, if possible, be spared.” But only “if

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64 The Berlin Wall possible.”; “possible” being a subjective term. According to the latest research, at least ninety-nine people were shot dead or met their deaths in their bids to escape. A further twenty-five people were fatally shot or died accidentally without having had any intention to escape. Eight border guards were killed in service, most of them by colleagues who were deserting—two of whom were likewise shot. The last Wall refugee to be fatally shot was twenty-two-year-old Chris Gueffroy, who died in a barrage of fire from border guards on February 5, 1989. Four weeks later, a thirty-one-year-old man died in his attempt to conquer the Wall in a hot air balloon. No other event demonstrated as drastically to the world the monstrous nature of the Wall as the agonizing death of eighteenyear-old kid Peter Fechter, on August 17, 1962, near Checkpoint Charlie. Fechter and a friend wanted to escape to the West. While the friend managed to climb over the Wall, Peter Fechter was hit by several bullets and lay on the Eastern side of the Wall. Despite his desperate pleas, GDR border guards refused to help, and the seriously wounded Fechter bled to death. An hour later, his lifeless body was carried away by the guards. Numerous people on the Western side, including journalists and television crews, had witnessed the whole event in helpless fury. Even a US officer refused to come to the aid of the refugee lying on the Eastern side, stating that he did not have the authority to do so. Peter Fechter was thus a victim of a political and military situation in which the Americans and Soviets faced each other with furtive rigidity. Peter Fechter’s death caused a certain change of heart among West Berlin politicians. The fatal restraint of the Americans had shown that it would be first and foremost the task of Germans

and Berlin politicians to remove at least part of the terror of the Wall. West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt and his close friends Egon Bahr and Heinrich Albertz, especially, sought political means of making the Wall more “permeable.” The building of the Wall did not mean that the escape movement came to an abrupt end, just as many GDR citizens naturally did not stop wishing for a life free from orders and repression. However, after August 13, 1961, it became much more difficult and dangerous to turn this wish into reality. Nevertheless, more and more people were prepared to put their lives on the line in order to flee to West Berlin. As the border installations were constantly fortified, this required an increasing amount of daring and imagination. In 1962, about twentythree hundred people succeeded in getting through the Wall and the border installations. In 1963, only six-hundred and forty were successful, just three hundred the following year, and in 1968, only forty-six made it. Between August 1961 and November 1989, a total of 5,075 people managed to flee to West Berlin. The total number of refugees from the GDR who escaped over the Wall, through the inter-German border, and via third countries, amounted to just over forty thousand.37 Many of these escapes would not have succeeded if a few, mostly young people had not declared their own private “war” against the SED regime and the Wall immediately after the border was sealed. These escape helpers, who were both imaginative and brave, prepared a way out to the West for numerous GDR citizens, using a great variety of methods and knowingly putting their own lives at risk. In the first weeks after the border was closed, so-called passport missions were very successful, in which foreign students

Peter Fechter lies bleeding to death by the Wall

66 The Berlin Wall

On the day the Wall was put up, people living on Bernauer Straße fled from their homes which stood directly on the border

went to East Berlin and handed their passports over to people who wanted to escape. Alternatively, passports from the West were smuggled in for refugees who resembled the actual owner of the passport. When GDR border authorities perfected the checks on foreigners and West Germans in early 1962, this method of escape was no longer reliable, and other ways were found—underground, for example. The years 1962–63 were the heyday of tunnel building. The first spectacular tunnel escape succeeded on January 24, 1962. After several weeks of digging in Oranienburger Chaussee in northern Berlin, twenty-eight people crawled under the border into the West. In the spring, not far from there, twelve people, most retirees, dug a one hundred foot-long, 5.75-foot-high tunnel, in which they were able to “walk tall into freedom,” as the eighty-one-year-old

leader proudly declared after their successful mission. On Bernauer Straße, a group of fortyone men worked for months on a tunnel over five hundred feet long, which ran from West Berlin into East Berlin territory. There were a great many difficulties and problems to overcome, including water bursting into the tunnel, before twenty-seven women, men, and two small children could crawl into the West on September 14, 1962. Television cameras were on hand to film the escapees as they emerged because, much to the annoyance of some of their friends in the West, the tunnel builders had sold exclusive media rights for 12,000 US dollars to American broadcasting company NBC, to cover the cost of the tunnel, which had cost a great deal in time and materials. In October 1964, fifty-seven GDR citizens managed to escape through a 475-foot

