Berlin 1961 Read online

  Nothing in Adenauer’s life had prepared him for the verbal abuse and battering talks that followed. When the Soviets informed their German visitor that only 9,628 German “war criminals” remained in Soviet gulags, Adenauer asked what had become of the rest. “Where are they?” Khrushchev had exploded. “In the ground! In the cold, Soviet ground!”

  Adenauer had been shaken by “a man who was, without a doubt, crafty, shrewd, clever, and very savvy, yet at the same time crude and without compunctions…. He pounded his fist on the table, half wildly. So I showed my fist as well, and that is what he understood.”

  Khrushchev got the better of Adenauer, gaining de facto recognition of East Germany in exchange for so few living POWs. For the first time, Adenauer accepted that there would be two ambassadors from the two Germanys in Moscow. The physical strain from the trip left Adenauer with double pneumonia. Die Zeit correspondent Countess Marion Dönhoff wrote, “The freedom of 10,000 was bought at the price of the servitude of 17 million.” The U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Charles Bohlen, wrote, “They traded prisoners for the legalization of the division of Germany.”

  Having never forgotten this unsettling encounter, Adenauer worried Kennedy would fare even worse with Khrushchev, though the stakes would be far higher. For that reason, Adenauer had only badly hidden his preference for Nixon over Kennedy. Adenauer even sent Nixon a condolence letter after he lost the election, saying, “I can only imagine the way you feel now.” The suggestion was clear: he shared Nixon’s pain.

  However, on his eighty-fifth birthday, Adenauer briefly put aside such concerns and basked in the adulation of admirers.

  The morning began as Adenauer had choreographed it at a Mass read by his son Paul at St. Elisabeth Hospital in Bonn, followed by a breakfast with doctors and nurses. He then joined a Catholic service in Rhöndorf, a neat village of tidy homes with well-tended flower boxes just across the Rhine from Bonn, where he had settled in retreat from the Nazis in 1935. The official explanation for choosing Bonn as West Germany’s provisional capital was to avoid the greater permanence that would have been associated with a major city. However, Germans knew the choice also suited Adenauer’s lifestyle.

  In Bonn, things were as Adenauer liked them—unruffled and in their place. The crisis of Berlin some four hundred miles away was real, but Adenauer seldom visited the city, the Prussian charms of which were lost on the Rhinelander. He considered Germany, like ancient Gaul, to be a country of three parts defined by its chosen alcoholic beverage. He called Prussia the Germany of schnapps drinkers, Bavaria the land of beer drinkers, and his Rhineland a place of wine drinkers. Of the three, Adenauer believed only wine drinkers were sober enough to rule the others.

  The chancellor’s office window looked out upon barren winter trees to the morning shimmer of the Rhine. His room was simply decorated: an old grandfather clock, a Winston Churchill painting of a Greek temple (a personal gift from the artist), and a fourteenth-century sculpted Madonna, presented to him by his Cabinet on his seventy-fifth birthday. Roses that Adenauer raised and cut himself rested in a delicate crystal vase on the shiny surface of the polished credenza behind his desk. If he had not been a politician, he told friends, he would have been a gardener.

  His birthday celebration ran according to the same sense of order, aside from Adenauer’s indulgence of twenty-one grandchildren. They romped through his Cabinet Hall as West Germany’s President Heinrich Lübke praised the irreversible nature of the chancellor’s achievements. Economics minister Ludwig Erhard declared that, thanks to Adenauer, the German people had rejoined the community of free peoples.

  In all, Adenauer received 300 guests and 150 gifts during his two-day celebration. But no visit was more revealing than that of Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, who at age forty-seven was both Adenauer’s opponent and his opposite. Born Herbert Frahm, the illegitimate son of a Lübeck shop assistant, he was a lifelong leftist who had fled the Gestapo to Norway, where he changed his name for safety. When the Germans invaded Norway, he relocated to Sweden and remained there until the war’s end.

