Berlin 1961 Read online

  Kroll assumed Mikoyan was referring to what had become known within Soviet party circles as the “Ulbricht lobby,” a group that had been greatly influenced by the East German leader’s increasingly strident complaints that Khrushchev was not defending Germany’s socialist state with sufficient vigor.

  Made more agreeable by all the Soviet compliments and champagne, Kroll conceded that the Soviet leader had demonstrated remarkable patience over Berlin. He warned Khrushchev, however, that if the Soviets unilaterally upset the Berlin status quo, the result would be an international crisis, and perhaps even military conflict with the U.S. and the West.

  Khrushchev disagreed. He shrugged that the West would respond with “a short period of excitement” that would quickly recede. “No one in the world will declare war over Berlin or the German question,” he told Kroll. Khrushchev, knowing Kroll would report the conversation to the Americans and his superiors, said he would prefer a negotiated agreement to taking unilateral action, but he stressed, “That will depend on Kennedy.”

  At four in the morning, Khrushchev ended the meeting and then paraded Kroll, Kosygin, and Mikoyan through the still-dancing crowd, which paused and opened an aisle for them to walk through.

  Even as experienced an ambassador as Kroll never knew which of Khrushchev’s frequent threats to take seriously. Yet the manner in which Khrushchev had raised the Berlin issue that evening convinced him that the year ahead would bring a confrontation over the matter. He would relay that view to Adenauer—and through him to the Americans. It was clear to Kroll that Khrushchev had concluded that the risks of inaction were growing greater than the dangers of action.

  However, the way the year would play out—cooperation or confrontation—would depend on the dilemma that lay at the heart of Khrushchev’s thinking on Berlin.

  On the one hand, Khrushchev remained certain that he could not afford a military competition or war with the Americans. He was committed to negotiating a peaceful coexistence with the U.S. and was reaching out to the new American president in hopes of brokering a Berlin deal.

  On the other hand, Khrushchev’s meeting with West German Ambassador Kroll demonstrated the growing pressure on him to solve his Berlin problem before it became a larger threat, both to the Soviet empire and, more immediately, to his own leadership.

  For that reason, Khrushchev was a communist in a hurry.

  And that was not his only Berlin problem. The Berliners themselves despised him, resented Soviet soldiers, and were weary of their occupation. Their memories of the postwar period were only bad ones….

  Marta Hillers’s Story of Rape

  SOMEWHERE IN SWITZERLAND

  JANUARY 1961

  Marta Hillers’s only consolation was that she had refused to put her name on the extraordinary manuscript in which she had so meticulously recounted the Soviet conquest of Berlin during the cold spring of 1945. It had been a time when her life—like that of tens of thousands of other Berlin women and girls—had become a nightmare of fear, hunger, and rape.

  Published for the first time in German in 1959, the book had brought to life one of the worst military atrocities ever. According to estimates extracted from hospital records, between 90,000 and 130,000 Berlin women had been raped during the last days of the war and the first days of Soviet occupation. Tens of thousands of others had fallen victim elsewhere in the Soviet zone.

  Hillers had expected the book to be welcomed by a people who wanted the world to know that they, too, had been the victims of war. However, Berliners had responded with either hostility or silence. The world still felt little sympathy for any pain inflicted on a German people who had brought the world so much suffering. Berlin women who had lived through the humiliation had no desire to recall it. And Berlin men found it too painful to be reminded of their failure to protect their wives and daughters. Early 1961 was a time of complacency and amnesia in Soviet-dominated East Germany and East Berlin, and there seemed little reason to get worked up about a history that no one had the power to change or the stomach to digest.

  Perhaps the German response should have been no surprise to Hillers, given the shame she herself expressed in signing her memoirs, Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin), only as “Anonyma.” She’d published them only after marrying and safely moving to Switzerland. The book had not circulated or been reviewed in East Germany, and only a few copies had been smuggled across to the communist zone in suitcases stuffed full of Western fashion magazines and other more escapist literature. In West Berlin, Anonyma’s memoirs sold poorly, and reviews accused her either of anticommunist propaganda or of besmirching the honor of German women—something she would insist that Soviet soldiers had done just fine long before her.

