Berlin 1961 (57 page)

“Johnson was a joke, a total joke,” he said. “All he wanted was to see the crowd.”

As for the arriving battle group, Pike considered it “a rotten lousy outfit” that was little fit for battle but acted arrogantly toward the troops who had been in place for so long. When the new arrivals came to stay in Roosevelt Barracks, they rubbed the long-resident soldiers the wrong way, claiming they had been sent to rescue them after their failure to stop the border closure.

“We took offense to that,” said Pike, “as they were only going to be here for ninety days, then they would be rotated out. We didn’t need saving, and we knew they were only in Berlin for symbolic reasons.” Worse, Johns’s unit was “drunk and disorderly, caught fighting, resisting arrest.”

However, Berliners knew only that America had finally shown its colors. Seldom had so many so loudly celebrated so little rescue. Pike thought it was a measure of Berliners’ despair that they would so loudly cheer so modest a gesture.

Johnson stayed clear of East Berlin during his stay, wanting to avoid either provoking Moscow or inciting a crowd. But after General Clay quietly toured the amputated Soviet part of the city, Clay declared East Berlin to be “an armed camp” with a population that looked “totally oppressed.”

For all the historic moment, Johnson didn’t lose sight of his mission’s other purpose: shopping.

At 5:30 on Sunday morning, his State Department escort Lucian Heichler woke Johnson’s valet to get the vice president’s shoe size so that Brandt could produce the shoes that he had wanted. Because Johnson had feet of two different sizes, which required him to wear handmade shoes, Brandt’s people had a Leiser shoe-shop owner send twenty different pairs over to Johnson. From them, he picked two pairs that fit the bill.

On Sunday afternoon, a famous Berlin porcelain maker, the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur, opened its showroom at Johnson’s request because he had admired the china at Willy Brandt’s official City Hall dinner the night before. He had told the mayor he wanted a set for his new vice presidential residence, a mansion called “the Elms” that he had purchased in Washington, D.C.

They showed the vice president one set after another, but he protested that they were all too expensive for him. He wondered whether they had any “seconds.” With his American escort, Heichler, looking for a hole to crawl into, Deputy Mayor Franz Amrehn saved the day by announcing, “The Senate and people of Berlin want to give you this as a present.”

Replied Johnson, “Oh, well, in that case…”

The vice president then picked the fanciest china he could find, thirty-six place settings in all, and then arranged for his office to send the vice presidential insignia to be painted on every plate, saucer, cup, and bowl.

Shopping aside, Johnson had been infected by Berlin’s spirit. In a report marked
SECRET
, he wrote to Kennedy:

I returned from Germany with new pride in America’s leadership but with an unprecedented awareness of the responsibility which rests upon this country. The world expects so much from us, and we must measure up to the need, even while we seek more help from our allies. For if we fail or falter or default, all is lost, and freedom may never have a second chance.

With that, an order for thirty-six place settings of china, and two pairs of shoes, and having safely seen 1,500 more troops land in Berlin, Johnson returned home.

EAST BERLIN
TUESDAY, AUGUST
22, 1961

Ulbricht was too busy consolidating his victory to engage in self-congratulation.

His determination to change Berlin’s status, which at the beginning of 1961 had neither Soviet approval nor means of execution, had been accomplished more successfully than he could have hoped. He had played a bad hand with enormous skill, and now he hoped to press his advantage.

On August 22, Ulbricht announced publicly that he would establish a no-man’s-land that would stretch for a hundred meters on both sides of the Berlin Wall. East German authorities, without Soviet approval, declared they would shoot West Berliners if they strayed into the buffer zone that very soon would be known to them as “the death strip.”

Swelling with confidence, the following day Ulbricht shrugged off objections from Soviet Ambassador Pervukhin and also reduced crossing points that Westerners could use from seven to only one, Checkpoint Charlie at Friedrichstrasse.

Two days later, Pervukhin and Konev summoned Ulbricht to reprimand him for these unilateral measures. The Soviets, Pervukhin said, could not accept the concept of a no-man’s-land running into West Berlin territory, which “could lead to a clash between the GDR police and the forces of the Western powers.”

