Berlin 1961 (43 page)

After that, he wanted Pervukhin to take the map to Comrade Ulbricht and then gather his comments as to the feasibility of shutting the border all along the jagged, erratic, and undefended lines that divided the world’s competing systems.

Ulbricht, as usual in 1961, was already way ahead of him.

And a world away in Miami Beach, perhaps the highest-profile East German refugee yet was providing the world with a dazzling reminder of the East German refugee problem—and Ulbricht with yet another reason to close the gate as quickly as possible.

Marlene Schmidt, the Universe’s Most Beautiful Refugee

She was Walter Ulbricht’s ultimate humiliation.

As the communist leader maneuvered behind the scenes to close his Berlin border, one of his refugees was strutting down the catwalk of a Miami Beach stage in her shimmering Miss Universe crown. Amid the flashing of cameras, Ulbricht’s most intractable problem had assumed the unmistakable shape of someone judges had declared “the world’s most beautiful girl.”

At age twenty-four, Marlene Schmidt was intelligent, radiant, blonde, a little shy, and a lot statuesque. West Germany’s
Der Spiegel
magazine described her as someone with an electrical engineer’s brain atop a Botticelli figure. But her real draw—the one that was getting her headlines around the world—was the story of her fairy-tale flight to freedom.

It had been only a year since Marlene had fled Jena, an East German industrial town that had been flattened by Allied bombing during World War II. Since then, Soviet expropriation had further gutted the city and communist central planners were rebuilding it in the colorless monotony of their bland block buildings. Though her new West German home of Stuttgart was just 220 miles away from Jena, it was a world apart.

U.S. and British air attacks had also destroyed most of Stuttgart, where German industry had grown around Gottlieb Daimler’s automobiles and combustion engines. However, West Germany’s postwar economic miracle had already transformed the city into a hilly, green boomtown of cranes, new cars, and rising aspirations—driven by West Germany’s ascent to become the world’s third-largest exporter.

Just a few weeks after landing in the West, Marlene had entered the Miss Germany contest, drawn by a local newspaper advertisement that announced that first prize would be a French Renault convertible. After winning in the luxurious spa town of Baden-Baden, West Germany, Marlene in Florida surpassed forty-eight competitors from around the world to become Germany’s first and only Miss Universe.

Time
magazine couldn’t resist a dig at the communists for having let her escape. “Even allowing for the crush [of refugees],” it said, “it is hard to understand how the East German border guards failed to spot lissome, 5-ft. 8-in. Marlene…. The West had no such difficulty.”

Marlene’s triumph was projected to the world in Technicolor from a pageant organized and produced by Paramount Pictures, with then game-show host Johnny Carson as master of ceremonies and actress Jayne Meadows as color commentator. Tens of thousands of East Germans watched as well, the product of thousands of jerry-rigged antennae on rooftops that allowed most of the country to pull down the West German television signal. They hung on every detail.

Marlene, who was earning $53 a week as an electrical engineer in a Stuttgart research laboratory, spoke of her excitement over Miss Universe winnings that included $5,000 in cash, a $5,000 mink coat, a $10,000 personal appearance contract, and a full wardrobe. Newspapers reported that her victory celebration stretched until five in the morning, followed by an “American-style breakfast” of orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, and coffee. “I’m a little tired, but so happy,” conceded Marlene through her interpreter, a doting Navy lieutenant and German linguist who escorted her through news conferences, interviews, and photo sessions.

World attention forced Ulbricht’s propaganda apparatus to react. The East German leader’s three-pronged effort to slow the refugee flood included more assertive propaganda about the virtues of socialism and the failures of capitalism; greater repressive measures, including punishment of refugees’ family members for complicity; and increased incentives for refugees who returned, ranging from jobs to housing.

Yet nothing could reverse the escalating numbers in a population awash with rumors that the opportunity to escape might vanish soon.

In the case of Marlene, the official communist youth publication,
Junge Welt
(Young World), accused the Americans of rigging the beauty contest to call attention to East Germany’s refugee problem. It sneered at how the West German media had falsely created “a Soviet zone Cinderella” who had been saved from half-starved communism by the Golden West. The writer countered that while East Germans valued her for her engineering and socialist education, “now all that matters are her bust, butt and hips. She is no longer to be taken seriously. She is just a display piece.”

When American journalists related such reports to her for comment, Marlene shrugged in resignation. “I had expected to hear this from them. I think it is uncomfortable for the East German government to have the world reminded of the situation in East Germany.”

Absent the Miss Universe crown, Marlene’s story had been similar to that of so many others at the time. A few weeks after helping her mother and sister escape, Marlene had chosen to follow them when she heard that authorities were investigating her for complicity in their crime of
Republikflucht,
or flight from the Republic. Under the 1957 Gesetz zur Änderung des Passgesetzes (Law to Change Passport Regulations), she would serve up to three years in prison if prosecuted.

Junge Welt
called her Miami triumph one of those short-lived pleasures of capitalism that would quickly fade away, to be followed by a hard life in an unfriendly land. “You will only reign one year, after which the world will forget you,” it said.

In this case, East German propaganda proved partially right. In 1962, she would become the third among the eight wives of Hollywood actor Ty Hardin, star of the Western television series
Bronco.
She divorced him four years later, and only after that ran up eleven movie credits as an actor, writer, and producer, but they included little of note aside from female nudity. “I learned that life in Hollywood wasn’t for me,” she said, reflecting on her choice to move back home and work on electrical engines in Saarbrücken.

When she left East Germany, however, Marlene’s choice had been between freedom and prison. After release, she would have been banned from working as an engineer and would have been caught in a dreary world of limited potential. Hollywood had had its disappointments for her, but the flight to the West had been her salvation.