Escape and Escape Aid

tunnel, which escape helpers, mostly students, had dug at a depth of forty feet below the cellar of a closed-down bakery in Bernauer Straße. When the tunnel was discovered shortly before the mission was complete, shots were fired, and one of the border guards was accidentally killed by one of his fellow guards. Two escape helpers were also killed by shots from border guards during other tunnel missions. There were about forty attempted tunnel escapes in Berlin. However, many projects failed when the money ran out, technical problems proved insurmountable, or the tunnel builders were betrayed by Stasi spies. Initially, escape aiders enjoyed strong support from the population and political good will, but this changed after 1962, at least as far as official politics were concerned. After the West Berlin Senate began its “policy of small steps” (Politik der kleinen Schritte), spectacular escape missions were increasingly viewed as disruptive. People even tried to cross the Wall in the air and on the water. One evening in July 1965, a professional economist from Leipzig secretly met up with his wife and their

nine-year-old son in the bathroom at the Haus der Ministerien (now the Federal Finance Ministry). When darkness fell, they climbed onto the roof of the building, which stood right next to the Wall. The man slung a hammer attached to a cable over the Wall. On the western side, escape helpers fastened a steel cable to it, which the escapees pulled up and secured to a flagpole. First his son, his wife, and then the man himself glided across this improvized “cableway” into West Berlin. Others tried to get into the West by swimming; as four young people succeeded in doing in summer 1988, very close to the Reichstag. They were cheered on by people standing on the Western side and filmed by a camera team that happened to be there. In June 1962, twelve escapees even hijacked a pleasure steamer on the Spree River, near the Oberbaum Bridge, and steered it into West Berlin waters, despite being shot at by border guards. With every successful escape attempt, however, the border installations were strengthened and extended. Over the years, it became more and more difficult and dangerous to escape.

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Living with the Wall In 1962, it must have been clear to even the keenest anti-Communists that it would be impossible to remove the Wall any time soon. This was particularly evident to the Western Allies, for whom, as their first reactions to the Wall’s construction showed, cementing up the division was obviously preferable to the permanent threat of war in Berlin. West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt had already issued a new watchword in September 1961: if the Wall cannot be removed, everything must be done to ensure that it is as permeable as possible. Thus began the “policy of small steps” that were meant to bring some relief to the people of Berlin. They had to wait over two years, however, for the first signs of progress. After lengthy negotiations, a pass permit agreement was put in place for Christmas 1963. Between December 19, 1963, and January 5, 1964, West Berliners were allowed for the first time in two years to visit their relatives in the eastern part of the city. Before going, they had to go through a complicated process, which involved waiting for hours outside the pass permit offices in West Berlin. There were tearful reunions at the border crossing points. An elderly woman from West Berlin described her feelings: “We used to sit down together every day. Since the Wall was built, I’ve been all alone in West Berlin. I have needed a lot of strength to survive these past two years… I stood in line for three days to get three pass permits. I’ll line up again, even if it takes longer.”38 Over Christmas 1963, a total of 1,242,000 day-pass permits were issued. Additional pass permit regulations were negotiated for the Christmas holiday for the following two years.

There were four pass permit agreements in all, the last one for Pentecost 1966. Later, visiting negotiations broke down, due to demands by the GDR that the West could not agree to without appearing to recognize the SED regime under international law. In 1964, however, “a pass permit office for urgent family matters” was established for West Berliners. This meant that they could apply for a pass permit for births, marriages, life-threatening illnesses, or the death of a close relative. This regulation was only valid for visits originating from West Berlin. For the people of East Berlin, the Wall remained impenetrable, at least until they reached retirement age.