  One such review, buried of West Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, bore the headline: A DISSERVICE TO BERLIN WOMEN / BEST-SELLER ABROAD—A FALSIFIED SPECIAL CASE. What irritated the reviewer, who accused the author of “shameless immorality,” was the book’s uncompromising narrative that so richly captured the cynicism of the postwar months. Judgments like that of Der Tagesspiegel prompted Hillers to remain underground and to prohibit any new editions of the book from being published during her lifetime, which ended at age ninety in 2001.

  She would never know that, following her death, her book would be re-published and become a best-seller in several languages, including the German edition in 2003. Nor would she ever have the satisfaction of knowing her story would be made into a major German movie in 2008 and become a favorite of feminists everywhere.

  Back in 1961, Hillers was more concerned with dodging the reporters who were trying to hunt her down from the few clues in her published pages. The book revealed that she was a journalist in her thirties, had lived in the Tempelhof district, had spent sufficient time in the Soviet Union to speak some Russian, and was “a pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat.” None of that had been enough to identify her.

  Still, nothing better captured the German attitude of the time toward their occupiers than the substance of Hillers’s book and Berliners’ aversion to reading it. The East German relationship to their Soviet military occupiers, who still numbered 400,000 to 500,000 by 1961, was a mixture of pity and dread, complacency, and amnesia. Most East Germans had grown resigned to their seemingly permanent cohabitation. Among those who hadn’t, many had fled as refugees.

  The East German pity toward their Soviet occupiers, whom they considered inferior to them, came from what they could see with their own eyes: undernourished, unwashed teenagers in soiled uniforms who would drop to the ground to retrieve the unfinished stubs of their discarded cigarettes or trade their service medals and gasoline for any form of consumable alcohol that would help them briefly escape their miserable existence.

  The pity was also stirred by the occasional alarms that accompanied desperate attempts at desertion. For the teenage soldiers, the brutality of officers, hazing by fellow soldiers, and the cold and overcrowded quarters occasionally became too much to bear.

  Their barracks, built during the Third Reich or earlier, housed three times the number of soldiers that Hitler had ever bunked there. The latest escape had come after an insurrection on New Year’s Eve, when a barracks uprising in Falkenberg had resulted in the escape to West Berlin of four soldiers and the dispatch of Soviet search parties along the Berlin border. Stories circulated of Soviet troops setting alight barns and other structures where deserters had gone in hiding—burning the escapees alive alongside farm animals.

  That only increased a deeply ingrained German dread of the Soviets.

  That dread had grown after the events of June 17, 1953, when Soviet troops and tanks had put down a workers’ revolt after Stalin’s death that had shaken the young East German state to its fragile foundations. As many as 300 East Germans had died then, and a further 4,270 were imprisoned.

  Yet the deeper roots of East German terror were found in the events that Hillers had described. There was a reason why women in East Berlin froze up whenev
er a Soviet soldier passed by or when East German leader Walter Ulbricht spoke on the radio of the enduring friendship with the Soviet people.

  Hillers described why outsiders had so little sympathy for what German women had suffered—and why many Germans wondered whether some vengeful God had delivered this punishment of rape in retribution for their own misbehavior. “Our German calamity,” Hillers wrote during the first days of occupation, “has a bitter taste—of repulsion, sickness, insanity, unlike anything in history. The radio just broadcast another concentration camp report. The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress stuffing, soft soap, felt mats—Aeschylus never saw anything like that.”

  Hillers despaired at the stupidity of Nazi leaders who had issued orders that liquor should be left behind for advancing Soviet troops on the theory that inebriated soldiers would be less dangerous adversaries. If it had not been for Soviet drunkenness, Hillers wrote, Berlin women would have suffered only half as much rape at the hands of Russians who “aren’t natural Casanovas” and thus “had to drown their inhibitions.”

