Berlin 1961 (54 page)

CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr rushed to Bernauer Strasse to tell the story. “We noticed slabs of concrete being moved into place as though to build a
wall
,” he said tentatively, among the first to employ the term “wall” to describe what eventually would divide Berliners. With his distinctive baritone laced with disbelieving emotion, he compared it to what Germans had built in Warsaw to contain Jews.

Schorr tried to explain to his American listeners why the U.S. military was watching passively while the communists made the figurative Iron Curtain a physical reality of concrete and mortar. “We might have been willing to go to war to defend our right to stay in Berlin,” he said, “but can we go to war to defend the right of East Germans to get out of their own country?”

Construction crews had also begun operating at Potsdamer Platz, laboring under huge floodlights that allowed round-the-clock work. However, it was Bernauer Strasse that would become both the focus and the symbol of Ulbricht’s intention to make Berlin’s divide both permanent and impermeable.

A fluke of prewar planning had put Bernauer Strasse directly on the dividing line between the East Berlin district of Mitte, in the Soviet zone, and the West Berlin borough of Wedding, in the French sector. Until 1938, the demarcation line had been down the middle of the cobblestoned, kilometer-long Bernauer Strasse, but in that year Wedding’s street cleaners protested. To simplify their job, Berlin’s Third Reich authorities expanded Wedding’s territory to the edge of the four-story apartment buildings on the street’s eastern side so that their cleaners could rule over the entire thoroughfare.

As a result, Berlin’s Cold War division left Bernauer Strasse’s pavement and the apartment buildings on its northern side in West Berlin, and all the homes on the southern side in East Berlin. So in the first two days after August 13, these East Berlin residents could escape to the West—depending on their apartments’ locations in their buildings—either by walking out the front door or climbing down a rope or sheet through an open window.

Like many of the soldiers dispatched to East Berlin for Operation Rose, nineteen-year-old Hans Conrad Schumann was born in rural Saxony, where his father had raised sheep in the village of Leutewitz. These were roots that authorities knew from experience would make young Schumann less politically susceptible. Yet as Schumann patrolled the East German side of the border along Bernauer Strasse on August 15, he failed to see the threat to his socialist homeland that he had been instructed to resist. Instead, all he saw were justifiably angry, unarmed protesters shaking their fists and shouting that he was a pig, a traitor, or—more hurtful, given the German past—a concentration camp guard.

It had been a confusing experience, as Schumann had felt greater sympathy for the crowd than for the soldiers who then dispersed them with smoke bombs and water cannons. It was then that Schumann began to consider his own escape. At the fast pace the construction crews were working, Schumann thought to himself, within days a concrete wall would replace all the barbed-wire fencing that still marked most of the border on Bernauer Strasse. Within weeks, all of East Berlin would be enclosed, and his chance would be gone.

As he visualized his flight, Schumann pressed down on the top of the coiled wire where he was standing watch and tested how much it would give against what amount of pressure.

“What are you doing there?” asked a colleague.

Though Schumann’s heart beat wildly, he responded calmly.

“The wire is rusting already,” he responded. It had the benefit of truth.

A young photographer began to watch Schumann from a few paces away in West Berlin. Peter Leibing, working on behalf of the photo agency Conti-Press in Hamburg, had rushed the 160 miles to Berlin to capture history as it unfolded. The images were powerful: East German soldiers cradling submachine guns, crying women, angry and sad faces, all framed through strands of barbed wire. When Leibing arrived at the epicenter of this drama, Bernauer Strasse, he joined a large crowd of West Berliners who had already gathered to watch the wall’s construction. Standing on a corner of Ruppinerstrasse in the West, Leibing looked through his lens at Conrad Schumann as he stood against a building in the East, smoking a cigarette. Some in the crowd told Leibing they had watched Schumann return to the barbed-wire coil on several occasions, always pushing the wire down a little farther to test its resistance to pressure.

The larger his audience, Schumann thought to himself, the greater the chance of a safe escape, since his colleagues would be less likely to shoot him as he fled. Schumann shouted at a young West Berliner who was approaching the border that he should get back. But then he confided to the same individual under his breath,
“Ich werde springen”
(I’m going to jump).