  That Brandt was paying his respects was a reflection of how far West German politics had come. The Social Democrats had concluded that their policy platform of neutrality and closeness to the Soviets would never get them elected. So in 1959 at their Bad Godesberg party conference, and again in November 1960, when they elected Brandt as their leader, they revised their domestic program and embraced West Germany’s NATO membership.

  The SPD’s shift to the right could not have been more apparent at Adenauer’s birthday procession. A year earlier on Adenauer’s birthday, the Social Democrat press service had accused him of abusing power and acting autocratically and cynically in executing his country’s highest office. A mid-ranking official had dropped off some carnations. This year Brandt himself visited, and SPD parliamentary leader Carlo Schmid personally delivered eighty-five red tea roses.

  Still, Adenauer did not trust the conversion of Brandt or his socialists. He considered Brandt a particularly treacherous opponent due to his charm and significant political skills, and because he represented the more electable center of the Social Democratic Party. So Adenauer applied one of his political maxims: he portrayed his most dangerous foe as the most despicable of characters and questioned the origins of his birth and the genuineness of his patriotism. Adenauer told his party’s ruling council, “Consideration must now be given to what can be said about Brandt’s background….” He told another party gathering later, “Whoever wants to be chancellor must have character and a clean past, because the people must trust him.”

  When Brandt asked Adenauer to his face whether such unfriendly competition was really necessary, the chancellor protested with false innocence, “I would tell you, if I had anything against you,” and then he continued conspiring against Brandt. Some questioned whether Adenauer at his age should seek another term, but nothing injected him with more youthful energy than the necessity of defeating the socialists.

  In a New Year’s radio interview, Adenauer set the standard low for what would constitute success in 1961. When pressed about his ambitions, he said, “I would say that 1961 will have twelve months. No one can dispute that. What will happen in those twelve months no one in the world knows…. Thank God that the year 1960 did not bring any catastrophe down upon our heads. And we want to work hard and diligently in 1961 as before. I hope 1961 will also be free of catastrophes for us.”

  So that was Der Alte’s fondest dream: a year free from disaster—providing more time to erode the Soviet bloc through his policy of strength and Western integration. He was convinced Khrushchev would test Kennedy in 1961 and that Germany’s future would lie in the balance. At a Cabinet meeting he held on the fringes of his birthday celebration, he said, “We will all need to keep our nerves. No one will be able to do that by himself. We have to do that in a common effort.”

  At the end of the long celebration, Adenauer’s secretary Anneliese Poppinga remarked that the chancellor must feel wonderful seeing such adulation.

  Waving his hand, Adenauer said, “Do you really think so? A good feeling? When you are as old as I am, you stand alone. All the people I knew, all those I cared for, my two wives, my friends, are dead. No one is left. It is a sad day.”

  As he scanned stacks of written congratulations with her, he spoke of the stress of the year ahead: the trips in the coming days to Paris, London, and Washington, and the need to keep Brandt down and Berlin free. “Old people are a burden,” he said. “I can understand those who talk so much about my age and who want to be rid of me. Don’t let all the attention today fool you. Most don’t know how I am and that I remain so healthy. They think that with my eighty-five years I must be tottering and not right in my head.”

  He then laid his papers to the side, stood, and said with a sigh to his secretary in his flawless Italian, “La fortuna sta sempre all’altra riva”—Good fortune always lies on the far side of the river.

  Yet even in Adenauer’s dar
kest moments, he knew the buoyant Federal Republic of Germany, through the irrepressible dynamism of its economy and the free agency of its people, was winning the struggle against communism. No matter what dangers Adenauer foresaw from President Kennedy’s inexperience or Mayor Brandt’s socialism, none of them amounted to the existential threat facing Ulbricht’s East Germany: the refugee exodus.

  The Failed Flight of Friedrich Brandt

  Friedrich Brandt was hiding in his family barn’s hayloft when the East German Volkspolizei burst through the front door of his nearby home. Brandt knew his crime: he was resisting the state-mandated collectivization of his family farm, which had been the Brandt property and livelihood through four generations.