  With characteristic power, she described one of the many times she’d been raped and how it had driven her to seek protection.

  The one shoving me is an older man with gray stubble, reeking of brandy and horses…No sound. Only an involuntary grinding of teeth when my underclothes are ripped apart. The last untorn ones I had.

  Suddenly his finger is on my mouth, stinking of horse and tobacco. I open my eyes. A stranger’s hands expertly pulling apart my jaws. Eye to eye. Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth.

  I’m numb. Not with disgust, only cold. My spine is frozen: icy, dizzy shivers around the back of my head. I feel myself gliding and falling, down, down through the pillows and the floorboards. So that’s what it means to sink into the ground.

  Once more eye to eye. The stranger’s lips open, yellow teeth, one in front half broken off. The corners of the mouth lift, tiny wrinkles radiate from the corners of his eyes. The man is smiling.

  Before leaving he fishes something out of his pants pocket, thumps it down on the nightstand, and without a word, pulls the chair aside, and slams the door shut behind him. A crumpled pack of Russian cigarettes, only a few left. My pay.

  I stand up—dizzy, nauseated. My ragged clothes tumble to my feet. I stagger through the hall…into the bathroom. I throw up. My face green in the mirror, my vomit in the basin. I sit on the edge of the bathtub, without daring to flush, since I’m still gagging and there’s so little water left in the bucket.

  It was at that point that Marta Hillers made her decision. She cleaned herself up a bit and went to the street to hunt for a “wolf,” a higher-ranking Soviet officer who would become her protector. She concluded it was better to be abused by just one Russian on a regular basis than by an unending string of them. Like millions of other Germans, Hillers was reaching an accommodation with an occupation she could not resist.

  Only years later would researchers try to reconstruct the full horror of that time. Between the late summer and early autumn of 1945, a minimum of 110,000 women between the ages of twelve and eighty-eight had been raped. Some 40 percent of the victims were raped on multiple occasions. One in five of the rape victims became pregnant, roughly half of these gave birth, and the other half had abortions, often without anesthesia. Thousands of women killed themselves for the shame of having been raped or out of fear of being the next victims. Some 5 percent of all Berlin newborns in the following year would be “Russenbabys.” Across Germany, the number would be 150,000 to 200,000 children.

  It was as these children were first becoming teenagers, in 1958, that Khrushchev would provoke what would become known as the Berlin Crisis.

  2

  KHRUSHCHEV: THE BERLIN CRISIS UNFOLDS

  West Berlin has turned into a sort of malignant tumor of fascism and revanchism. That’s why we decided to do some surgery.

  Nikita Khrushchev, at his first press conference as premier, November 27, 1958

  The next President in his first year is going to be confronted with a very serious question on our defense of Berlin, our commitment to Berlin. It’s going to be a test of our nerve and will…. We’re going to be face-to-face with the most serious Berlin crisis since 1949 or 1950.

  Senator John F. Kennedy, in a presidential campaign debate with Vice President Richard Nixon, October 7, 1960

  PALACE OF SPORTS, MOSCOW

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1958

  On an unlikely stage and before an unsuspecting audience, Nikita Khrushchev launched what the world would come to know as “the Berlin Crisis.”

  Standing at the center of Moscow’s newest and grandest field house for indoor sports, the Soviet leader told a gathering of Polish communists that he planned to renounce the postwar agreements that had been the basis for Europe’s fragile stability. He would abrogate the Potsdam accord that had been signed with wartime allies and unilaterally change Berlin’s occupied status, with the aim of liquidating the city’s western part altogether, and removing all military forces from the city.

  The venue for his remarks, the Palace of Sports, which rested beside Lenin Central Stadium, had opened to great fanfare two years earlier as a state-of-the-art stage to show off Soviet athletic accomplishment. Since then, however, its most memorable moment had been the stunning defeat of the Soviets by the Swedes at the 1957 ice hockey world championships, which had been tainted by the boycott conducted by the U.S. and other Western hockey powers in protest against the Soviet crackdown in Hungary. The Swedish victory had come after a defenseman had head-blocked a puck before the goal, producing a gusher of blood and the championship.

