Berlin 1961 (19 page)

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

W
alter Ulbricht had never written a letter 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.

If Ulbricht could control all access to West Berlin, he could also squeeze it and over time erode its viability as a free, Western city. Ulbricht knew he was suggesting something similar to Stalin’s failed Berlin Blockade of 1948, but he used Khrushchev’s own arguments that the Soviets would be more likely to succeed this time because Moscow had closed the gap on Western military superiority and faced a less determined adversary in Kennedy than had been the case with Truman.

On three matters, Ulbricht demanded that Khrushchev make immediate decisions and announce them publicly.

The tail was furiously trying to wag the bear.

First, he wanted Khrushchev to issue a statement that Moscow would ratchet up Soviet economic assistance to the GDR to show the West that “economic blackmail” against his country could not succeed. Second, he appealed to Khrushchev to announce that there would be an East German–Soviet summit in April to raise the standing of Ulbricht and his country in negotiations with the West. Finally, he demanded that the Soviet leader convene a Warsaw Pact summit to rally Moscow’s allies to support East Germany militarily and economically. Thus far, Ulbricht complained, these countries had been unhelpful bystanders. “Although they report in the press about these problems,” wrote Ulbricht, “they basically feel uninvolved in this matter.”

Ulbricht reminded Khrushchev that it was the Soviets who had stuck East Germany with such an impossible starting point from which Ulbricht now had to defend the Kremlin’s global standing. “We are a state,” he lectured Khrushchev, “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.”

Ulbricht groused to Khrushchev that the Kremlin had deeply damaged East Germany during the first ten postwar years by extracting economic resources through reparations, including the complete withdrawal of factories, while the U.S. had built up West Germany through the enormous financial support and credits of the Marshall Plan.

Perhaps reparations had been justified at the time, Ulbricht conceded, given all of the Soviets’ wartime suffering and the need to strengthen the Soviet Union as the world communist leader. But now, Ulbricht argued, Khrushchev should recognize how much such measures had damaged East Germany in its competition with West Germany. From the war’s end through 1954, Ulbricht said, the per capita investment in West Germany had been double that in East Germany. “This is the main reason that we have remained so far behind West Germany in labor productivity and standard of living,” he wrote.

In short, Ulbricht was telling Khrushchev:
You got us into this mess, and you have the most to lose if we don’t survive, so now help get us out.
Ulbricht escalated the economic demands he had made in November, which Khrushchev had mostly accepted. “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,” he said, adding that it was also what allowed the West Germans to apply “constant political pressure.”

An East German worker had to labor three times as long as a West German to buy a pair of shoes,
if
he could find them at all. East Germany had 8 cars per 1,000 people, compared with 67 per 1,000 in West Germany. The East German official growth rate of 8 percent came nowhere near measuring the real situation for most citizens, since the figures were inflated by heavy industrial exports to the Soviets that did nothing to satisfy consumers at home. The result in 1960, when West German per capita income was double that of East Germans, was a 32 percent increase in refugees, from 140,000 to 185,000, or 500 daily.

Because of all that, Ulbricht appealed to Khrushchev to dramatically reduce the remaining East German reparations to the Soviet Union, and to increase supplies of raw materials, semifinished goods, and basic foodstuffs like meat and butter. He also sought new emergency loans, having already asked Khrushchev to sell gold to help East Germany. “If it is not possible to give us this credit, then we cannot maintain the standard of living of the population at the level of 1960,” he wrote. “We would enter into such a serious situation in supplies and production that we would be faced with serious crisis manifestations.”

Ulbricht’s message to Khrushchev was clear:
If you don’t help now and urgently, you will face the prospect of another uprising.
Khrushchev had barely survived the 1957 coup attempt that had followed Budapest, so Ulbricht knew the Soviet leader could not ignore his warning.

Ulbricht was combining maximalist demands with threats of dire consequences if Khrushchev failed to act. His letter might offend the Soviet leader, but that was the least of Ulbricht’s worries. Khrushchev’s failure to act could bring the end of East Germany—and of Ulbricht.