  Brandt’s wife wept and his thirteen-year-old son Friedel stood in stony silence while police ransacked every room, dumping out drawers, overturning mattresses, cutting open picture frames, and tipping over bookshelves in the pursuit of incriminating evidence. However, they already had all the proof they required in a letter that Farmer Brandt had written several weeks earlier to East German President Wilhelm Pieck.

  Brandt was confident that Pieck, a trained carpenter whom he considered a hardworking man of integrity, would protect his country’s farmers and their property if only someone would tell him about collectivization’s excesses and its costs to agricultural production:

  Dear President Wilhelm Pieck:

  Municipal council representatives have revoked my right to farm despite the fact that my grains and harvest are maintained at the highest standards while potatoes are rotting in the fields that have been harvested by the collectivized state farmers under the supervision of Master Farmer Gläser.

  I beg to know why the police have confiscated all my farm equipment and inventory. They have taken my beautiful young horses to be slaughtered. I consider this a criminal act of robbery and beg for your assistance and an investigation into these events as soon as possible. And if that is no longer possible, then I ask for an exit permit so that I may leave the GDR in order to live out my twilight years quietly and recover from this land of injustice. For freedom and unity!

  Friedrich Brandt

  Brandt was just one among thousands of East Germans who had fallen victim to Ulbricht’s accelerated efforts at agricultural collectivization and the completion of his industrial nationalization under his second five-year plan for 1956–1960. The East German leader had executed the Stalinist plan with a vengeance after two efforts by reformers to oust him had been defeated, and the uprisings of 1953 and 1956 showed Soviet leaders that the cost of a too-liberal East German leadership was dissolution.

  The first two years of the plan had introduced an impressive 6,000 agricultural cooperatives—which quickly became known by the abbreviation LPG, short for the lengthy German name Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft. For Ulbricht, that was insufficient, as 70 percent of all arable land still belonged to the country’s 750,000 privately owned farms. So in 1958 and 1959, the Communist Party sent agitation teams to villages throughout the country to cajole and threaten the locals into “voluntary” collectivization. By the end of 1959, the state set unachievable quota measures for those farmers who remained private. The State Security Directorate then began to imprison farmers who resisted collectivization.

  Brandt had been one of the few holdouts. The state sector’s 19,000 LPGs and dozens of other state farms controlled 90 percent of the arable land by then and produced 90 percent of its agricultural products. It was a remarkable achievement for Ulbricht, coming while he reduced private enterprise’s share of total industrial production to only 9 percent. The cost, however, was that tens of thousands of the country’s most skilled business leaders and farmers had fled the country, and state enterprises were being run by individuals more skilled at party fealty than at effective management.

  Having terrorized the Brandt family, the People’s Police left his farm before even trying to find their missing suspect. They had restricted his and his wife’s ability to travel or flee to the West by taking their identity papers, which left them naked in a country of frequent, random document checks. Authorities would return later to arrest Herr Brandt for resisting collectivization and conspiracy to commit the further crime of Republikflucht, or flight from the Republic, which carried a prison sentence of three years.

  So Brandt decided to leave the country that night, joining the four million who had left the Soviet zone and then East Germany from war’s end until 1961. To avoid possible police inspections on public transport, he rode his bicycle for four hours through the night to the home of his wife’s sister in East Berlin near a border crossing on a bridge over the Teltow Canal. She offered to conceal him, but after a short conversation Brandt decided to make his way west before the border posts had his description or police began checking the homes of his relatives the next morning. The odds were good that Brandt would be spared any identity check, along with the tens of thousands of others who safely crossed the open border each day for work, shopping, and social visits.

  After she heard the next day from her sister about her husband’s decision, Brandt’s wife decided to flee as well, along with her son. With their farm lost and her husband likely to be already safely in the West, it was an easy decision. Her sister, with whom she shared a resemblance, provided her with identity papers with which she could travel. If she was caught, to protect her sister she would say she had stolen the documents. Life meant nothing to her without her Friedrich.