  Khrushchev’s Polish audience had anticipated far less drama. Having stayed on in Moscow following a celebration of the forty-first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, they had expected the routine rhetoric of one of communism’s countless friendship meetings. Instead, they sat in stunned silence as Khrushchev declared, “The time has obviously arrived for the signatories of the Potsdam Agreement to discard the remnants of the occupation regime in Berlin and thereby make it possible to create a normal situation in the capital of the German Democratic Republic.”

  The Poles weren’t the only surprised party. Khrushchev had failed to give advance notice either to the Western signatories of the Potsdam agreement or to his socialist allies, including the East Germans. He had acted without even seeking the blessing of his own Communist Party leadership. Only shortly before the speech did Khrushchev share what he planned to say with the leader of the Polish delegation, the stunned Communist Party First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka. If Khrushchev meant what he said, Gomulka feared he could trigger a war over Berlin.

  Khrushchev explained to Gomulka that he was acting unilaterally because he had wearied of Berlin diplomacy that was leading nowhere. He was prepared to risk a confrontation with the West, and he argued that he was in a better position to succeed than Stalin in 1948 because Moscow had now overcome the American nuclear weapons monopoly. Under a project called “Operation Atom,” Khrushchev would deploy a nuclear deterrent on East German territory within weeks. Twelve medium-range R-5 missiles would give Khrushchev the capability to respond to any U.S. nuclear attack on East Germany with counterstrikes on London and Paris—if not yet New York. Without reference to those still-secret weapons, Khrushchev told Gomulka, “Now the balance of forces is different…. Today America has moved closer to us; our missiles can hit them directly.” Though not literally true, the Soviet leader was newly in a position to annihilate Washington’s European allies.

  Khrushchev did not share any details about the timing or implementation of his new Berlin plan, because he had not worked them out yet himself. What he told his Polish audience was that the Soviets and the Western Allies, according to his plan, would over time remove all their military personnel from East Germany and East Berlin. He would sign a war-ending peace treaty with East Germany and
then hand over all Soviet functions in Berlin to that country, including control of all access to West Berlin. Thereafter, U.S., British, and French soldiers would need to seek East German leader Walter Ulbricht’s permission to enter any part of Berlin by road or air. Khrushchev told the Palace of Sports crowd he would consider any resistance to East Germany’s exercise of these new rights—which could include blocking air and road access to West Berlin—as an attack upon the Soviet Union itself and its Warsaw Pact alliance.

  Khrushchev’s shocking escalation of the Cold War had three sources.

  Above all, it was an attempt to win the attention of President Eisenhower, who had been disregarding his demands for Berlin negotiations. It seemed that no matter what Khrushchev did, he could not win the respect of American officials that he so craved.

  His party rivals rightly argued that the U.S. had given him scant credit and no reward for a series of unilateral measures he had taken to reduce Cold War tensions since Stalin’s death. He had gone far beyond simply replacing the concept of inevitable war with peaceful coexistence. He had also cut Soviet troop numbers unilaterally by 2.3 million men between 1955 and 1958, and had withdrawn Soviet forces from Finland and Austria, opening the way for those countries’ neutrality. He had also encouraged political and economic reform among Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

  The second source of Khrushchev’s impulsive Berlin move was his growing confidence in power after having put down the so-called anti-party coup against him in June 1957, led by former premiers Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov and his onetime mentor, Lazar Kaganovich. They had attacked him partly because of just the sort of reckless leadership style he was now demonstrating over Berlin. Unlike Stalin, he hadn’t killed them but exiled them to lesser roles far from Moscow’s power center: Molotov to Mongolia as ambassador, Malenkov to Kazakhstan to run a hydroelectric plant, and Kaganovich to the Urals to direct a small potassium factory. He thereafter removed from power his popular defense minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov, whom he also suspected of plotting against him.