The young man raced off, and before long a police van pulled up as closely as possible without attracting the suspicion of the other East German soldiers. Leibing trained his lens on the spot in the barbed wire that Schumann had been testing. It struck him as ironic that he was using an East German camera, an Exakta. The longer he waited, the more it seemed to Leibing that Schumann had lost his courage or never intended to jump.

At about 4:00 p.m., Schumann saw his two colleagues disappear around a corner and out of sight. He tossed away his cigarette, raced forward, and jumped onto the top of the coil with his right boot, pressing down just hard enough to propel himself forward but not to sink into the concertina wire. As he soared, he released his Kalashnikov submachine gun with his right hand while extending his left arm for balance. It looked to the cheering crowd as if he were extending his wings for flight. His flat steel helmet remained steady on his head as he pulled his neck into his shoulder. Like a champion hurdler, he landed on his left boot and then ran without shortening his stride up to and then through the Opel Blitz police van’s open door.

Drawing upon his previous experience photographing horse jumps in Hamburg, Leibing snapped a photo that perfectly captured the soldier in flight over the obstacle beneath him. His manual shutter would give him only one shot, but that was enough to produce an iconic photo.

“Welcome to the West, young man,” said a West Berlin police officer to a shaking, silent Schumann, and he collapsed in the van.
^*
The door slammed shut and the vehicle sped away. It was but a brief triumph.

Within a week, Ulbricht had grown so confident that Kennedy would not intervene that on August 22, he began to expand his wall construction to multiple sites. Though history would record August 13 as the Berlin Wall’s birthdate, the truth was that it rose only gradually in the days that followed, once the communists could be certain they would face no resistance.

RATHAUS SCHÖNEBERG, CITY HALL OF WEST BERLIN
4:00 P.M., WEDNESDAY, AUGUST
16, 1961

Willy Brandt had never been so worried before a speech.

As he stood before the Rathaus Schöneberg, he looked down on 250,000 angry Berliners and knew it would be difficult to strike the right tone. He had to channel the crowd’s rage, but not so ferociously that it incited them to storm across the border, only to be shot down.

He also knew this crucial moment was a campaign opportunity. Elections were only one month off, and Brandt wanted to show Germans that he could more effectively defend their interests than the aging Chancellor Adenauer, who with his American friends had done nothing to stop the border closure nor reverse it. Adenauer had turned down Brandt’s invitation to join him at the rally, and he had not set foot in Berlin since August 13.

Thus far, Adenauer had resisted pressure from his party and the public to visit the city because, he said, his appearance might incite political unrest and encourage false expectations. What he didn’t say was that it would also underscore his impotence. Adenauer was also eager to avoid giving the Soviets any excuse to expand on their success and threaten West Berlin or West German freedoms—a line Moscow had been careful not to cross.

So while Brandt prepared for his speech, Adenauer met in Bonn with the Soviet ambassador to West Germany, Andrei Smirnov. He agreed to sign a communiqué the Soviet had brought to the meeting: “The Federal Republic would not undertake any step that could damage its relationship with the Soviet Union or endanger the international situation.”

It reeked of appeasement.

Within forty-eight hours of the border closure, Adenauer had announced that he would not cut trade ties with East Germany, reversing his initial threats. Even his hawkish defense minister Franz Josef Strauss had appealed for calm. “If shooting starts,” he told a West German crowd, “no one knows with what kind of weapons it will end.”

British Prime Minister Macmillan, the ally so reluctant to provoke the Russian bear, had praised Adenauer for having responded with a “heated heart and cool head.” It seemed as though, after all his concern about Kennedy’s leadership, Adenauer was now adopting the U.S. president’s position on the wall.

However, Adenauer’s response was one more of resignation than conviction. He had seen his worst fears realized regarding Kennedy’s indecisive leadership. Heinrich Krone, the chairman of Adenauer’s party faction in the Bundestag, wrote in his diary, “This was the hour of our greatest disillusionment.” The building of the wall ended whatever residual confidence Adenauer had that membership in “the strongest alliance in the world” could guarantee absolute security.