An Agreement for Berlin After the last pass permit regulation for Pentecost 1966, long years followed during which the Wall seemed impassable even for the West Berlin population. Berlin was paralyzed on the front lines of the Cold War, and the people in both parts of the city lived increasingly separate lives, fueled by the fact that droves of West Berliners left the city, while younger people from Western Germany, as well as immigrants, moved in. Debate in and around Berlin got going again at the end of the 1960s, however, in the wake of the politics of détente. A Socialist-Liberal coalition government, with Willy Brandt as Federal Chancellor, came to power in Bonn in 1969, and tried to negotiate through the front lines of the Cold War. Other Western capitals were also in favour of détente. In Moscow, meanwhile, Khrushchev was deposed by Leonid Brezhnev, who was admittedly anything but a political reformer, but

An Agreement for Berlin

Living in the shadow of the Wall

in foreign policy he wanted peace, in Europe at least. (One of the mechanisms of the Cold War was that almost parallel to the détente in Berlin and Central Europe, the conflict escalated elsewhere, in this case in South East Asia.) For Berlin and its population on both sides of the Wall, this process of détente brought distinct improvements. It almost seemed as if the opposing parties in the long dispute over Berlin, who had so often brought the world to the brink of war, had grown tired. The constant arguments about access routes and visiting regulations were to be finally settled. In March 1970, the ambassadors of the Four Powers sat down together around the negotiating table, for the first time in decades, in the Allied Control Council building, with strong desire for unity. After eighteen months of struggle, the “Four-Power Agreement” was ceremo-

nially signed on September 3, 1971, in West Berlin. It was the first governmental agreement between the Four Powers since the beginning of the Cold War in 1946–47, and signalled the beginning of a new era for Berlin. At least in this Cold War theater, common sense had prevailed over ideological dogmatism, because in the interest of pragmatic solutions, disputed questions of status, like the link between West Berlin and the Federal Republic, were excluded. The Four-Power Agreement and the Transit Treaty agreed upon directly by Bonn and East Berlin on December 17, 1971, made life much easier for everyone. Moscow and the GDR promised to keep the access routes to and from Berlin permanently open. The harassment that had occurred on the transit highways, which often included hours of waiting, was over. Most important was that from now on, visiting regulations were in place indefi-

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70 Living with the Wall

Visitors from West Berlin hurry to meet their relatives on the Oberbaum Bridge

nitely. West Berliners could apply for visits to East Berlin for a total of thirty days per year. GDR authorities set up five offices for visits and travel in West Berlin, and the West insisted that applications would only be received there. The actual paperwork had to be completed in East Berlin, because the West Berlin Senate would not tolerate any sovereign acts by the SED regime—including the approval of travel permits—on West Berlin territory. These offices for visits and travel were a piece of the GDR in West Berlin. They were furnished and decorated with the charm of all GDR offices, in which applicants were “admitted” with bureaucratic correctness. In 1984, the number of possible visiting days was increased to forty-five per year, and in 1988, a “multiple entitlement permit” for a total of ten visits was introduced, which reduced the long waits in application offices.

Several hundred thousand West Berliners made use of these new visiting regulations. The average annual number of dayvisits to East Berlin totalled over 3.1 million. These high numbers of visitors from the West soon became a headache for the GDR’s national security service and the border guards, because they meant inevitable contacts and information from the West, which GDR authorities wanted to keep from the GDR population. In 1980, the GDR leadership came up with a new way to stem the flow of visitors from West Berlin, by introducing the “minimum exchange.” In 1972, in order to cross the border, the West Berliners had to exchange five Deutsche mark, DM, for East marks, at a rate of 1:1. In 1980, the minimum exchange was increased fivefold, to twentyfive DM. By the following year, the number of day-visitors had fallen by about a third, to 1.7 million, and in 1983, it fell to its low-

Normal State of Emergency

Border controls at the Dreilinden checkpoint on entry into West Berlin

est level, at 1.5 million day-visits. By 1988, the number gradually climbed back up over two million.

