The Berlin Wall (14 page)

The party should have been forewarned. Trouble was already rife elsewhere in the Soviet imperium.

In early June 1953, as East Germany’s Politburo wrestled with the ‘new course’, there were strikes and riots in industrial areas of Czechoslovakia, affecting 129 factories. On 6 June, there were mass demonstrations in the key manufacturing and brewing city of Plzn (German, Pilsen). Workers stormed the city hall and occupied the Skoda armaments factories. Portraits of Stalin and Gottwald were burned. Demonstrators hoisted the American flag. The government sent in the army. There were deaths. Thousands were imprisoned.

In the GDR the problems began on 16 June 1953. In the Stalinallee (formerly Frankfurter Allee) a huge, high-rise residential building project was emerging from bombed-out ruins. Designed in 1930s Stalinist ‘wedding cake’ style, with neo-classical touches that quoted the Prussian
master Schinkel, on a scale that hinted at Albert Speer, the building process began with a huge propaganda fanfare.

The Stalinallee—no accident that the name of the
vodzh
had been lent to the project—was to show what the new, Communist Germany was capable of. The buildings would stretch, like a great windowed wall, along a wide, tree-lined boulevard. And the ‘first socialist street of the German capital, Berlin’ was to be built very quickly.

On 16 June 1953, the construction workers decided that the pace demanded of them was too much. They held a meeting at which they voted to deliver a petition directly to Otto Grotewohl, protesting against raised work norms. As they marched through the streets they found other construction and factory workers joining them. In time the demonstrators reached the huge 1930s building in the Leipziger Strasse that had once housed Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry but was now the home of the GDR’s Council of Ministers. They were now 10,000-strong.

The cream of the working class assembled outside the headquarters of their alleged representatives. They started shouting insults aimed at the SED leadership, such as ‘
Spitzbart, Bauch und Brille sind nicht des Volkes Wille!’
(Pointy beard—Ulbricht—Belly—the corpulent Pieck—and Glasses—bespectacled Grotewohl—are not the people’s will!). A construction worker named Horst Schlaffke sprang on to a table and demanded that Grotewohl and Ulbricht address them in person. ‘If they don’t come out, we’ll call a general strike!’ he declared to huge applause.

None of the big names showed themselves. The relatively junior Heavy-Industry Minister, Fritz Selbmann, was sent out to placate the workers. He tried a routine appeal to their political solidarity (‘My dear colleagues, I, too, am only a worker’), but got boos and whistles. Selbmann re-consulted and then reappeared. He announced changes in the work-norm ordinance that would make compliance voluntary.

The workers, who knew how little the concept of ‘voluntary’ meant in the SED state, became increasingly angry. A general strike was declared for the next day. The workers marched back via Police Headquarters in Alexanderplatz. Windows were broken, SED banners and posters destroyed or defaced. They seized a government loudspeaker van and used it to spread their message as they headed back towards the Stalinallee. There the crowd broke up, parts of it heading towards Lichtenberg and
other eastern suburbs, where many lived. Touchingly, the government-property loudspeaker van was parked where the authorities could find it.
¹⁹

In Berlin, two night shifts refused to work: first some track-maintenance crews of the transportation authority and then the workers at the ball-bearing factory in Berlin-Lichtenberg.
²⁰
When the workers arrived at the huge Upper Spree Cable Works in Berlin at 6.30 a.m., they also refused to work.

Meanwhile, police units had been bused in from Potsdam, Leipzig and Magdeburg in preparation for more trouble. The authorities had closed the Strausberger Platz subway station, at the western extremity of the Stalinallee. At yet more factories, the morning shift did no work but engaged in discussion of the situation. Soon dozens of other workplaces in East Berlin, including large-scale enterprises such as the Borsig locomotive works, were also paralysed by strikes. When the party sent in agitators or (state-employed) union officials to persuade the strikers to return to work, they were howled down.

West Berliners streamed over the Oberbaumbrücke from the American sector to join the demonstrations around the Ostbahnhof. At Friedrichstrasse station and the nearby House of Ministries, state-owned shops—blamed for high prices—were set on fire. SED banners were torn down, piled up and also torched.

