The Berlin Wall (25 page)

In June 1961, 19,198 refugees (approx. 630 per day) registered at Marienfelde reception centre. By July the total had leapt to 30,444, (a thousand per day), the highest since 1953. On 2-3 August, 1,322 refugees were registered at Marienfelde; on 3-4 August, 1,100; on 4-5 August, 1,155; and on 5-6 August, 1,283. Over the weekend of 6-7 August, 3,268 left East Germany for West Berlin. The figure for the next day was 1,741.

The total population loss for the GDR for those previous seven days amounted to 9,869. If this were kept up over a year, it would amount to around half a million ‘deserters’, dwarfing even the figure for the
annus horribilis
of 1953.

On Monday 7 August, Ulbricht had told the Politburo members of the coming border-closure operation At the same meeting, it was agreed that the GDR parliament, the People’s Chamber, would assemble on 11 August, where it would approve any measures necessary. The ‘anticipated measures for control’ (i.e. the sealing of the border) would occur during the night between next Saturday to Sunday, on the basis of an order by the Council of Ministers.

So the official decision was revealed to the highest élite of the GDR, and duly rubber-stamped.
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Meanwhile, some Western intelligence sources inside the GDR had started to hint that the decisive moment might come sooner than expected. On 6 August, a CIA source, a doctor quite prominent in his district SED, reported being told at a committee meeting that ‘drastic measures’ to close off West Berlin were planned for the following weekend. Several Soviet and East German army divisions stood in
readiness. A dentist passed on to his French intelligence handler details of a conversation with a patient who held a senior position in the SED. The man had told him that ‘they intended to build barriers through Berlin’.
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Although Willy Brandt’s SPD was now illegal in East Germany, it maintained a clandestine network there. Through this, on 4 August, came another report, from an official in the GDR Health Ministry, that West Berlin was to be sealed off. It gave details. In the Potsdam District alone, 14,000 troops of the East German army had been mobilised, and all police units in the district put under army control, along with the factory paramilitary groups. All leave for police and army units had been cancelled. Moreover, these measures applied not just to the border between West Berlin and the GDR (i.e. the Potsdam area) but also to that between East and West Berlin.

This last, astonishingly accurate report reached Brandt himself on either 6 or 7 August 1961. It was marked with the Mayor’s personal green pencil for the attention of his chief of staff. Later, Brandt would say that no intelligence organisation had predicted the date of the border closure. This may have been true, but only in the very narrowest sense.
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The German intelligence service, the BND, also picked up this and that. As early as mid-July, one of their agents in the East told them that ‘the refugee movement within the population of the Soviet Zone will soon force the SED to take rigorous measures’, and a few days later another source claimed to have heard a ‘top SED functionary’ talking about plans for the sealing-off of West Berlin. The details were being worked out, but as yet the Soviets had not yet given formal permission. This was all true except the last point. Khrushchev had, in fact, finally approved Ulbricht’s plan just a few days earlier.

As late as the first week in August, while Ulbricht and his aides were in Moscow, dotting the final i’s and crossing the last t’s of ‘Operation Rose’, the West German intelligence establishment at its headquarters in Pullach, near Munich, was still mired in speculation about when precisely the East German leader would get the Soviet go-ahead for his alleged Berlin plan.
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The big difficulty was one of imagination. How to divide a modern city of almost four million, to cut streets and railway lines and infrastructure networks that had been functioning, pulsating nerves and
arteries for a huge, lively centre of population—a living urban organism—for many decades, even hundreds of years?

A West Berliner, then a student, toured Israel in the autumn of 1960. He was given a tour of Jerusalem, and was shocked to see a city then divided between an Israeli West and a Jordanian/Palestinian East. Their hosts showed them a wooden wall just by the Catholic Cathedral of Notre Dame. This, it was explained, had been built to stop clashes between young Jews and Arabs, who had a habit of throwing stones at each other across the border.

For a few minutes, we West Berlin students discussed whether something like this would be possible at home. We rejected the thought immediately. The four-sector city of Berlin was in our opinion far too large for a strict division like that in Jerusalem—it couldn’t happen in Berlin, a metropolis that had arisen over centuries of technical progress, with extensive bodies of water and forest, with an intricate pattern of sewers, with a network of subterranean underground and city railway tunnels, inhabited by children who had no inclination to throw stones at each other, as if they were members of two hostile population groups.
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In early August, Erich Mende, chair of the West German Free Democratic Party, was tipped off about the BND’s suspicions. He broke off from campaigning for the elections due on 17 September and went to Bonn to see the Minister for All-German Questions, Ernst Lemmer. The two politicians discussed the possibility. Lemmer, himself a prominent member of the Eastern CDU who had been forced to flee to the West, produced a large map of Berlin and unfolded it out on to the table in his office. He indicated the border around West Berlin. All 164 kilometres of it.

‘We discussed how hard it would be to seal off a great city in such a hermetic fashion,’ Mende wrote later, ‘so that there wasn’t even a mouse hole in it. And Ernst Lemmer said, it just wasn’t possible.’
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Meanwhile, Honecker and his fellow plotters were preparing to do exactly what the Christian Democrat minister had defined as impossible. Every day now, from 9 August, he was in his office, drafting, telephoning, planning.

The omnipresence of the state and its officials in the days before ‘Operation Rose’, the rising wave of stop-and-search actions and spot checks, was already making life difficult for would-be ‘deserters of the Republic’, like 25-year-old Gerhard Diekmann. He left the ancient Baltic port of Wismar on 9 August.

