Iron Curtain (31 page)

The communist party also set up its own youth section, optimistically assuming that many young Germans would want to join. But they did not, or at least not in the numbers anticipated. In a report filed to the leadership in October 1945, the young (or youngish; he was then thirty-three)
Erich Honecker, a trusted insider—he had arrived on the first plane from Moscow with Ulbricht too—informed his superiors that progress was slow. He worried that young Germans “equate politics with the activity of the former Nazi party,” and feared many were “looking for individual solutions to their problems” or were “giving in to an addiction to pleasure and black market dealing.”
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Others also found German young people to be insufficiently political.
Robert Bialek—who had now left Breslau and had temporarily recovered from his disillusionment with the Soviet soldiers who raped his wife—also complained that young Germans still thought and spoke using Nazi vocabulary. Bialek had been named leader of the youth section of the communist party in
Saxony, where he argued in favor of bringing former
Hitler Youth into the new organization, the better to broaden its appeal. These were Germany’s natural leaders, he declared: “We might ostracise the former leaders of the Hitler Youth Movement but we could not eradicate, even by order of Marshal Zhukov, the authority these leaders had wielded.”
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Yet while the communist youth groups languished, the strength and appeal of other groups, particularly Christian groups, was clearly growing. In the moral wasteland of post-Nazi Germany, the church seemed a spiritual and ethical oasis.
Ernst Benda, later a legal scholar, judge, and eventually the president of West Germany’s constitutional court, joined the youth wing of the Christian democrats in
East Berlin at that time precisely because he believed that its doctrine derived from “simple truths”: “Be completely honest, do not lie, be truthful, be fair to your political opponent, be just—which means social justice.”
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Manfred Klein, a young man who had been heavily recruited by the communist party while still in a Soviet prison camp, also drifted back to the church in the autumn of 1945. Returning to Berlin at the war’s end, he had initially helped Honecker organize the communist youth movement, but he soon grew uncomfortable. “Being only twenty years old, we were pretty helpless when facing the closeness of this system and its seemingly complete and irrefutable logic,” he wrote in his memoirs: “having been brought up on Catholic belief and having grown up with Catholic youth work I still held many reservations.” Eventually he joined the Christian Democratic Party’s youth group. This infuriated his former communist colleagues, until they realized he could be of use to them. “You are savvier than I thought you were,” Honecker told him, all smiles. The Soviet comrades approved of his decision too: now they expected him to be an agent within the Christian Democratic milieu, working on their behalf.
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By December 1945, the young communists realized they had to change their tactics. They were failing to attract young people in the same numbers as the other party youth groups, and so they decided to change the rules of the game. Honecker asked Bialek to begin surreptitiously organizing a
“spontaneous” popular movement for a “unified” German youth movement. The push for the unification of all German youth groups under a single umbrella was to originate in Saxony and would involve petitions, meetings, and speeches. Youth leaders would also send letters to the Soviet authorities calling for a single, nonpartisan youth group. Once the Soviet military leaders agreed to this plan, then the “bourgeois” youth leaders would have no choice but to go along: all of the young people would then belong to the new group, and the relative weakness of the young communists would not be so noticeable.
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This was an idea born of failure: because the communist party could not compete for young people, its leaders decided to eliminate the competition. Though German in origin—it seems to have been Honecker’s idea—the plan quickly found favor with the Soviet commanders. In January 1946,
Wilhelm Pieck, at the time chairman of the party’s Central Committee, made a note of a discussion held in Karlshorst, the Soviet headquarters in
Berlin: “The creation of a unified antifascist youth organization: Agree, but decide in Moscow.” Ulbricht duly took up the subject on his next trip to Moscow, and in early February he returned with Moscow’s permission. Thus was born the
Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ).

