The Berlin Wall (6 page)

By the end of January 1933, the civil war was over. The Nazis had won.

According to one story, the 85-year-old Reich President, First World War hero Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, peered out of his palace window on the night Hitler became chancellor. A torchlit parade was sweeping down Unter den Linden. The first thing he saw was a regular army unit, moving in perfect marching time. He smiled with senile pride. There followed a bunch of brown-uniformed Nazis. Street thugs, whose attempts at marching failed to conceal shambling, often drunken gaits. The President rubbed his ancient eyes and turned to one of his staff.

‘Ah,’ murmured the man who had routed the Tsar’s armies at the battle of Tannenberg in 1914, ‘I did not know we had taken so many Russian prisoners!’

New elections, held with Hitler controlling the levers of government,
gave the Nazis a majority. The Communist Party was forbidden. Walter Ulbricht went into hiding, initially sheltered in their garage by a family of Social Democrats. He was one among a handful of prominent Communist leaders who managed to avoid arrest.

Absurdly, while individual Communists risked their lives to oppose the Nazis, a bitter power struggle broke out between the surviving leaders. The Comintern had no notion of the urgency of the situation. Hitler’s rise to power was not a final situation but a temporary phase, Moscow insisted, just a predictable stage in capitalism’s death-throes. The Social Democrats and other anti-Nazi parties were to be combated as savagely as before.

Meanwhile, the Gestapo was sweeping up remaining members of the anti-Nazi underground into concentration camps. While the Communists, an instinctively conspiratorial party, might survive a little longer, they too were doomed. Admitting defeat, Ulbricht travelled first to Moscow, then to Paris. There another prominent German Communist, Wilhelm Pieck, was setting up a Central Committee in Exile.

Ulbricht remained the ice-cold, loyal servant of Moscow, for whom the party could do no wrong. At the end of that catastrophic year, 1933, he glibly announced: ‘Developments have confirmed the correctness of the KPD’s strategy and tactics.
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He and the other surviving Communists would return to Berlin under circumstances that before 1933 only a madman could have imagined. Berlin would lie in ruins. The red, hammer-and-sickle flag would flutter over what remained of the German Reichstag.

3

‘IT MUST LOOK DEMOCRATIC, BUT WE MUST HAVE EVERYTHING IN OUR HANDS’

ON 1 MAY 1945
, Walter Ulbricht set foot on German soil for the first time in twelve years.
¹

Before dawn the previous day, Ulbricht had woken in his room at the Hotel Lux in Moscow. Since 1917, this splendid Tsarist-era building on Tver’skaya Street had provided comfortable accommodation for favoured foreign comrades. Ulbricht belonged to that privileged few. Otherwise, he would not have been there. He would nave been dead, like Hermann Schubert and Fritz Schubert, also leaders of the underground KPD, or former Politburo member Heinz Neumann. All had sought refuge in the welcoming bosom of the Soviet Union, and had perished in the cellars of the NKVD or the cruel wastes of the Gulag.

For Stalin, all humans were suspect, but foreigners, even Communist foreigners, were most suspect of all. Many thousands of lesser fish, refugees from Fascism, were sacrificed, along with their families, to the Soviet leader’s paranoia. In August 1939, Stalin made a pact with Hitler, opening the way for the rape of Poland. In a breathtakingly cynical gesture of goodwill to the Führer, during that autumn Stalin delivered hundreds of refugee German Communists back to the Reich. Those not immediately executed disappeared into Gestapo prisons and concentration camps.

The exiled Ulbricht obeyed every bizarre twist and turn of Stalin’s policies. He spent years travelling on Comintern business. Following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, he turned to political work with German troops captured by the Red Army on the Eastern Front. His job was to persuade POWs to turn against Hitler and support a Communist future for post-war Germany.

Now all that work, and all that subservience, was bearing fruit. By 1945, Ulbricht ranked second in the exiled German Communist hierarchy after the veteran Communist leader, 69-year-old Wilhelm Pieck. Spring was here, and the war against Hitler was now all but won. A new phase was beginning.