So Ulbricht reversed those orders, protesting to his Soviet counterparts that he had “no intention of interfering” in West Berlin affairs. It was an easy compromise to make, as he had won more rights over Berlin than he had dared imagine at the beginning of the year. However, he refused to back off his decision to reduce the Western crossing points to just one.

As would happen so often in 1961, the Soviets ceded the point to Ulbricht.

TEMPELHOF AIRPORT, WEST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST
23, 1961

Chancellor Adenauer finally surfaced in Berlin, but only ten days after the communists had shut down the Berlin border, and after Vice President Johnson and General Clay had safely left town. Only a few hundred people cheered Adenauer when he landed at Tempelhof Airport, and perhaps only another 2,000 awaited him when he arrived for a visit to the Marienfelde refugee camp.

Many West Berliners demonstratively turned away from him as he drove through the city. Others held signs that criticized how he had handled the crisis. One typical placard read
SIE KOMMEN ZU SPÄT
—“You’ve come too late.” Another said sarcastically,
HURRAH, THE SAVIOR HAS COME
. At Marienfelde and elsewhere, the signs suggested voters would punish him for his weak response to the border closure.

When he viewed the wall at spots along the border, the Ulbricht regime taunted him from the eastern side from a loudspeaker truck, comparing him to Adolf Hitler while pointing a high-pressure water hose in his direction. At another spot along the way, however, older East Germans wept and cheered as they waved white handkerchiefs by way of greeting.

Adenauer visited the king of West German media, Axel Springer, who had built his headquarters beside the Berlin border, and whose
BildZeitung
, West Germany’s largest-circulation newspaper, had been most critical of Adenauer and American impotence during the border closing. “Herr Springer, I don’t understand you,” said the chancellor. “Nothing has changed here in Berlin” except that the media was stirring the pot more.

He warned Springer that his newspaper’s antics might revive National Socialism.

Springer stormed from the room in anger.

BERNAUER STRASSE, EAST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER
4, 1961

Berliners grew accustomed to their post-Wall reality with surprising speed. The refugee outflow came to an almost complete halt as escape attempts became riskier and border controls tightened. In increasing numbers, West Berliners were relocating to West Germany rather than taking a chance that the Soviets might not be done quite yet.

At Bernauer Strasse, tour buses visited and dozens of Berliners continually loitered on the Western side of the border, observing their street’s post–August 13 phases: the initial border closure, the removal of Bernauer Strasse’s East Berlin residents, the bricking up of windows and doors, and the construction of the Berlin Wall.

West Berlin police officer Hans-Joachim Lazai and his colleagues had strung a rope between trees near Bernauer Strasse beyond which they would not allow spectators to pass. But on some days the crowd grew so angry that it was difficult to restrain them. Guilt overcame Lazai on the occasions when the hard stream of the police water cannons was required to keep back West Berlin crowds. Far worse were the times when Lazai had to stand by and watch East German border police arrest and cart away those who tried to escape. Following his orders to remain in place and provoke no one, he felt “a sense of helplessness as I stood across from complete injustice.”

Worst of all were the tragic deaths of those desperate days. The first one that Lazai witnessed was that of Ida Siekmann, who on August 21, just one day before her fifty-ninth birthday, became the first fatality at Bernauer Strasse. Lazai had been turning left onto the street on his way to work when he saw a dark ball descend from one of the buildings. Siekmann had thrown her mattress from the third-floor window ahead of herself in a vain hope that it would absorb her fall.

She had died instantly.

After that, West Berlin police used reinforced, sheetlike fireman nets in which they could catch jumpers. Nevertheless, would-be refugees had to jump with great accuracy, as the sixteen men who typically gripped the nets’ edges could not move quickly enough in any direction to compensate for an errant leap.

It was nearly eight on the evening of October 4 when Lazai first shouted through the dark at Bernd Lünser, a twenty-two-year-old East Berlin engineering student, to jump into just such a net from the roof of a four-story apartment building at Bernauer Strasse 44.

