The Berlin Wall (8 page)

During talks that eventually ‘allowed’ the three Western allies to take possession of their sectors, they made a serious misjudgement. Their negotiators agreed that all orders issued by the Soviet commandant since Berlin had been under ‘Allied’ (i.e. until July
de facto
Soviet) control, remained in force until further notice.

These Soviet orders were more than simple administrative provisions. They included the appointment throughout Berlin of block and street wardens. Just as in the Nazi period, these people reported on and
disciplined anyone who did things of which the authorities (that is, the SMA and its agents) might not approve.

On 17 August, the British commander for Charlottenburg district stripped such persons of all powers, and forbade them from interfering in the private lives of local people. The American military authorities followed suit. Westerners realised that they would have to take concrete steps to ensure that genuine representative democracy, with its concomitant freedoms, would return to Berlin. It would not happen of its own volition.

It took some weeks until the extent of the French sector was agreed. The British were the main supporters of a French role, so their share of Berlin, comprising the districts of Reinickendorf and Wedding, was carved out of the northern part of the British sector. The difference between Paris and the other Western allies was that it wanted to keep the Germans as weak and disunited as possible.

The French opposed turning the Allied Control Commission into an Allied government for the whole of the country, and at first discouraged German self-government. France continued to lay claim to the German-speaking Saar industrial area, as well as to control of the Rhineland and the mighty Ruhr industrial basin. Fiercely opposed, for patriotic reasons, to Soviet interference in their sector, they were unprepared to join the Anglo-Americans in standing up for the rights of Berliners in the face of increasingly blatant power-plays by the East and its agents.
²⁰

For the meantime, anyway, many Westerners persuaded themselves that these excesses were oversights, the result of Soviet inexperience in running a modern city.

Political life began to revive in the Soviet Zone. Ulbricht hoped that the SPD’s erstwhile supporters would flock to the KPD, attracted by its dynamism and its closeness to the Soviet occupiers.
²¹
He was wrong. The SPD re-formed very quickly and within weeks had branches all over the Soviet Zone. Many on the left of the SPD had become so excited by the heady atmosphere of liberation that they started campaigning for the ‘reunification’ of the German workers’ movement. In the 1930s, it was the split on the Left that had handed power to the Nazis. Never again!

Ulbricht’s team dutifully followed Stalin’s orders and kept its distance. To retain an element of control, however, Ulbricht proposed joint policy committees in which they would discuss how best to rebuild Germany in a democratic, socialist fashion. The SPD agreed.

The middle-class parties were also encouraged to re-form. They would be invited to join the KPD in a post-war ‘block’. In the case of the Liberal Party (LDPD), the ‘bourgeois democrats’ were slow to get going. ‘Walter, what can I do?’ complained Richard Gyptner, the
apparatchik
charged with co-ordinating this. ‘They talk a lot, but don’t seem that keen on founding a party.’ ‘Well, Richard, just give them a good talking to,’ Ulbricht replied sternly. On 5 July 1945, the Liberal Democratic Party was founded in Berlin, following the establishment of the centre-right Christian Democrat Union (CDU) on 25 June.

On 14 July, the ‘Unity Front of the Anti-Fascist Democratic Parties’ was announced. It comprised five representatives each from KPD, CDU, SPD and LDPD. Ulbricht’s pseudo-democratic edifice stood in place. Two years later, the finishing touch was added by the creation of the National Democratic Party (NDPD), a home for repentant small-fish ex-Nazis and ex-militarists who wanted their sins forgiven and a role in the ‘building of socialism’.
²²

The trick was that, although the KPD would appear to be just one party among equals, it was in fact the only political group within the ‘Unity Front’ that had the ear of the all-powerful SMA. Ulbricht met with senior Soviet officials every day. Without these officials—and therefore without him—nothing happened in the Soviet Zone.

This was the situation the Western Allies faced: a ‘block’ of superficially independent parties, a Berlin city administration fronted by democratic and/or bourgeois figures, but with shadowy, Soviet-controlled groups in the background.

In November, elections were held in Hungary and Austria, where similar ‘blocks’ existed under Soviet auspices. Local Communists did badly and the bourgeois and moderate-left parties very well. The hope that Soviet nominees would sweep all before them as part of a natural historical process was seen to be mistaken. A worried Soviet official told Ulbricht that if they wanted to avoid the ‘Austrian danger’, they would need to take a more forceful attitude towards non-Communists.
²³

Soon came a policy change. In late January 1946, Ulbricht again flew to Moscow. Stalin now told him that a merger between KPD and SPD must be achieved at all costs. The process was to be completed by the symbolic date of 1 May 1946.