Marlene Schmidt would wear her Miss Universe crown for less than a month before Ulbricht moved to close the escape hatch through which she and so many others had passed.

PART III

THE SHOWDOWN

13

“THE GREAT TESTING PLACE”

The immediate threat to free men is in West Berlin. But that isolated outpost is not an isolated problem. The threat is worldwide…above all it has now become—as never before—the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments, stretching back over the years since 1945, and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation.

President Kennedy in a special television address, July 25, 1961

Khrushchev is losing East Germany. He cannot let that happen. If East Germany goes, so will Poland and all of Eastern Europe. He will have to do something to stop the flow of refugees. Perhaps a wall. And we won’t be able to prevent it. I can hold the Alliance together to defend West Berlin, but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open.

President Kennedy to Deputy National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, several days later

THE VOLKSKAMMER (PEOPLE’S CHAMBER), EAST BERLIN
THURSDAY, JULY
6, 1961

M
ikhail Pervukhin, the Soviet ambassador to East Germany, ordered his aide Yuli Kvitsinsky to track down Ulbricht immediately. “We have a yes from Moscow,” Pervukhin said.

At age twenty-nine, Kvitsinsky was a rising star in the Soviet foreign ministry who had made himself invaluable to Pervukhin with his sound judgment and flawless German. He sensed the historic moment. After Khrushchev had scrutinized a much-improved map of Berlin from General Yakubovsky, the commander of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, the Soviet leader had concluded that Ulbricht was right: it would be possible to barricade Berlin.

Years later, Khrushchev would take full credit for the decision to build the Berlin Wall. “I had been the one,” he would write in his memoirs, “who thought up the solution to the problem which faced us as a consequence of our unsatisfactory negotiations with Kennedy in Vienna.” Yet the truth was that Khrushchev was merely giving Ulbricht the green light to proceed with a solution that the East German leader had sought as early as 1952 from Stalin. The Soviets would help shape, refine, and provide the crucial military guarantees for the operation’s success, but it was Ulbricht who had driven the outcome with his constant badgering, and it would be Ulbricht’s team that would work out all the details.

Khrushchev would tell the West German ambassador to Moscow, Hans Kroll, “I don’t want to conceal from you that it was I who in the end gave the order. Ulbricht had pressured me for a long time and in the last months with increasing vehemence, but I don’t want to hide myself behind Ulbricht’s back.” Khrushchev then joked with Kroll that Ulbricht was far too thin anyway for that purpose. “The wall will disappear again someday, but only when the reasons for its construction disappear,” Khrushchev told Kroll.

Khrushchev had agonized over the decision; he knew the cost would be great to socialism’s global reputation. “What should I have done?” he had asked himself. “You can easily calculate when the East German economy would have collapsed if we hadn’t done something soon against the mass flight. There were, though, only two kinds of countermeasures: cutting off air traffic or the Wall. The former would have brought us to a serious conflict with the United States which possibly could have led to war. I could not and did not want to risk that. So the Wall was the only remaining option.”

After Khrushchev relayed his decision to East Berlin, Kvitsinsky tracked down Ulbricht at the People’s Chamber, where he had been attending a session of East Germany’s rubber-stamp unicameral parliament, whose decisions, like most everything else in the country, followed his dictate.

Pervukhin told a satisfied Ulbricht that he had Khrushchev’s green light to begin practical preparations for closing the Berlin border, but that he must operate under the greatest of secrecy. “For the West, the action must be carried out quickly and unexpectedly,” Pervukhin said.

In stunned silence, the two Soviets listened to Ulbricht as he recited without emotion each minute detail of what was already a meticulously constructed plan.

The only way to close such a border rapidly enough, Ulbricht said, and with sufficient surprise, was to use barbed wire and fencing—and a massive amount of it. He knew precisely where he would get it and how he would bring it to Berlin without alerting Western intelligence agencies. Just before he shut the border, he would bring the metro and the elevated trains to a complete stop, he said. He would put up an unbreakable glass wall at the main Friedrichstrasse train station, through which the greatest amount of cross-Berlin traffic passed, so that East Berliners could not board West Berlin–bound trains to escape the shutdown.

The Soviets should not underestimate the difficulty of the border closing, Ulbricht told Pervukhin. He would act in the early hours of a Sunday morning, when traffic across the border would be far less and many Berliners would be outside the city. The 50,000 East Berliners who worked in West Berlin during the week as so-called
Grenzgänger
, or “border crossers,” would be home for the weekend and thus caught in Ulbricht’s trap.

Ulbricht said he would share the details with only a handful of his most trusted lieutenants: Politburo security chief Erich Honecker, who would direct the operation; State Security chief and thus secret police chief Erich Mielke; Interior Minister Karl Maron; Defense Minister Heinz Hoffmann, and Transportation Minister Erwin Kramer. Ulbricht said he would entrust only one individual, his chief bodyguard, to hand-deliver regular updates on preparations to Pervukhin and Kvitsinsky.

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
FRIDAY, JULY
7, 1961

Just one day after Ulbricht received Khrushchev’s go-ahead for his bold plan, Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger was scheming to slow adviser Dean Acheson’s own rush to action.

Having won the Pulitzer Prize at age twenty-seven for his book
The Age of Jackson
, Schlesinger was the Kennedy court historian who also engaged in random troubleshooting. His sudden focus on Berlin came as a response to what he considered his own poor performance during the run-up to the Bay of Pigs operation. Schlesinger had been alone among the president’s closest advisers in opposing the invasion, but he reproached himself for failing “to do more than raise a few timid questions” while military commanders and the CIA lobbied Kennedy to approve action. Schlesinger had limited his dissent to a private memo that had warned Kennedy: “At one stroke you would dissipate all the extraordinary goodwill which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world.”