Normal State of Emergency When the Four-Power Agreement came into force in June 1972, a completely new chapter in the Cold War began in and around Berlin. The four-sector city ceased to be a permanent trouble spot where military conflict between the superpowers could flare up at any time. The people in both halves of the city gradually came to terms with life in the shadow of the Wall, which continued to involve many unpleasant aspects—shortages and hardships, particularly for the people of East Berlin—but which became less oppressive in general once efforts to achieve détente began..Willy Brandt’s “policy of small steps” actually did lead to the Wall

becoming more permeable, at least from West to East. In the early 1970s, things for many people in East Berlin must have been like GDR author Günter de Bruyn described in his memoirs: “…the provisional had obtained solid contours…In the long run it was necessary to get by, to start a family, to have children…not to stand out by making a bad impression.…I could see myself getting used to things. My opinion of the Wall remained unchanged, but I learned to adjust to the new conditions and not be permanently angry about the restrictions on my freedom.” But the pain kept returning—every time he saw the “improvements to the border installations, the searchlights on the Marshal Bridge, which were meant to block our view of the Reichstag, or the new maps which just blanked out West Berlin in white, as if the world ended at the border.”39 Erich Honecker, who replaced Walter

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Patrol at Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn. Trains run underneath East Berlin without stopping

Normal State of Emergency

Documented “provocative behaviour by the enemy” from the archives of the GDR border troops

Ulbricht as leader of the SED in 1971, did his bit to promote what Günter de Bruyn referred to as “habituation” for a large number of people in East Berlin and the GDR. Retirement plans, improved provision of food and consumer goods, ambitious housing projects, and other things contributed to make living conditions in East Berlin noticeably better. Provided, at least, that people managed to ignore the restrictions on their freedom and their repression at the hand of the SED regime. This phase of relative “upturn” in East Berlin and the GDR, however, only lasted until the early 1980s, when the immobility of the planned economy, a lack of innovative power, rapidly rising state debts, and other problems resulted in shortages. An I don’t care attitude began to determine daily life more and more. In East Berlin and elsewhere, the state of disrepair in housing from 1981–82 onward

symbolized the decay of the State and society. The government’s reaction consisted mainly of increased repression of any form of opposition. In West Berlin, meanwhile, both the general population and official policy seemed to be less and less interested in the conditions in East Berlin. It was, so to speak, the drawback of the détente in and around Berlin. A certain degree of indifference followed the angry confrontation of the “rivalry of political systems.” Other questions and problems increasingly determined West Berliners’ thoughts and actions—questions about lifestyle, increase in wealth, culture, and how to spend leisure time. It soon seemed to West Berliners that reality outside their city only began again beyond “Helmstedt,” in other words, once they got through the transit route through

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74 Living with the Wall

John F. Kennedy giving his speech in front of the Schöneberg City Hall on June 16th, 1963

the GDR. West Berlin developed into a social and political “biotope,” whose island situation brought considerable advantages for large segments of the population. In addition, many West Berliners who had survived the Second World War and the Cold War (most from the middle class), simply left, moving west, to West Germany. A new wave of people moved into their apartments: draft-dodgers from West Germany (West Berlin did not have the draft), students, left-wing activists, and Lebanese, Greek, and Turkish guest workers. In the wake of the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a leftwing academic scene developed. Members of the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) and hippies lived in cooperatives in prewar apartments and discussed solutions to world problems, but generally ignored the conditions only a few miles away. Street fights with the police culminated on June 2, 1967, when Benno

Ohnesorg, a student, was shot by policeman Karl Heinz Kurras. Kurras was, as we know today, on the payroll of the GDR’s Stasi (the secret service). This and the ambush of student leader Rudy Dutschke one year later was Germany’s equivalent to the Kent State shooting in 1971. A similar movement sprang up again in the 1980s, when squatters (mostly students and anarchists) occupied hundreds of residential buildings in areas left vacant by Berliners moving into housing projects. The majority of the older population that had remained regarded this activity with disapproval, yet also with a certain calm while making a comfortable life for themselves in the shadow of the Wall. The fact that daily life in West Berlin was relatively easy, despite all the adversity, had a lot to do with the political and economic guarantees provided by the Western Allies and the federal government. West

“Mister Gorbachev …”

The American President Ronald Reagan in front of the Brandenburg Gate on June 12th, 1987

Berlin’s situation was precarious in times of détente, too. It was reassuring for West Berliners to have the global power of the US and its allies behind them, and it was nice to have half the West Berlin budget financed by Bonn. To exaggerate, one might say that in fact the Cold War only lasted in Berlin until 1972. That is, if it hadn’t been for November 9, 1989, when the fall of the Wall brought Berlin back to center stage—when the rapid collapse of the Soviet Empire was so plain to see, and with it the end of the Cold War.