Bialek’s “spontaneous” call for unity took the other youth leaders by surprise. At a meeting called to discuss the matter, Honecker claimed that “many” groups were demanding a unified, Free German youth movement. When Christian Democratic and Social Democratic youth leaders said they had not heard any such demands, they were shown several baskets containing hundreds of letters. “The surprise was a success,” remembered Klein. “We had not reckoned with such a suggestion at that time.” A founding congress was duly organized and a range of young people—Christian Democrat, Social Democrat, communist—agreed to attend. So did Catholic and Lutheran youth leaders, albeit cautiously. Klein discussed the meeting with
Jakob Kaiser, then the leader of the Christian democrats in Berlin, who agreed that he should take part but advised him to be wary: “None of us knows how long this will work.”
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This first meeting was held in
Brandenburg in April 1946 and it started out optimistically. It began with a song (“The Ballad of Free Youth”) and the unanimous selection of a presidium that included Klein, Honecker, and Bialek. There were several speeches of welcome. Colonel Sergei Tulpanov, the cultural commissar of the Soviet occupation forces, told the young people
that “Hitler’s ideology has left deep traces in the consciousness of German youth” and complimented those in the room, somewhat patronizingly, on having grown out of it: “We know how hard you have worked in order to purge yourselves of all of that.”
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Welcome speeches were followed by more speeches: on the achievements of youth, on the importance of the inclusion of girls, on the need for nationalized industry, on the perfidy of the West. Many of the speakers addressed the hall as “comrades.” One or two Catholic representatives did get up to speak. Yes, we want to unite, said one, “unite in the love of Germany.”
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Although the mood in the hall was reconciliatory, the atmosphere in the corridors was less so, and by day three the atmosphere had turned sour. That morning, some of the more radical communist delegates held a meeting in a side room, during which one of them had complained about the church group leaders. He thought they should be expelled. Bialek told him not to worry, the religious young people would be kept under control: “We will give the churches ten blows a day until they lie on the ground. When we need them again, we will stroke them a little until their wounds are healed.”
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Unfortunately one of the Catholic youth leaders overheard this little speech, took notes on the dialogue, and reported back to his colleagues. Klein and several Catholic leaders announced they would refuse to join the new organization. Some shouting back and forth followed, and a Soviet officer intervened. Major
Beylin promised the Catholics they could have some autonomy within the organization, whereupon they agreed to stay inside: the Soviet occupiers were, in 1946, still anxious for their occupation zone at least to appear democratic and multifaceted.

That desire did not last. In the end, the congress elected sixty-two members to the new organization’s central council, of which more than fifty were either communists or socialists. Separately, the communists allotted to themselves all the important jobs. Honecker, a communist of blind dedication, became and would remain the Free German Youth’s leader until long after he had ceased to be a youth himself (he resigned from the Free German Youth in 1955, when he was forty-three years old). A Free German Youth training school was quickly opened in
Bogensee. Here, Klein remembered, “the real intentions of Honecker and his comrades became apparent very quickly … the boys and girls were trained in Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology and got precise directives on what they had to do to help socialism win in the enterprises and the country.”
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The intentions of the Soviet comrades became clearer as well. In August 1946, authorities in
Saxony sounded the alert because local churches had organized their own youth retreats and summer camps. The Soviet forces came to the rescue. Soldiers marched into the forest and, in the words of a report filed at the time, “brought the children home.”
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In October, there were ominous power cuts during a large
Christian Democratic youth rally in
West Berlin. Everyone present knew that electricity in Berlin at that time was all supplied by a power station in the Soviet-controlled half of the city. In a spirit of defiance, the rally continued by candlelight.
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Other groups were simply dispersed. In the spring of 1946, Soviet authorities discovered that an unregistered evangelical youth group, Christian Endeavor (Entschieden für Christus) was active in Saxony, where it held Bible discussions and prayer meetings. “This proved that control on the activity of German organizations is weak,” the Saxon authorities declared, and they immediately banned the organization.
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Another group that set up an “independent” cell of the Free German Youth in
Leipzig met a similar fate. Although the leaders of the group argued that their members were more intellectually inclined than the “workers” in the mainstream Free German Youth, and that they therefore needed their own organization, they were abruptly disbanded too.
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One Soviet report complained that many of the groups that had religious affiliations “act far outside the frame of religion” and were engaging in “cultural-political work with youth,” which is of course what church youth groups had always done.