  When stopped by East German police on the same bridge her husband likely had crossed, she collapsed on the ground and cried from the tension. She was certain she had been found out. But luck was on her side that evening. In the random ways that determined East German life, the border police gave Frau Brandt’s papers only a cursory look and allowed her to pass.

  When she arrived with her son at the Marienfelde refugee camp in West Berlin, the administrator running the registration office said no one of her husband’s name or description had arrived. After she waited and worried for three days, a friend arrived from their village and reported that Friedrich Brandt had been captured and jailed before he could cross the border. The charge was one that Ulbricht was employing frequently: “endangerment of the public order and antisocial activities.” In a touch of irony, authorities had further justified his imprisonment by pointing to his letter’s slanderous contention that East Germany was a land of injustice.

  Brandt’s village friend urged her to remain in the West, but she protested: “What should I do alone with the boy in the West? I cannot allow Friedrich to sit in a jail there with no one to help him.”

  She returned home the next morning with her boy, hoping she could still land a job on the collective farm to sustain their diminished family while Friedrich was in prison. Their brief freedom became years of quiet desperation as they disappeared into East Germany’s drab society, quietly awaiting his release.

  Friedrich Brandt’s arrest was a small victory for Ulbricht. But he knew he would lose the larger war on refugees without far more decisive help from Khrushchev.

  6

  ULBRICHT AND ADENAUER: THE TAIL WAGS THE BEAR

  We are a state, which was created without having and still does not have a raw material base, and which stands with open borders at the center of the competition between two world systems…. The booming economy in West Germany, which is visible to every citizen of the GDR, is the primary reason that in the last ten years around two million people have left our republic.

  Walter Ulbricht in a letter to Premier Khrushchev, January 18, 1961

  The probe which we carried out shows that we need a little time until Kennedy stakes out his position on the German question more clearly and until it is clear whether the USA government wants to achieve a mutually acceptable resolution.

  Khrushchev’s response to Ulbricht, January 30, 1961

  EAST BERLIN

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 1961

  Walter Ulbricht had never written a lette
r of greater consequence. Though it was marked SECRET, Ulbricht knew that what he was about to send to Khrushchev would also circulate among all the top Soviet leader ship. Separately, he would forward copies to other communist allies who might support the new pressure he was placing on the Soviet leader.

  Every word of the East German leader’s fifteen-page correspondence was written for maximum impact. Just two short months after their last meeting in Moscow, Ulbricht had again lost faith that Khrushchev would get the job done in Berlin. He rejected Khrushchev’s plea for patience, feeling his problems were growing too rapidly to be laid aside until Khrushchev could test relations with Kennedy.

  “Since Comrade Khrushchev’s statement on the West Berlin question in November 1958, two years have flown by,” Ulbricht complained. In a brief concession to Khrushchev, the East German leader acknowledged the Soviet leader had used the time to convince more countries that “the abnormal situation in West Berlin must be eliminated.” But he spent most of the letter arguing why it was finally time to act on Berlin and how to do so. Even Moscow’s NATO adversaries, Ulbricht argued, knew negotiations to change West Berlin’s status “are unavoidable.”

  Conditions in the coming year favored communist action, Ulbricht argued, because Adenauer would want to avoid a disruptive conflict before his September elections, and Kennedy would go to great lengths to prevent a confrontation during his first year in office.

  Ulbricht then brazenly issued what he called “GDR demands.” Writing more as the ruler than the ruled, Ulbricht listed in detail what he expected of Khrushchev in the coming year. He wanted him to end postwar Allied occupation rights in West Berlin, bring about the reduction and then withdrawal of Western troops, and ensure the removal of Western radio stations and spy services with all their subversive influences.

  His catalog of expectations was lengthy, touching on issues small and large. From Khrushchev, he sought the transfer to East Germany of all the state functions in Berlin that were still controlled by the four powers, ranging from postal services to air control. In particular, he wanted control of all air access to West Berlin from West Germany, which would provide him with the capability to shut down the daily scheduled and chartered flights that were ferrying tens of thousands of refugees to new homes and better-paying jobs in West Germany.