Berlin 1961 (49 page)

Second, said Konev, the operation had to be as fast as the wind.

Khrushchev had constructed the plan so that “our establishing of the border control in the GDR didn’t give the West either the right or the pretext to resolve our dispute by war.” To achieve that, Konev considered speed essential to create a fait accompli, to ensure the loyalty of East German forces, and to dissuade any trigger-happy American commander from improvising. A rapidly executed operation could also demonstrate to the West the impossibility of reversing the facts that communist troops would establish on the ground.

THE VOLKSKAMMER, EAST BERLIN
10:00 A.M., FRIDAY, AUGUST
11, 1961

At age twenty-six, Adam Kellett-Long of Reuters was the only Western news correspondent based in communist East Berlin, and that suited him just fine. A gaggle of reporters fought over each shred of news in West Berlin, but he had the communist side to himself under an arrangement through which the East German government paid its bills to the news agency through supplying his office and accreditation. Ulbricht called Kellett-Long “my little shadow,” acknowledging his frequent presence.

Still, the East German press office’s telephone call that morning was unusual, urging the young reporter to cover an emergency session of the Volkskammer, the country’s parliament, on Luisenstrasse at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, August 11. The British reporter usually skipped the Volkskammer’s mundane meetings, as his editors were unlikely ever to print a report on them. But if his East German minders were so eager for him to attend, there must be a reason.

The council that day passed what Kellett-Long regarded as an “enigmatic resolution,” saying that its members approved whatever measures the East German government wished to undertake to address the “revanchist” situation in Berlin. It was an all-purpose rubber stamp for Ulbricht.

Outside the meeting hall, Kellett-Long buttonholed his most reliable source, Horst Sindermann, who ran the Communist Party’s propaganda operations. “What is all this about?” asked Kellett-Long.

Sindermann was less talkative than usual. He studied the young Brit through thick glasses, strands of dark hair combed across his balding head, then spoke in a measured, businesslike manner. “If I were you, and were planning to leave Berlin this weekend, I would not do so,” he said.

The East German then disappeared into the crowd.

Kellett-Long would later recall, “You could not have a stronger tip in a communist country that whatever was going to happen was going to happen that weekend.”

The British reporter checked out news reports, but found no further clues. Sender Freies Berlin, the U.S.-funded West Berlin radio station, had that morning reported yet another record number of East Germans arriving at the Marienfelde emergency refugee camp. Kellett-Long had joked to his wife that, by his calculations, East Germany would be entirely empty by 1980 or so.

The official East Berlin radio station Deutschlandsender didn’t report on refugees at all that day—or anything else that would help Kellett-Long. It was running a feature on the second human to orbit the Earth, Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who had circled the globe seventeen times in twenty-five hours and eighteen minutes before safely returning to Earth. The accomplishment was “unprecedented in human history,” the radio station said, noting that it further proved the socialist superiority that the refugee flood so stubbornly contradicted.

In a further effort to follow up Sindermann’s tip, the British reporter drove to the Ostbahnhof, East Berlin’s main station for those arriving from elsewhere in East Germany, where he often tried to monitor the refugee flow. The number of travelers seemed greater than usual, but what struck Kellett-Long even more was the larger presence of uniformed and plain-clothes police.

The police were aggressively working the crowd, fishing out dozens of travelers seemingly at random, arresting some and turning back others. The Brit scribbled in his notebook: “an escalated police operation.” However, it seemed to Kellett-Long that East German authorities were losing the battle, trying to hold back the sea with outstretched palms. He could see the tension in their eyes.

Kellett-Long returned to his office and wrote a story that rang bells in editorial rooms around the world. “Berlin is holding its breath this sunny weekend,” he wrote, “waiting for drastic measures to stem the refugee flow to West Berlin.” Based on the Sindermann steer, he said authorities would be responding “imminently.”