At six a.m. on I May, a bus arrived to collect him and nine other German exiles.

Courtesy of Lend-Lease, two American McDonnell Douglas transport planes were waiting on the tarmac at Moscow airport—one for Ulbricht’s group and the other for members of the ‘National Committee Free Germany’, prominent German prisoners of war who had agreed to work against the Nazis. They were also flying home, but for presentation reasons would travel separately from the Communists.

Little was said during the flight. ‘Under Stalin you didn’t ask questions…. Under Stalin you didn’t talk much.
²
The Communists’ plane landed at a captured German
Luftwaffe
base seventy kilometres east of Frankfurt on the Oder.

They stayed overnight at an inn and carried out preliminary discussions with Soviet political officers before travelling by road to Bruch-mühle, near Strausberg, thirty kilometres east of Berlin. The fires of the burning capital could be clearly seen from their new base, the headquarters of Soviet Colonel-General Berzarin. Berzarin had been appointed by Stalin as city commandant of Berlin on 24 April 1945, when Hitler still had nearly a week to live. The General was currently visting the front line, but his staff had organised accommodation for the German Communists in a nearby villa.

Ulbricht headed for Berlin, while the others stayed at their new quarters. Their leader returned that evening. The tireless Ulbricht called a meeting, which Soviet political officers also attended. He told his comrades: ‘It will be our task to build the structure for the organs of German self-government in Berlin.’ They would gather any technicians, engineers and construction experts they could find, plus teachers and artistic leaders. This was what the Russians wanted. This was the correct next step.

His colleagues glanced at each other in astonishment. Everyone knew of the unspeakable chaos and destruction in Berlin. Hitler had killed
himself twenty-four hours previously, but fighting was still going on. Ulbricht talked as if he had just been made mayor of a town that needed a few problems sorted out.

Berlin was the administrative, political and economic hub of the Reich. Its last census had recorded a population of four and a quarter million. Six hundred thousand of these worked in factories. One German industrial worker in thirteen lived in the Greater Berlin area. The city accounced for nearly a tenth of German production. After five years of relentless Allied bombing and two weeks of vicious street fighting, costing almost a hundred thousand Soviet army dead and twice as many German civilian lives, scarcely a building remained standing in the city centre. The population was roughly half the pre-war level. Forty per cent of buildings had been destroyed.
³
Berlin had no power, sewerage system, or functioning public transport.

As the ‘Ulbricht Group’ settled into their comfortable quarters at Bruchmühle, Berlin’s citizens were in hiding in cellars, or crowded into the maze of subway tunnels that ran beneath their city. Especially Berlin’s women. ‘
Frau, komm
’ (Woman, come), the Soviet soldier’s pidgin-German command to females he encountered, became the words every woman in Berlin, from seventeen to seventy, knew and dreaded.

Perhaps Ulbricht was aware of the wave of murder, looting and vengeful sexual violence sweeping through Berlin in the wake of the Red Army’s advance. If so, he did not admit it and never would. Colleagues who tried to bring it to his attention were simply frozen out. In his fantasy version of ‘liberation’, such horrors could not have happened. After twelve years in Stalin’s USSR, Ulbricht knew that, above all when reinforced by fear, such political fantasy could constitute a stronger power than any reality, however universally known.

However, though their new Communist masters might force them to keep silent, the people of Berlin and eastern Germany knew what they knew. The post-war Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten was known, with typical dark Berlin wit, as the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Rapist’. The two million abortions a year carried out in occupied Germany in the immediate post-war period, mostly in the Soviet Zone, witnessed unimaginable suffering, as did the rocketing incidence of venereal disease and the 150,000 to 200,000 ‘Russian babies’ born as the result of the rapes.
Such problems were described in Soviet military literature as applying to ‘women who have been visited several times by soldiers of the Red Army’.
⁴

There were many Soviet soldiers who behaved kindly and honourably, who did their best to help civilians. Many educated Russian officers were more deeply acquainted with German artistic and musical life than their Anglo-American equivalents. None the less, the Soviets and their German allies would always struggle to gain support in post-war Berlin.