At the same time, between the Strausberger Platz and the Alexanderplatz, Soviet army all-terrain vehicles were seen for the first time rumbling into position, though as yet taking no action.

By ten o’clock, demonstrators were seen carrying banners that declared: ‘We demand free elections!’ A euphoric crowd surged towards the Brandenburg Gate, singing the Social Democratic workers’ song, ‘Brothers to the Sun, to Freedom!’, and later the third verse of the old German national anthem, ‘Deutschland über Alles’, which called for ‘unity, law and freedom’ and had recently been adopted as the official anthem of the Federal Republic.

At the modernistic Columbushaus, on the Potsdamer Platz, where a police station shared the space with a state-owned retail store, the police were overpowered and forced to strip. Windows were broken, furniture and police documents tossed from on high to crash into the Potsdamer
Platz below. A white flag was hung from the building. It was said that several of the captured
Vopos (Volkspolizei)
were delivered to the Western police, who stood just over the border in the Tiergarten. A group of youths clambered up the Brandenburg Gate and tore down the Soviet flag that flew there, chanting: ‘We want freedom, we want bread, we will beat all Russians dead!’

Something close to a full-scale uprising was taking shape, involving tens, even hundreds of thousands of ordinary Berliners. They were calling for freedom, elections and, increasingly, a reunited Germany. The Communist authorities were preparing to give them their answer.

Noon came and went. After trying unsuccessfully to break into the Economics Ministry, a large crowd veered off towards the Potsdamer Platz to be confronted by the power of the Red Army. Dozens of Soviet T-34 tanks had moved into Berlin. The official order had been given by the Russian city commandant, Major-General Dibrova, but behind the decision lay the Soviet leadership, which had been informed the previous day of the gathering unrest.

Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s executioner, had flown to Berlin during the night and was now personally supervising the counter-attack.

The first shots were fired on the Marx-Engels-Platz, where a group of young East Berliners tried to clamber atop a tank. Demonstrators fought back with bricks, paving stones, and chunks of metal, but they could make little impression on the might of the Red Army. The Russians fired into the crowd. Their guns swept the border areas to prevent demonstrators escaping into West Berlin.
²¹

At 13.00, a state of emergency was declared by the SMA. Public gatherings of more than three people were banned. Anyone contravening these instructions could be shot. Once the Soviet tanks had broken the momentum of the uprising and sealed the sector border in the centre of Berlin, a mass of KVP squads, including the reinforcements summoned during the night from other cities, moved in to clear up. Many were as brutal as the Russians—beating up protesters and bystanders alike and firing into crowds—even shooting some from behind as they tried to run away.

Among those shot was Rudi Schwander, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy from East Berlin, son of a bakery worker. He had been fleeing the scene
when a
Vopo
’s bullet hit him in the back of the head. Young Rudi collapsed. The unconscious boy was picked up by fellow demonstrators and carried over the nearby border into the French sector, where he died. By late afternoon, the resistance in Berlin was broken.

The seventeenth of June, the day of the GDR workers’ uprising, gave its name to a long, wide boulevard in West Berlin. Formerly the Charlottenburger Chaussee, the ‘Street of the 17 June’ (Strasse des 17. Juni) runs four kilometers from the Ernst-Reuter-Platz, past the ‘Victory Column’ to the Reichstag and then the Brandenburg Gate. Its name makes many think of the uprising as a Berlin event, but in fact it was a phenomenon that spread across the length and breath of the GDR.

According to official records discovered after the fall of the East German regime, around half a million employees throughout the country went on strike on 17 June 1953. Four hundred and eighteen thousand were estimated to have taken part in demonstrations. Strikes and demonstrations were even more widespread in the southern industrial area of Halle/Merseburg than in the capital. The number of strikers in the light- and precision-industrial city of Dresden actually equalled those in Berlin. In Leipzig and Magdeburg, historic strongholds of the Left and the trade-union movement, there were violent clashes between workers and security forces.

