Berlin 1961 (50 page)

NUREMBERG, WEST GERMANY
SATURDAY EVENING, AUGUST
12, 1961

Berlin’s mayor Willy Brandt launched the final phase of his national campaign for chancellor in Nuremberg in Bavaria, some one hundred miles north of Munich. Before 60,000 voters on the city’s cobbled market square, he attacked his opponent Adenauer for refusing to engage him in a public debate of the Nixon–Kennedy variety.

In a raspy, emotional voice, the forty-seven-year-old mayor rhetorically asked the crowd why so many refugees came to West Berlin every day. “The answer,” he said, “is because the Soviet Union is preparing a strike against our people, the seriousness of which only a very few understand.” He said East Germans fear “the Iron Curtain will be cemented shut” and they will be left “locked into a giant prison. They are agonizingly worried that they might be forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of indifference and lost opportunities.”

As prophetic as he was poetic, Brandt fired another shot across the bow of his opponent Adenauer. “Today we stand in the most serious crisis of our postwar history, and the chancellor belittles that matter….”

He called for all Germans on both sides of the divide to join in a plebiscite about their future, confident they would choose a democratic, Western course. If East Germans could not be included in such a referendum, West Germans and West Berliners should vote on their own, he said. “We also have a claim to self-determination,” he said, in reference to Germany’s wartime defeat, “not because we are better than others, but rather because we are no worse than other people.”

The crowd cheered wildly, wanting even more of Brandt when he retreated in exhaustion to the two railway carriages that had been carrying him from one campaign stop to another. The train would drive overnight to Kiel on the North Sea coast.

While Brandt was in Nuremberg, Adenauer was campaigning closer to his Bonn home in Lübeck. His less focused, more meandering speech asked East Germans to stop their westward stampede and stay home, helping to prepare East Germany for unification.

“It is our duty,” he said, employing the emotive German concept of
Pflicht
, “to say to our German brothers and our German sisters on the other side of the zone border: Don’t panic.” Germans together would someday overcome their difficult separation, he said, and become as one again.

GROSSER DÖLLNSEE, EAST GERMANY
5:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST
12, 1961

Walter Ulbricht appeared uncharacteristically relaxed to guests attending his garden party at Grosser Döllnsee, some twenty-five miles outside Berlin. The government guest quarters, known as “House Among the Birches,” had once served as the hunting lodge for Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring, something Ulbricht’s guests knew but did not mention.

Ulbricht’s party had a dual purpose. First, he was quarantining government officials who would later sign off on his operation in an environment that he could hermetically seal. Second, he was executing a diversionary maneuver. Any Western intelligence agency monitoring his movements would report that East Germany’s leader was throwing a summer party at his countryside retreat.

His guests speculated among themselves about why they had been summoned. Some noticed a larger-than-usual number of soldiers and military vehicles in the woods surrounding the guesthouse. But none of them had risen in Ulbricht’s hierarchy by asking too many questions.

The August sun beat down as they gathered in the shade of birch trees in the meadow beside a serene lake. For those who remained inside, Ulbricht was showing a film, the popular Soviet comedy with the German title of
Rette sich wer kann!
(or
Each Man for Himself
), about the chaos aboard a Russian freighter carrying lions and tigers.

Only a handful of Ulbricht’s guests knew that at four p.m. their boss had signed the final order that gave Honecker the green light to put Operation Rose into motion. Standing by his side had been the crucial players in that evening’s chain of command: Politburo members Willi Stoph and Paul Verner, who ran the government; Defense Minister Heinz Hoffmann; Minister of State Security Erich Mielke; Minister of Interior Karl Maron; Minister for Transport Erwin Kramer; People’s Police President Fritz Eikemeier and his chief of staff Horst Ende.

While standing before them, Honecker had briefed his senior officers on their assignments for the evening, and none had raised any questions or objections. He had then provided each of them their written instructions, having signed them as he would all the other orders for that evening: “With socialist greetings, E. Honecker.”

HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS
MIDDAY, SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961 (6:00 P.M. IN BERLIN)

Apparently unaware of what was occurring in Berlin, President Kennedy was trying to beat the 90-degree heat on Cape Cod with a midday boat outing. He had spent Saturday morning reading reports that followed up on Friday discussions about how to prepare for a possible Berlin crisis with Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Defense McNamara.

The day’s diplomatic traffic contained some reason for concern.

Khrushchev had given a speech at a Soviet–Romanian Friendship Rally a day earlier, and the U.S. embassy in Moscow worried about his blatant threats “of complete destruction” of NATO members Greece, Italy, and West Germany should war break out. At the same time, Khrushchev had talked more emphatically than before of Soviet willingness to provide guarantees of access to West Berlin and ensure noninterference in the city’s internal affairs.

Both could be viewed as messages to Kennedy—a stick and a carrot.

Secretary of State Rusk had sent a sharply worded cable to U.S. Ambassador to Germany Dowling that began, “The situation in East Germany is causing us increasing concern.” He warned that an “explosion along 1953 lines at this time would be highly unfortunate.”

He feared that such an uprising, in response to the danger of “the escape hatch being closed,” would come “before the military and political measures now under way for dealing with the Berlin problem have become effective.” He said, “It would be particularly unfortunate if an explosion in East Germany were based on the expectation of immediate Western military assistance.”

He wanted Dowling to report on what the West German government thought about the “likelihood of early explosion” and “what action it contemplates to prevent one, and what action by the U.S. and other Allies it would consider useful.” He reminded Dowling to tell the West Germans “that as a matter of policy, the Allies should do nothing to exacerbate the situation.”

Despite such clear worries about coming trouble, Kennedy set his papers aside at midday and, with the sun burning through the overcast sky, set off on his motorboat into Nantucket Sound with his wife, three-year-old Caroline, and Lem Billings, his longtime friend and New York advertising man. The president dropped anchor in Cotuit Harbor after the Coast Guard and police boats cleared a swimming area for the First Family. Jackie set aside her pink parasol and jumped into the water dressed in a blue-and-white bathing suit.

The latest report on Khrushchev’s activities included little of interest. The Soviet leader had left for a weekend retreat in the Crimea, where he was preparing for his October Party Congress, and the word was that he planned to be away until the first week of September. More excitement was swirling around the New York Yankees’ extraordinary baseball year. Mickey Mantle had just hit his forty-fourth homer and Roger Maris his forty-second.

After a four-and-a-half-hour cruise, the Kennedys returned to their private dock, where they swam, joined by Caroline in an orange life jacket. The
Los Angeles Times
reported that although “the president did not swim vigorously…he showed no trace of his recent back ailment when he agilely climbed a ladder at the stern of the
Marlin
.”

While soldiers in East Germany were secretly loading trucks with tank traps, barbed wire, pillars, and sawhorses, Kennedy drove his white golf cart into Nantucket village, where he bought Caroline and four of her cousins some ice cream at a local candy store. Jackie looked like something out of a fashion magazine in her blue blouse and red shorts.

EAST BERLIN
7:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST
12, 1961

Reuters correspondent Kellett-Long had created such a stir with his Friday story, in which he had predicted an imminent Berlin event, that his news editor David Campbell had flown in that afternoon to track the story personally.

By early evening on Saturday, the two men were still searching for factual confirmation of Kellett-Long’s apparent scoop. “You put us out on a real limb here,” Campbell told his young reporter. “Something better happen.”

In rereading his story, Kellett-Long wondered whether he should have used somewhat less hyperbolic language. He and Campbell drove around East Berlin in his car, looking in vain for the crisis he had predicted. Yet all Kellett-Long saw was a beautiful day with crowded swimming pools and overflowing cafés.

Perhaps it would happen later in the evening, the reporter told his boss.