“Mister Gorbachev…” In 1963, the most powerful men in the world and the main adversaries in the Cold War, US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet State and Party Leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, each visited Berlin shortly after one another. Each one in his own half, of course.

Kennedy gave his legendary speech then, in June 1963, in front of the Schöneberg Town Hall, which ended with the famous declaration, “Ich bin ein Berliner!” At the end of the 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Party Leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to Berlin shortly after one another. Standing at the Berlin Wall, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan asked Gorbachev (in his absence) to “tear down this Wall.” “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace…then come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!” GDR border troops had set up huge loudspeakers on the eastern side of the Wall, to drown out the speech with music.

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76 Kolumnentitel

The End of the Cold War At the time, Reagan was ridiculed by many for his melodramatic appearance, because no one could imagine how relevant it was to the current situation and how quickly the Brandenburg Gate would open again. In the late 1980s, things had really started fermenting in the GDR and all over the Eastern Bloc—and hardly anyone in the West seemed to notice. GDR opposition groups criticized repression, the failing economy, the militarisation of society, and environmental pollution. In the summer of 1987, there was a direct confrontation between youths and the Volkspolizei (People’s Police), when four thousand pop music fans were brutally forced back as they tried to listen to a pop concert that was taking place

near the Brandenburg Gate, on the other side of the Wall. One year later, Pink Floyd gave a concert in West Berlin, featuring songs from their famous “The Wall” album, with huge speakers facing the East. Choruses chanted “Die Mauer muss weg” (“The Wall must go”) and “Gorbi, Gorbi,” because in 1987–88, many opposition groups in the GDR hoped for support from the Soviet Party Leader who was vigorously pushing for reform in Moscow under the banners of “Glasnost” and “Perestroika.” Those in power in the GDR were not thinking about reforms, but about more and tougher repressions. In summer 1989, pressure on the SED regime increased. Many East Germans were

Günter Schabowski (right) at the historic press conference of 9th November 1989

The borders are open. Trabbis and rejoicing crowds on Bornholmer Straße.

78 The End of the Cold War upset because the SED had fraudulently reported May election results in the national election that had very limited choices to begin with. In Poland and Hungary, the Communist parties had already ceded some of their power to organizations like Solidarnosc, the Polish labor movement. Tens of thousands of GDR citizens had used their summer vacations to travel to Hungary and Czechoslovakia and flee to the West, either taking the direct route across the Hungarian border or fleeing first to West German embassies to force their exit into the West. Finally, in September 1989, Hungary opened its border to let the Germans out. In the face of this mass exodus and emigration by GDR citizens, it was no longer any use, when in autumn 1989, younger and somewhat less stubborn SED-politicians like Egon Krenz, Hans Modrow, or Günter Schabowski replaced the old guard surrounding Erich Honecker and Stasi leader Erich Mielke. The overwhelming majority in the GDR were fed up with the SED state, whose fate was finally sealed by the fall of the Wall on November 9. At an historic press conference on the evening of November 9, 1989, Günter Schabowski misread a new travel regulation without realising what it would trigger. “Private journeys abroad can be applied for without preconditions—without having to state reasons or relationships. Permission will be granted on short notice.” Evidently, Schabowski was not aware of the implication of what he was hesitantly reading out

loud. A journalist enquired, “When does this come into force?” Schabowski rummaged around helplessly in his papers. “As far as I know, it takes effect…straightaway, immediately.” The main story on the Tagesschau’s television news at 8 p.m. was “GDR opens border.” There was no turning back now. In East Berlin, thousands of people streamed to the border crossing points and demanded that the barriers be lifted. The border officials had neither information nor orders. In the face of the growing masses of people, the official in charge at the Bornholmer Straße crossing point was the first to decide on his own authority to lift the barrier. Thousands of East Berliners streamed, rejoicing, into West Berlin. A short time later, other crossing points also opened—at Invalidenstraße, Checkpoint Charlie, and Sonnenallee. After twenty-eight years, the Wall had fallen. This was, in effect, the end of the Cold War in and around Berlin—sealed on October 1990 with the reunification of Germany and Berlin. Four years later, in April 1994, the ceremonial farewell to the last Russian troops in Germany took place on the Gendarmenmarkt in the presence of Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The American, British, and French militaries, who had protected the “front-line city of Berlin” for over forty years from takeover by the East, also left their barracks.