In the winter of 1946, the Soviet authorities at Karlshorst also informed the brand-new German cultural administration—part of the German bureaucracy set up to enact Soviet policy—that artistic and cultural groups of all kinds, whether for children, young people, or adults, were illegal unless they were affiliated to “mass organizations” such as the Free German Youth, the official trade union organization, or the official cultural union, the Kulturbund: “Otherwise they cannot be controlled.” A German inspector sent out to gauge the situation of “associations” at this time discovered many such groups not aligned to mass organizations. She seemed particularly horrified by the large numbers of independent chess clubs. She called upon Soviet and German cultural authorities to eliminate these groups—chess clubs, sporting clubs, singing clubs—a task that was not finished until 1948–49. Other apolitical organizations were banned right away. Hiking clubs were strictly forbidden, for example, presumably because the Hitler Youth had a
particular fondness for hiking (though the Wandervogel, the famous German hiking and nature clubs founded at the end of the nineteenth century, had once had left-wing as well as proto-Nazi sympathies).
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Klein kept working within the system. Though frustrated with his role as the “token Christian” inside the Free German Youth, he spent a good bit of his time trying to organize the other token Christians into a voting bloc. He lobbied to keep the Free German Youth open to many different kinds of young people, but to no avail. Almost exactly a year after its founding, this brief Soviet-German experiment in nonpartisan youth politics had come to an end. On March 13, 1947, the NKVD arrested Klein, along with fifteen other young Christian Democratic leaders. A Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to a Soviet labor camp. He remained there for nine years.

On June 19, 1946,
Szabad Nép
, the Hungarian communist party’s newspaper, reported a shocking story: a Russian officer had been murdered at the Oktogon, a busy eight-sided intersection in central Budapest. During the shootout, another Russian soldier had also died, along with a woman described as a “Hungarian working-class girl.”
Szabad Nép
explained that the murderer, a young man named István Pénzes, had been a member of a rural Catholic youth group, Kalot, and thus an “enemy of our economic recovery and freedom.” Investigators found his charred body in an attic overlooking the square and concluded he had been part of a larger conspiracy: “The traitors who lost their lands, the parasites of the hardworking Hungarian people, will try everything, in anticipation of the peace treaty and the currency reform, to make our nation’s life impossible.”
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Little time was lost in drawing further conclusions about what quickly became known as the Oktogon murders. On the following morning,
Szabad Nép
filled its entire front page with an editorial entitled “Youth and Democracy”: “It is high time for us to take the weapons and the grenades out of the hands of our misled youth … After Monday’s attack, we must tell the right wing of our democracy that fighting against the fascists is a national struggle, a national duty.”
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The funeral of the two Red Army soldiers on the following day received equally lavish media coverage. “Hundreds of thousands” participated in the ceremony for the dead soldiers, according to
Szabad Nép
. Led by Hungarian and Soviet officials, mourners had carried banners with slogans such as “Death to the Traitors” and “Liquidate Fascist Killers.” An
editorialist repeated the call for stricter treatment of misled youth: “Let us stop all reactionary criticism … Let us prevent certain church circles from teaching our youth how to commit murder.”
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In his funeral oration,
General Vladimir Sviridov, the recently arrived chairman of the
Allied Control Commission
in Hungary, also spoke. Although “the Red Army gave the Hungarian people the possibility to establish a new life according to democratic principles,” he declared, certain “reactionary forces, like wild dogs, attack the greatest protector of the Hungarian people, the Red Army.” Sviridov castigated Hungarian politicians: “Here in your country, which you call a friend of the Soviet Union, fascist wrongdoers ambush Soviet people. Here in your country you pay for all the blood spilled by the Red Army with bullets.”
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