PEOPLE’S ARMY HEADQUARTERS, STRAUSBERG, EAST GERMANY
8:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST
12, 1961

General Heinz Hoffmann, who was both East German defense minister and army commander, stood proudly before his officers. At age fifty, he looked like something out of a World War II film, standing ramrod-straight in his perfectly pressed uniform with eight rows of medals, wavy blond hair with gray streaks, combed back. With his square and high cheekbones, he was almost too handsome.

Like so much of the East German leadership, he had been a rambunctious young communist in prewar Germany. Convicted of assault during anti-Nazi demonstrations, he had done hard jail time. In 1937 and 1938, Hoffmann had been seriously wounded while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, where he had served in an international brigade under the cover name Heinz Roth. After two years in an internment camp, he’d moved to the Soviet Union, where he had been educated for his future work. In 1949, he had taken charge of creating the East German armed forces that he would now deploy against their own people.

Beside him stood his most impressive workhorse officer, Ottomar Pech, a man of a quite different background who had fought in the Third Reich’s Wehrmacht before his capture by the Russians on the Eastern Front. His job was to train the most elite military units and oversee coordination between the secret police and the military, which would be so crucial that evening.

Arrayed before them were the army’s top commanders and senior border police officers at the People’s Army headquarters in Strausberg, some thirty kilometers east of Berlin. They had eaten generously from a cold buffet table groaning with the sort and quality of food that was not easily accessible to all East Germans: sausage, ham, veal, caviar, and smoked salmon. Though alcohol had been available, most of the men drank coffee, for rumors had indicated they would be involved in a secret operation that evening.

Hoffmann briefed officers on what was to come after they watched a morale-building film extolling the might of socialist combat forces. At precisely 8:00 p.m., Hoffmann handed his senior officers the first sealed orders. Successively lower-ranking officers were briefed thereafter, many by telephone. They were ready to mobilize soldiers and police, thousands of whom had been held by their superiors in their barracks and at training grounds throughout the weekend.

By 10:00 p.m., Honecker was confident his apparatus had responded exactly as planned and was ready for full mobilization. He would receive reports throughout the night from commanding officers, district party committees, and government departments. His tentacles stretched everywhere. Honecker would later reflect that the operation that he had begun “in the dawning day, Sunday” would make the world “prick up its ears.”

The little information that had leaked out to the West on the operation wasn’t resulting in any response. The head of West Germany’s Free Democratic Party, Erich Mende, had contacted Ernst Lemmer, Adenauer’s minister responsible for
gesamtdeutsche Fragen
, or German-German relations, after hearing reports from West German intelligence that they were picking up “indications” that showed Ulbricht was planning at some point soon to introduce
Sperrmassnahmen
, or measures to blockade the middle of Berlin. The intelligence had been convincing enough that Mende had come to Lemmer’s office to discuss the danger while they inspected an outspread city map together. The two men agreed that sealing the border would be impossible.

“It just wouldn’t work,” Mende concluded.

Yet at midnight on the dot, Honecker rang army headquarters and issued the order to begin the unimaginable.

“You know the assignment!” he said. “March!”

Hoffmann immediately set his units in motion: some 3,150 soldiers of the 8th Motorized Artillery Division began to roll on East Berlin from Schwerin, with 100 battle tanks and 120 armored personnel carriers. They would park in the stockyards of the Friedrichsfelde district of East Berlin. Hoffmann would dispatch a further 4,200 troops of the 1st Motorized Division from their barracks in Potsdam with 140 tanks and 200 personnel carriers. They would form the second ring of defense behind the border’s front lines, which would be made up of 10,000 men from units of the East Berlin Volkspolizei, the 1st Brigade of the Readiness Police, and the Berlin Security Command.

In all, some 8,200 People’s Police and 3,700 members of the mobile police forces—reinforced with 12,000 factory militia men and 4,500 State Security men—would move into action in the hours ahead. They would be supported by a further 40,000 East German soldiers around the country, just in case the border closure triggered anything similar to the national uprising of June 1953. Soldiers from Saxony, who were considered particularly reliable, would reinforce the 10,000 soldiers of the People’s Army stationed in Berlin.