It was strong and pessimistic language, just the sort of brash report that had made Kellett-Long so unpopular with his superiors. But he was confident of it. Kellett-Long reckoned there were now several possibilities as to what could happen next. He listed them for his readers: East German authorities could tighten their controls on travelers. They could impose stiffer penalties on those apprehended while trying to flee. A far bigger story, of course, would be if the East Germans shut off transit routes altogether.

Kellett-Long couldn’t imagine that alternative. Then he would be writing about a potential war.

STASI HEADQUARTERS, NORMANNENSTRASSE, EAST BERLIN
LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST
11, 1961

In the first briefing for his lieutenants ahead of their weekend work, Stasi chief Erich Mielke gave the historic moment its code name. “The name of this operation will herewith be known as ‘Rose,’” he said. He did not explain the reasoning behind the name, though the suggestion was that behind the tens of thousands of barbed-wire thorns was a plan of organizational beauty.

Mielke exuded self-confidence. Though he was only five feet, five inches tall—about the same height as Ulbricht and Honecker—he was more powerfully built, more athletic, and more handsome than either of them. He wore a permanent five-o’clock shadow on his jowls and had bags under his dark eyes.

Back in 1931, at only twenty-four years of age, Mielke had begun his thuggish communist career with the murder of two Berlin police officers who had been lured to a political rally for the planned hit in front of the Babylon Cinema. After the killings, Mielke crowed among comrades at a local pub, “Today we celebrate an act that I have staged!” (
“Heute wird ein Ding gefeiert, das ich gedreht habe!”
) Party comrades smuggled Mielke out of Germany, where he was convicted in absentia. He then began his education and training in Moscow as a Soviet political intelligence officer.

Mielke had run East German state security since 1957, but the coming hours would be the most crucial test yet for his elaborate apparatus of 85,000 full-time domestic spies and 170,000 informants. Most of his senior officers, gathered in the canteen at secret police headquarters, had known nothing about the operation until that moment.

“Today we begin a new chapter of our Chekist work,” he told them, with one of his frequent references to the Cheka, the original state security arm of the Bolshevik revolution. “This new chapter demands the mobilization of each individual member of the State Security Forces. In this period we are entering, it will be shown whether we know
everything
and whether we are firmly anchored
everywhere
. Now we must prove whether we understand the politics of the party and are capable of carrying out its orders.”

Mielke kept fit, drank little, and didn’t smoke, but he had three indulgences: a passion for Prussian marching music, hunting on private grounds he kept for top communist officials, and the success of the security forces’ soccer team, Sportsvereinigung Dynamo, which would regularly win championships with the help of his manipulation of matches and players. Yet none of that compared with the game he was fixing now.

He told his officers that the work they were about to perform would “demonstrate the strength of our republic…. What is the main thing to remember: always be watchful, demonstrate
extreme
efficiency and eliminate
all
negative occurrences.
No
enemy must be allowed to become active;
no
conglomeration of enemies must be permitted.”

He then issued instructions for the weekend ahead. They ranged from how to control individual factories to assessing precisely the “enemy forces” on a district-by-district level. He wanted secret police present within the armed forces to ensure combat readiness and political loyalty through the closest possible contact to officers. “Whoever may confront us with antagonistic actions will be arrested,” he said. “Enemies must be seized outright. Our goal is to prevent all negative phenomena. Enemy forces must be immediately and discreetly arrested…if they become active.”

Mielke had taken leadership after the June 1953 failure of his mentor Wilhelm Zaisser to stop worker protests from spreading. Back then, soldiers and police had in many cases joined ranks with the protesters. Strikes had spread like waves across the country, and it had taken Soviet tanks and troops to restore order.

Mielke was determined to preclude all such problems by anticipating them and dousing dissent before it gained momentum.

EAST AND WEST BERLIN
SATURDAY, AUGUST
12, 1961

It was like any other summer weekend for most Berliners.

The weather was a pleasant 75 degrees (24 degrees Celsius), with just enough cloud cover to provide relief from the sun. After the downpours of the previous week, Berliners gathered at sidewalk cafés, in parks, and at lakeside beaches.