In rural areas, there was violent unrest. Party officials and collective-farm managers were attacked. There were protest meetings and mass withdrawals from agricultural collectives. In eastern Saxony, Soviet troops intervened when a farmers’ demonstration attracted hundreds of sympathisers from local factories, a junction of resistance forces that amounted to a nightmare for the authorities.
²²

As in Berlin, the actual outbreaks of disorder were dealt with by martial law and curfews, but so deep-seated were the resentments that protests rumbled on into July in individual factories and farming collectives.

The demonstrators called for Ulbricht to discuss their grievances, but where was the all-powerful First Secretary of the SED? The answer was a humiliating one. Ulbricht spent 17 and 18 June under Soviet protection at Red Army headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst, with Grotewohl, Herrnstadt, and Zaisser, while the Soviets and the police dealt with the trouble.

Semenov, Moscow’s representative, was also at Karlshorst, and reportedly showed only contempt for the East German leaders. At the height of the crisis, he told them: ‘RIAS says that there is no longer any government in the GDR’. Semenov then turned to his senior Red Army colleagues. ‘Well,’ he remarked acidly in Russian, ‘that is just about true.’
²³

When the Central Committee of the SED met again on 21 June, its members were seriously shaken. ‘If masses of workers do not understand the party,’ someone said, ‘then the party is guilty, not the workers’. Only slowly did a counter-version emerge: the uprising had been the product of Fascist
agents provocateurs
, operating at the behest of Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and their puppets in Bonn, with the hyenas of RIAS screaming encouragement over the air waves.

All the same, in the cold light of the post-uprising dawn, Ulbricht was not in a strong position. Beria was said to have called him an ‘idiot’.
²⁴

Ulbricht’s support in East Berlin was even shakier. Only the arch-Stalinist Herman Matern, and the youth-movement leader Erich Honecker (a relative stripling at forty but a hardliner just the same) still supported Ulbricht. A couple of others were undecided. It seemed that Ulbricht was doomed.

The problem was that his enemies lacked killer instinct. In late June, Herrnstadt proposed that the single-person party secretariat be modified, the Politburo expanded, and a committee formed that would oversee the ‘new course’. This would turn the SED over to a collective leadership. The Soviets seemed supportive. Greeting Ulbricht on his sixtieth birthday, they addressed him not as ‘General Secretary’ but as ‘one of the most well-known organisers and leaders of the SED’.

They had underestimated him. On 2 July, after a week of intrigue, the Politburo met again. This time, the veteran leader fought back, his tactic clearly to hold on at all costs. When Zaisser proposed replacing Ulbricht with Herrnstadt, the result was a heated debate but no resolution. In the end, Semenov’s deputy, Miroshinchenko, who presided over the meeting, insisted that they postpone any decision until his boss returned from Moscow.

Zaisser, the
Stasi
chief, tried again on 7 July, the day before Ulbricht and Grotewohl were due to fly to Moscow on a brief, apparently routine
visit. After a meeting lasting several hours, it remained obvious that the SED boss had little support. However, Ulbricht was a master of detail and procedure. He knew how to delay things while he planned his counter-attack. Again, the matter remained undecided. Then he and Grotewohl left for the airport.
²⁵

The embattled East German leader arrived to find Moscow full of other heads of satellite governments, who had also been summoned to the Kremlin to be briefed on the latest developments. And these were dramatic in the extreme.

Beria had been arrested almost two weeks previously for alleged ‘criminal anti-party and anti-governmental activities’. He was, the charge went, ‘an agent of imperialism’. His colleagues, terrified of what the Security Minister would do to them when he got the chance, had struck first; and, unlike Ulbricht’s enemies, their aim was swift and true. Beria had been seized at a Kremlin meeting, where his professional killers and special troops could not protect him. He was now languishing in jail and would be executed the following year. Ulbricht’s most active enemy in Moscow was no more. Had Beria remained the most powerful man in Russia, Ulbricht would undoubtedly have been deposed (and worse).

Ulbricht and Grotewohl returned to Berlin twenty-four hours later to attend an evening session of the Politburo. They reported the news of Beria’s arrest. Again Ulbricht’s opponents did not go in for the kill, assuming that the end of the autocratic Beria would inevitably mean the end of the autocratic Ulbricht.