Kolumnentitel

Berlin Time Table May 9, 1945 Unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany Berlin is occupied by the Soviets July 1945 The Americans and the British move into their sectors July 11, 1945 First meeting of the Allied Kommandatura August 1945 The French move into their sector August 21–22,1946 Founding of the SED by uniting the SPD and the KPD in the Soviet Occupation Zone October 20, 1946 City Council elections June 20, 1948 Introduction of the Deutsche Mark (DM)`in the three western Occupation Zones June 23, 1948 Introduction of the Ostmark (M) in the eastern Occupation Zone June 24, 1948–May 12, 1949 Blockade and Airlift December 4, 1948 Founding of the Free University in Dahlem December 5, 1948 City council elections in the three western sectors. Ernst Reuter becomes mayor. May 23, 1949 Founding of the Federal Republic of Germany October 7, 1949 Founding of the German Democratic Republic May 1952 Road links between West Berlin and the surrounding countryside are sealed off by order of the GDR government June 17, 1953 People’s uprising against the SED regime

November 27, 1958 Khrushchev Ultimatum June 15, 1961 Ulbricht announces to the press in East Berlin: “No one has the intention of erecting a wall.” August 13, 1961 Construction of the Wall begins October 25, 1961 Confrontation between American and Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie August 17, 1962 Peter Fechter is shot while trying to escape over the Wall and bleeds to death in the border area June 26, 1963 President Kennedy visits West Berlin December 19, 1963 First pass permit agreement comes into force, lasting until January 5, 1964 1964–66 Three further pass permit agreements follow, through mid-1966 May 3, 1971 Honecker replaces Ulbricht as SED Party Leader September 3, 1971 Four-Power Agreement signed in Berlin December 17, 1971 Transit Treaty signed by the Federal Republic and the GDR November 9, 1989 Fall of the Wall October 3, 1990 GDR joins the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany; Reunification 1994 Withdrawal of the last Soviet troops from Germany

79

Key locations in Cold War Berlin   1  Checkpoint Charlie   2  Museum at Checkpoint Charlie   3  Karl-Marx-Allee (until 1961 Stalinallee)   4  Wall Memorial, Bernauer Straße   5 Allied Control Building,   containing Air Safety Control Centre   6  Schöneberg Town Hall   7  RIAS   8  Allied Kommandantura   9  US Military Headquarters 10  CIA Headquarters 11  Free University FU 12  Allied Museum 13  Soviet Headquarters in Karlshorst 14  KGB Headquarters 15  Tempelhof Airport (Airlift Memorial) 16  Gatow Airport 17  Tegel Airport 18  Hansaviertel (Hansa District) 19  Glienicker Bridge