For some time, Lünser and two friends had been trying to summon the nerve to rappel down to West Berlin from the rooftop, using a clothesline they had brought with them. By shouting their encouragement, a growing crowd of West Berliners below alerted nearby East German police to their flight attempt.

Gerhard Peters, a nineteen-year-old member of the East German border police contingent, led the pursuit after gaining access to the roof through a trapdoor. Lünser pulled off roof tiles and threw them at Peters, who, after a short time, was joined by three other officers. After a dramatic chase, Lünser’s two friends were taken into custody by police after falling and sliding down the roof into a protective rail.

When one of the East German police shot at the would-be refugees, West German officers below pulled their pistols and exchanged twenty-eight shots with the East Germans. Under orders only to use their guns defensively, the West German police later argued that they had only acted once they had been fired upon.

Given a last chance to escape after a West Berlin policeman’s bullet struck the pursuing East German officer in the leg, Lünser broke free and ran. Some in the crowd shouted for him to throw the policeman off the roof. Others, including Lazai, shouted for him to jump into the outstretched net. When the student finally leapt, he caught a foot on a rain gutter and fell headfirst to the ground some twelve feet from where the men held out their net.

He landed with a deathly splat.

Lazai would later condemn his own role in the incident: “Man, you drew him out into his own death.”

On the following day, East German authorities sent roses to the border policeman Peters. East German Interior Minister Karl Maron decorated him for his sacrifice in fulfilling his duty. A headline in the West Berlin newspaper
BZ
sneered,
DECORATION FOR MURDER
.

R
egine Hildebrandt, who lived nearby at Bernauer Strasse 44, had seen many failed and successful escape attempts by the time Lünser died that day.

As she wrote in her diary, she smoked a cigarette from a pack that had been pulled up by rope to her window in a basket given to her from West Berlin friends, a basket that also contained oranges, bananas, and other goods: “some small condolence for a ruined life.”

“Two huge West German tourist buses just drove by,” she wrote. “Yes, we’ve become Berlin’s number-one tourist attraction. Oh how gladly we’d just be ignored! How gladly we’d turn back the wheels of time and leave things the way they were! Oh, not again! Another bus. This is a ghastly time in which we live. Our lives have lost their spirit. Nobody enjoys work or life anymore. A petulant feeling of resignation hangs over all of us. There is no point. They will do with us as they like, and we can do nothing to stop them.

“Bow your heads, friends, we are all become sheep. Two more buses. Countless faces looking our way, while we sit with balled fists in our pockets.”

Berlin had some unlikely heroes in the days that followed, but their efforts failed as often as they succeeded.

Eberhard Bolle Lands in Prison

Eberhard Bolle was so focused on the potential danger he faced that he glanced only briefly at the news kiosk front pages at West Berlin’s Zoo train station. They reported on the arrival of Vice President Johnson, General Clay, and the U.S. troop reinforcements. But Bolle had other concerns: the philosophy student was about to take the biggest risk of his life.

Before buttoning closed his light blue jacket, Bolle felt to confirm that the two identity cards were in its inside pocket. Though it was not a particularly warm day, he was sweating uncontrollably. His mother adored his disarming smile, but at the moment Bolle wore only a troubled frown.

The first of the two identity cards in his pocket was his own, and he would show it if asked when he crossed into East Berlin. Under the rules after the border closing six days earlier, West Berliners could still cross freely into the Soviet zone with ID. What Bolle planned to do with the second West Berlin identity card was to help the escape to the West of his friend and fellow Free University student Winfried Kastner,
^*
with whom he shared a love of American jazz music. Like most other Berlin students that summer, they had also spent a great deal of their vacation time listening to Ricky Nelson’s latest hit, “Hello Mary Lou,” which had taken West Berlin by storm.

Though the Free University was in West Berlin, about a third of all its 15,000 students before August 13 had been East Berlin residents. Overnight, the border closure had ended their studies. For Kastner it was a particular disappointment, as he was in his last year of history studies and would not be accepted into an East German school because his family was considered politically unreliable. So Bolle was bringing him the ID of a West Berlin friend who closely resembled Kastner, and their simple plan was that he would use it to show border police as he crossed into West Berlin.