One neighborhood near Berlin’s East–West border had been closed to traffic, but it was for the annual Kreuzberg
Kinderfest
, or children’s fair, on the Zimmerstrasse. Flags and streamers decorated the narrow street, where children from all sectors of Berlin were laughing, playing, and begging their parents for ice cream and cake. Doting adults tossed children wrapped candies from their apartment windows above the streets.

Most Allied military officers had taken the day off to be with their families. Some steered sailboats on the Wannsee and up it through the undulating Havel. Major General Albert Watson II, the U.S. commandant in Berlin, played golf at the Blue-White Club, where membership was part of occupation rights.

The Severin + Kühn company tour buses were having a bumper day showing off the Cold War’s epicenter to tourists, including stops in the Soviet sector. They instructed passengers not to photograph certain public buildings but urged them to snap as many shots as they liked of the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, with its statue of a giant Red Army soldier cradling a German baby in one arm while crushing a swastika with his boot.

The biggest story of the day in West Berlin papers was that of the record inflow of refugees. A flat nasal voice at the Marienfelde refugee center provided the count over loudspeakers for all who were waiting in line—“seven-hundred sixty-five, seven hundred sixty-six, seven hundred sixty-seven”—to reach more than two thousand by day’s end.

Church workers, members of civic clubs, and other volunteers, including the spouses of Allied forces, had gathered to help feed hungry refugees and console weeping babies. The camp’s facilities overflowed, so refugees had been distributed around the city to sleep in church naves and in classrooms on military camp beds and hospital cots. Heinrich Albertz, Mayor Brandt’s chief of staff, telephoned George Muller, the deputy political adviser at the American Mission, to ask for field rations, as Marienfelde had run out of food. “The matter just can’t continue like this,” he said.

Muller extracted several thousand C rations from the U.S. garrison to help. They would last only a few days, but Albertz would take what he could get.

Not since 1953 had West Berlin seen such a stampede. Marienfelde’s twenty-five three-story apartment blocks were filled to bursting, as were twenty-nine other temporary camps set up to absorb the flood. Twenty-one daily charter flights were ferrying thousands of the new refugees from West Berlin to other parts of West Germany where jobs were plentiful.

Yet none of that was sufficient to manage the human tide. Processors had all but given up trying to sift out real from bogus refugees, among them certainly dozens of East German spies that Ulbricht’s foreign intelligence chief Markus Wolf was planting in the West.

As dark settled over Berlin, a fireworks display for the children’s festival illuminated the sky. Dancing couples on the rooftop terrace of the new Berlin Hilton stopped to take in the pyrotechnics. West Berlin movie houses were sold out that weekend, and more than half of the customers were East Berliners. It was no wonder, considering the hits they could see for a mark and twenty-five pfennigs in Eastern or Western currency:
The Misfits
, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, at Atelier am Zoo;
Ben-Hur
, with Charlton Heston; or
The Old Man and the Sea
, with Spencer Tracy, at the Delphi Filmpalast. Or they could watch
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, at the Studio on Kurfürstendamm, or
The Third Man
, with Orson Welles, at the Ufa Pavillion.

On a live stage, Leonard Bernstein’s new musical,
West Side Story
, was taking West Berlin by storm. East Berlin also had its stage attractions. Hundreds of West Berliners crossed each evening to see the latest Bertolt Brecht performance at the famous Berliner Ensemble, or political cabaret in the Distel. Some made the trip for cheap drinks at places like the Rialto Bar in the northeast Pankow district, which had no closing hour.

Soviet troops were restricted to barracks that night, due to nonfraternization policies. However, British, French, and American soldiers were doing the town, enjoying their considerable attraction to Berlin girls whose own German men had far less pocket money to entertain them. The First Welsh Regiment had gathered at a British sector dance hall. The French had a dance floor at the Maison du Soldat. American GIs gathered in their own service clubs and favorite pubs—and as so often on Saturdays, they would make it a long and liquid night.