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Notes 1  Peter Wyden, Die Mauer war unser Schicksal (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1995), p. 120 2  Quoted from Michael Beschloss, Powergame. Kennedy und Chruschtschow Die Krisenjahre 1960–1963 (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1991), p. 281 3  Quoted from Wolfgang Leonhard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder. (München: Kiepenheuer & Witsch: 1982), p. 317 4  Wolfgang Ribbe (ed.), Geschichte Berlins, Volume 2, (Müchen: C.H. Beck), p. 1050 5  Beatrix Bouvier, Ausgeschaltet! Sozialdemokraten in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone und in der DDR 1945–1953, (Bonn: Dietz, 1996). 6  Ribbe, Wolfgang (Hg.), Geschichte Berlins, Volume 2, (München: C.H. Beck, 1987), p. 1043 7  Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg. Geschichte eines radikalen Zeitalters, 1947–1991, (München: C. H. Beck, 2007), p. 92 8  Clay’s letter to Sokolowski, in: Berlin. Quellen und Dokumente, I/2, Nr. 755, (Landesarchiv) p. 1334 9  Michael W. Wolff, Die Währungsreform in Berlin 1948/49, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991) 10  Jack O. Bennett, 40 000 Stunden am Himmel, (Berlin: Ullstein, 1982), p. 200 11  Churchill to an official in the British Foreign Office, quoted from Klaus Larres, Großbritannien und der 17. Juni 1953, quoted in: Bristoph Kleßmann/Bernd Stöver, 1953 – Krisenjahr des Kalten Krieges in Europa, (Köln: Bohlau, 1999), S. 172 12  Quoted in David Clay Large, Berlin. Biographie einer Stadt, (München: C.H. Beck, 2002), p. 409 13  David Clay Large, p. 407 14  George Bailey/ Sergej A. Kondraschow/David E. Murphy, Die unsichtbare Front. Der Krieg der Geheimdienste im geteilten Berlin, (Berlin: Ullstein, 1997, p. 259 15  Baily, Kondraschow, Murphy, p. 159 16  Quoted in Thomas Flemming/Bernd Ulrich, Vor Gericht. Deutsche Prozesse in Ost und West nach 1945, (Berlin: Bebra, 2005), p. 21 17  Quoted in Michael Lemke, Die Berlin-Krise 1958 bis 1963, (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1995), p. 47 18  Dokumente zur Berlin-Frage 1944–1966, (München: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, 1962), p. 315 19  Khruschev Ultimatum, quoted in: Dokumente zur Berlin-Frage 1944–1966, (München: Oldenbourg, 1962), p. 314 f 20  Dokumente zur Berlin-Frage, p. 318 21  Franz Josef Strauß, Die Erinnerungen, (Berlin; btb, 1989), p. 388 and Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg, (München: C.H. Beck, 2007), p. 136

22  Rolf Steininger, Der Mauerbau. Die Westmächte und Adenauer in der Berlinkrise 1958–1963, (München: Olzog 2001), p. 99 23  Macmillan in a letter to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 23.6.1959, quoted in Rolf Steininger, Der Mauerbau, (München: Olzog, 2001), p. 124 24  Eric Hobsbawn, Age of Extremes. The Short Twenty Century 1914–1991, (London: Vintage 1995), p. 243 25  The division of Germany also meant that after 1949 several hundred thousand people from the Federal Republic settled in the GDR. The latest estimates put the number at 603,000 between 1949 and 1989. Hartmut Wendt, Von der Massenflucht zur Binnenwanderung, in: Geographische Rundschau 46/1994, p. 136–140; p. 137; Andrea Schmelz, Politik und Migration im geteilten Deutschland während des Kalten Krieges, West-Ost-Migration in die DDR, (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 2002), p. 39 26  Quoted in Michael Lemke, Die Berlin-Krise 1958 bis 1963, (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1995), p. 49 27  Quoted in Foreign Relations of the United States, Vol. XIV, Berlin Crisis, 1961–1962, Washington 1993, p. 98 28  Quoted in Peter Wyden, Die Mauer war unser Schicksal, (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1995, p. 28 29  Quoted in Michael Beschloss, Powergame, (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1991, p. 242 30  Khrushchev at a meeting with McCloy on Juli 27th 1961 at the Black Sea resort of Stoschi, quoted in Rolf Steininger, Der Mauerbau, (München: Olzog, 2001, p. 230 31  Walt Rostow, The Diffusion of Power. An Essay in Recent History (New York: Macmillan 1972), p. 231 32  Julij Kwizinskij, Vor dem Sturm, (Berlin: Siedler 1993), p. 179 (in 1961, Kwizinskij was an associate of the Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Perwuchin) 33  Quoted from Beschloss, Powergame, (Düsseldorf: Econ. 1991), p. 281 34  Tony Judt, Geschichte Europas von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, (München: Hanser, 2006), p. 287 35  Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg, (München: C.H. Beck 2007, p. 279 f 36  Judt, Tony, Geschichte Europas von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, (München: Hanser, 2006), p. 288 37  Hertle, Hans Hermann, Die Berliner Mauer – Monument des Kalten Krieges, (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2007, p. 57 38  quoted from: Der Tagesspiegel, 12/25/1963 39  de Bruyn, Günter, Vierzig Jahre. Ein Lebensbericht, (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1996), p. 110

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