He was also taking the long view. His West Germany remained intact and anchored in NATO. There was no advantage in denying the reality that East Berlin had landed ever more securely in communist hands. Therefore, his most important purpose was to win the September 17 elections and keep his country out of socialist control.

Smirnov wooed and threatened Adenauer along the usual Soviet lines. He spoke of how constructively Moscow had worked with Adenauer while reminding him of his country’s certain destruction should he forget Germany’s role in the last two world wars and pursue what he called warlike activities and escalation now.

During his meeting with Smirnov, Adenauer chose not to condemn the Soviets or Khrushchev. Instead, he extended thanks to the Soviet leader for his greetings, warmly recalled his last meeting with Khrushchev, and spoke of his focus on winning the September 17 elections.

Only at that point did he mention Berlin. “We’re dealing in my view here with an aggravating and unpleasant matter, which has been played up way beyond the necessary,” he told Smirnov. “I would be grateful if the Soviet government could calm the situation.” Adenauer said he worried and “quite openly feared” that developments in Berlin and the Soviet zone “under some conditions could lead to bloodshed.” He said plaintively, “I would be grateful if the Soviet government could prevent such an occurrence.”

If his approach to the Soviets was one of restraint, it was quite the opposite when it came to his political opponent, Willy Brandt. Adenauer knew the border closure would hurt him with voters. He also knew an increasing number of them were questioning whether the old man was still fit enough to lead, and that Brandt had moved his Social Democrats to the more acceptable political center. He hoped voters would weigh all that against West Germany’s thriving economy and the stability he had achieved for his country within the Western alliance.

Less than forty-eight hours after the communists had closed the border, Adenauer had campaigned in the Bavarian city of Regensburg rather than rushing to Berlin. He told the crowd he did not wish to inflame the situation by grandstanding in Berlin. Instead of attacking the communists, he took a nasty swipe at Brandt’s character, for the first time referring publicly to his illegitimate birth. “If ever anyone has been treated with the greatest consideration by his political opponents,” said Adenauer, “it is Herr Brandt, alias Frahm,” a reference to his unwed mother’s maiden name, which Brandt had discarded while in wartime exile.

At an August 29 campaign speech that followed in Hagen, Westphalia, Adenauer told a partisan crowd that Khrushchev had shut down the Berlin border so as to help the socialist Brandt in the upcoming elections. The German press attacked Adenauer for turning so viciously on Brandt, but among voters Adenauer was effectively sowing doubts about his opponent.

Brandt, who until then had responded with restraint, lashed back. “The old gentleman really cannot grasp what’s going on anymore.” He advised Adenauer to seek
“ein friedliches Lebensabend”
—a peaceful retirement. Brandt calculated that his best strategy was to announce that he was abandoning electioneering altogether. “For me all that matters is the struggle for Berlin,” he said, announcing that he would reduce his election work to one day each week and otherwise focus on “Germany’s destiny.”

Brandt realized that perhaps the most important factor with voters was how he handled the Americans. On the day of his rally, West Germany’s most-read newspaper,
Bild-Zeitung
, with its circulation of 3.7 million, covered the entire top half of its front page with a headline that captured the public mood:
THE EAST ACTS—AND THE WEST? THE WEST DOES NOTHING
.

The editors had placed large photographs of the three Allied leaders under the story with derisive cutlines: “President Kennedy remains silent / Macmillan goes hunting / And Adenauer insults Brandt.”

In an accompanying front-page editorial,
Bild
said:

We entered the Western alliance because we believed this would be the best solution for Germany as well as for the West. The majority of Germans, the overwhelming majority, is still convinced of this. But this conviction is not strengthened if some of our partners, at a moment when the German cause is in great danger, coolly declare: “Allied rights have not been touched.”

The German cause is in the greatest danger. Three days already and so far nothing has happened apart from a paper protest by the Allied commandants.