O
n the same day, Ulbricht sent an indirect but just as unmistakable message through Khrushchev’s nemesis: Beijing.

Ulbricht did not seek Khrushchev’s permission, nor did he provide prior notice before dispatching a high-level mission to China’s capital, led by Politburo member and party loyalist Hermann Matern. Given Ulbricht’s insider knowledge of Khrushchev’s ugly dispute with Mao, it was an unfriendly act in both timing and execution.

It was only the inescapable flight route through Moscow that alerted the Soviet leadership to the mission. Yuri Andropov, then the Politburo member responsible for Socialist Party relations, asked to be briefed on the trip during the delegation’s airport layover. Matern insisted the mission’s purpose was purely economic, and Ulbricht knew Khrushchev could not object at a time when East Germany’s needs were growing and the Kremlin was complaining about the cost of satisfying them.

But everything about the trip’s timing and choreography was political. In China, the group was received by Vice Premier Chen Yi, Mao’s confidant and a legendary communist commander during the Sino-Japanese War and marshal of the People’s Liberation Army. He told Matern that China regarded its Taiwan problem and Ulbricht’s East German problem as having “very much in common.” They both involved areas of “imperialist occupation” of integral pieces of communist countries.

In a direct challenge to Khrushchev, the East Germans and the Chinese agreed to assist each other in their efforts to recover these territories. The Chinese view was that Taiwan was the eastern front and Berlin the western front of a global ideological struggle—and Khrushchev was faltering in both places as world communist leader. Beyond that, Chen promised that China would help get the Americans out of Berlin because the situation there affected all other fronts in the global communist struggle.

Chen reminded the East Germans that communist China had shelled the Taiwanese islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1955, causing a crisis during which Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs had considered a nuclear response. This happened, he said, not because China had wanted to increase international tensions, but rather because Beijing had needed “to show the USA and the whole world that we have not come to terms with the current [Taiwan] status. We as well had to remove the impression that the USA is so powerful that no one dares to do something and one must come to terms with all of its humiliations.”

His suggestion was that the same determination was now necessary regarding Berlin.

The warmth of the East German–Chinese exchange was in sharp contrast to the Sino–Soviet chill that had set in. Ulbricht knew from his November meeting with Khrushchev in Moscow how competitive the Soviet leader felt toward Mao, and he had already played that card to successfully increase Moscow’s economic support. Khrushchev had declared at the time that he would provide East Germany with the sort of economic assistance Mao could not, creating joint enterprises with the East Germans on Soviet territory—something the Soviets had done with no other ally. “We aren’t China,” he declared to Ulbricht. “We are not afraid of giving the Germans a boost…. The needs of the GDR are our needs.”

Three months later, the Chinese were becoming an ever greater problem for Khrushchev, despite the apparent truce he had negotiated with them at the November gathering of Communist Parties in Moscow. While the East Germans were in Beijing seeking economic assistance, China was in Tirana encouraging xenophobic Albanian leader Enver Hoxha to break with the Soviet Union. During the Fourth Congress of the Albanian Communist Party, from February 13 to 21, Albanian communists had torn down public portraits of Khrushchev and replaced them with those of Mao, Stalin, and Hoxha. Never had a Soviet leader suffered such humiliation in his own realm.

Ulbricht’s course of greater diplomatic pressures on Khrushchev had its risks.

The far more powerful Khrushchev might have decided it was finally time to replace Ulbricht with a more submissive and obedient East German leader. He might have decided the China mission had crossed some impermissible line. However, Ulbricht had gambled correctly that Khrushchev had no good alternatives.

THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW
MONDAY, JANUARY
30, 1961

Khrushchev’s response landed on Ulbricht’s desk twelve days after the East German leader had written to him and, by coincidence, on the day of John F. Kennedy’s State of the Union speech. Given the impertinence of Ulbricht’s demands, Khrushchev’s letter was surprisingly submissive.