On 9.8.61 just before 4 a.m., I left Wismar by train, travelling in the direction of Schwerin, in order to get to Berlin. During the journey I made the following observations: our train stood for around 15 minutes at the control point of Schönfliess, and we were guarded and had our papers checked by the
Trapos
[transport police]. When I got out of the train to smoke a cigarette, there were tanks and guns of the Red Army standing in a field about 50 metres distant. I saw exactly four, which were well camouflaged.

As the journey continued, I realised that a great part of the young people who had been with us in the train were no longer aboard.

When I arrived at Berlin-Lichtenberg, there were
Trapos
at the barrier again—four or five of them—and they were demanding that passengers submit their luggage for examination. Around six passengers were taken into custody by the
Trapos
. All passengers complained about the constant document checks. Anyone who did not submit to the orders of the
Trapos
had their German identity card confiscated.
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The situation was escalating. But where exactly was it escalating
to
? In the West, even the intelligence insiders seemed unable to distinguish rumour from fact.

On 9 August, the ‘Berlin Watch Committee’ met. This important body, which co-ordinated American intelligence organisations in Berlin and pooled their information, discussed the measures the GDR might be considering to stem the exodus. Some participants reported strong indications from sources inside East Germany that a border-sealing operation was on the cards. These sources were not, admittedly, considered wholly reliable. In the end, the majority opinion still held a total closure of the Berlin border to be technically unfeasible.

Like the Foreign Ministers in Paris, the spooks on the spot concluded
that any drastic action by the East would occur in the autumn, when a separate peace treaty was signed, not before.
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And like the Foreign Ministers, they were wrong.

The huge amount of materials and men required for the border closure was being moved around the GDR in some 400 trucks, deliberately dispersed and taking long routes so that no one would realise that they were all ultimately headed for Berlin.
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Work parties and police teams were also kept away from the sector border until the last moment. These ploys seem to have worked.

All that remained now was to maintain internal secrecy as far as possible. As the clock ticked towards the weekend of 12/13 August, more people on the East German side had to be indoctrinated in ‘Operation Rose’. By 9 August, some sixty GDR functionaries and military commanders of various kinds had been let into the secret of the imminent border closure. A critical moment was approaching when—as the information already starting to dribble through to NATO intelligence services indicated—the West would have more than just vague suspicions. All the more reason for Honecker to keep to his schedule, and to maintain what secrecy and/or external confusion he could muster.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were playing their own game of hide-the-border-closure. On Thursday 10 August, at 4.30 in the afternoon, the three senior liaison officers of the Western military missions based in Potsdam appeared by invitation at the Soviet military headquarters complex near Wünsdorf, south-east of Berlin. They were scheduled to meet with the Soviet commander-in-chief, Germany. In itself, a fairly routine event. Expecting to see the familiar figure of Colonel-General Yakubovski, they were astonished instead to be greeted by a balding, slightly portly figure in his sixties, resplendent in a Soviet marshal’s uniform. ‘Gentlemen, my name is Konev,’ he announced with a stagy twinkle in his eye.

Later they exchanged social chit-chat with the legendary marshal—it was, as the American liaison officer, Colonel von Pawel later remarked, like having General Eisenhower suddenly emerging from retirement. Then one of the Westerners remarked: ‘We are hearing about substantial military transport activity in your command’. They knew that the Soviets were claiming a routine army exercise, but there was no harm in raising
the subject—and if Konev was here, surely something big was going on, or was about to.

The marshal merely smiled and told them in avuncular fashion: ‘Gentlemen, you can rest easy. Whatever may occur in the foreseeable future, your rights will remain untouched and nothing will be directed against West Berlin’.
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It was the all but final act of a classic piece of Khrushchev power-political theatre, and Konev played it perfectly.

On Friday 11 August, prominent East German journalists and regional SED chiefs assembled at the imposing Central Committee building on the Werderscher Markt, a block south of Unter den Linden. They were given a basic run-down of what was about to happen. The newspapers would have to print the formal announcements and also begin the propaganda counter-blast that would justify the action and help to keep the GDR population as calm, or at least as passive, as possible.

That evening,
Stasi
Minister Mielke gathered his senior officials in the officers’ restaurant at the ministry’s headquarters in Hohenschönhausen and explained the situation. Although the organisation itself would play little direct part in the border closure, its job was just as vital. There must be no repeat of the 1953 uprising. This was the
Stasi’
s task.

‘This new chapter demands the mobilisation of each individual member of the State Security,’ Mielke told them, adding an appropriately Orwellian note: ‘In this period we are entering, it will be shown whether we know everything and whether we are firmly anchored everywhere.’ The aim would be to prevent ‘all negative phenomena’.

Mielke didn’t entirely trust the East German army and police either.
Stasi
operatives would also be charged with ensuring the ‘reliability and combat readiness’ of the armed forces during the border closure. In 1953, some soldiers and
Vopos
had sided with the rioters. This must not happen now. In the other main area of danger, the big factory complexes in Berlin and elsewhere, strikes had spread eight years previously like brushfires. ‘Anyone who comes forward with hostile slogans is to be arrested,’ the minister concluded brusquely.

Then Mielke vouchsafed the final secret: ‘The overall operation has been given the codename: “Rose’.’
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And so the
Stasi
set to work, covering Honecker’s back while he put his final plans into practice.

Between Wednesday 9 August and Saturday 12 August 1961, 5,167 refugees were registered. During the following twenty-four hours, it would be about 2,400. Under drastically changed circumstances.

The last day of Berlin’s open border dawned. The weather proved only sporadically summery, reaching only 20°C (68°F), with just three hours’ sunshine in the afternoon. Otherwise conditions stayed grey and, in the crucial hours of darkness, under clear skies, the temperature would fall to 8.6°C (47°F).
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