It was clear from the first day that Ulbricht and his band were tools of the occupiers. On his first evening in Germany, Ulbricht met with General Galadshev, head of the Main Political Administration (PUR) of the Red Army. The Germans would carry out Soviet orders, he was instructed. ‘Those travelling [to Germany},’ as Comintern boss Dimitrov told the titular head of the KPD, Wilhelm Pieck, in May 1945, ‘stand not at the disposal of the Communist Party of Germany, but of the Red Army and its organs.’.
⁵

Ulbricht would take his day-to-day orders from Galadshev’s titular deputy, General Ivan Serov. This corrosively corrupt figure, brutal veteran of numerous purges and forced deportations, was in fact more powerful than his nominal superior: It was he who would dictate Ulbricht’s and East Germany’s fate. Serov was the senior NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) officer in Germany, reporting directly to Stalin and his secret-police chief, Lavrenty Beria.

Serov’s chief task was to dismantle vast areas of eastern German industry and ship it to the Soviet Union, as part of the reparations Moscow was determined to extract from the defeated Reich. This devastated a part of Germany that had previously contained much of the country’s most advanced industry. By March 1947, II,800 kilometres of railway track (almost half the 1938 total) had been removed, while 30 per cent of the Soviet Zone’s industrial capacity had been stripped and shipped.
⁶
Serov was also authorised to seize any wealth or valuables that could be viewed as compensation. This provided opportunities that made him and his aides notorious.

On 2 May 1945, Ulbricht’s group got their first look at conquered Berlin. Wolfgang Leonhard described that first journey through the eastern suburbs into unimaginable suffering:

Our cars made their way through Friedrichsfelde in the direction of Lichtenberg. The scene was like a picture of hell—flaming ruins and starving people shambling about in tattered clothing; dazed German soldiers who seemed to have lost all idea of what was going on; Red Army soldiers singing exultantly, and often drunk; groups of women clearing the streets under the supervision of Red Army soldiers; long queues standing patiently waiting to get a bucketful of water from the pumps; and all of them looking terribly tired, hungry, tense and demoralised.
⁷

Remarkably, the first weeks of occupation saw considerable progress, The raping and looting continued for quite a while, None the less, surprisingly few Berliners actually starved. General Berzarin remains a controversial figure. He died in a—some say—mysterious motorcycle accident in Berlin on 16 June 1945. However, he did organise basic supplies for the German population, often from the Red Army’s own stores. He also showed a keen interest in reviving the cultural life of the city.
⁸

As early as 17 May 1945, exhibitions from Berlin’s museum collections opened in temporary quarters. On 26 May the Berlin Philharmonic gave its first post-war concert. The Soviets, accustomed to the harsh exigencies of a command economy, immediately dragooned thousands of Berliners into labour gangs, and so the streets soon started to be cleared. Trams started running once more. The first stretch of subway was reopened on 15 May. Before long, the Russians had rounded up enough biddable journalists to publish a daily newspaper, the
Täglicbe Rundscbau
(Daily Review). However, since it was mostly filled with Soviet propaganda, the paper was known as the
Kläglicbe Rundscbau
(Pitiable Review).
⁹

Meanwhile, on 19 May the city government was re-instituted. A former Social Democratic trade-union leader, Josef Orlopp, was persuaded to join. The method used to legitimise his ‘election’ was a little basic. The Russians scoured the surrounding buildings, rounded up a few dozen men and women, herded them together and told them to ‘vote’. A pre-war Catholic politician, Dr Andreas Hermes, who had served as Food Minister during the 1920s, was drafted in to take charge of feeding Berlin. The famous surgeon and director of Berlin’s Charité Hospital, Dr
Sauerbruch, was tracked down to his lakeside villa at Wannsee and invited to lead the municipal health department. The architect Hans Scharoun and the film and theatre star Heinz Rühmann became advisers on architectural and cultural matters.

This city authority of all the talents did something to restore confidence. No matter how much the Russians were distrusted, an appeal to the Prussian sense of duty could be surprisingly successful. Ulbricht played this card for all he was worth.