Leftist Social Democrats such as Otto Grotewohl were in favour, and carried some of the rank and file with them. Many other SPD activists resisted. Those in the East quickly found themselves banned from speaking by Soviet commanders, who held absolute power in their localities. Others were dismissed or arrested on spurious charges. Attempts to organise a free Berlin-wide ballot of SPD members were foiled by the Soviet authorities, sometimes at the point of a gun. Polling stations in the West that managed to stay open showed a substantial majority against the merger.

It didn’t matter. In the German State Opera House in East Berlin on 21/2 April 1946, a thousand delegates formally voted to merge the parties. More than half the membership of the new ‘Socialist Unity Party of Germany’ (SED in German) was made up of Social Democrats. The fourteen seats on the party committee were distributed 50/50 between Social Democrats and Communists. Joint leaders were Wilhelm Pieck (KPD) and Otto Grotewohl (SPD), while their deputies were Walter Ulbricht (KPD) and Max Fechner (SPD). Grotewohl and Pieck shook hands to a storm of applause. A stylised version of the handshake became the SED’s emblem, later reproduced on a million banners and badges and posters.

With the creation of the SED, the real power in the Soviet Zone rested with the man who was technically its joint deputy leader. Walter Ulbricht, the relentless Saxon, reigned supreme in the entity he had so industriously and ruthlessly constructed. It was now a year since his arrival in the ruins of the German capital.

And Ulbricht had not finished with Berlin yet.

With Germany at their feet, the victors were soon at each other’s throats. The Western Allies found themselves overwhelmed by too little of some things and too much of others. They had too little shelter and food. They had too many helpless, unproductive human beings.

In May 1945, the population of Berlin was half what it had been a few
months earlier. Much of the population had fled west to escape the Russians, and many who stayed died in the fighting for the capital.

At the Potsdam Conference, a fateful step was taken. The borders of Germany were moved hundreds of miles to the west. The Poles would get most of the territories east of that new line. Protocol XII stipulated that if long-established German populations were removed from these areas, this would be done ‘in an orderly and humane manner’.

Sadly, humaneness had nothing to do with it. Countries that had suffered the cruelties of German occupation thirsted for revenge. Of the five million Germans in the Polish-occupied territories, almost all were also expelled, often suddenly and with great brutality. On 19 May 1945, the Czechoslovak government announced that their three million German-speaking compatriots, the so-called ‘Sudeten Germans’, would be forced to leave. Women were raped, families robbed by thugs who roamed the roads and preyed upon refugee trains. Murder was commonplace.

Many of the roads and railway lines led through Berlin. Robert Murphy, political adviser to the American commandant, described the parlous situation of the refugees in a message to the State Department on 12 October 1945:

At the Lehrter Rail Station in Berlin alone, our medical authorities state an average of ten have been dying daily from exhaustion, malnutrition and illness. In viewing the distress and despair of these wretched people…the mind reverts instantly to Dachau and Buchenwald. Here is retribution on a large scale, but practised not on the
Parteibonzen
[Nazi Party bosses] but on women and children, the poor and infirm.
²⁴

Life
magazine gave a figure of eight million refugees in Berlin. Perhaps a wild exaggeration, but the city was full to overflowing. The Allies had enough trouble feeding the 1.5 million Berliners under their care. At one point, up to 25,000 refugees were reaching the Berlin city boundary each day. Perhaps these desperate people hoped that something of pre-war, splendid Berlin, with all its possibilities, survived. They could not have realised how much of the city lay in ruins. Hundreds of thousands of dwellings had been reduced to rubble. In the British sector, forty-three
out of forty-four hospitals had been destroyed or seriously damaged. Newcomers were pushed straight on to westbound trains, any westbound train.

At this point, the Soviets forbade the importation of food from the surrounding countryside. They also began, under administrative pretexts, to limit the number of trains that could travel to and from the Western zones. Since original Russian regulations remained in force, for a long time the Soviets retained control, by default, of most aspects of everyday life. They could increase the pain any time they chose.

Constant hunger became the Berliners’ lot. Allied soldiers or officials had access to drink, food, nylons, and especially cigarettes (which became Berlin’s unofficial currency). If they were not averse to bending the rules, they could live like kings. The going price for sex with a German woman was five cigarettes. The activity of
Kippensammler
(cigarette-butt collector) became a recognised calling. A waiter in places frequented by Allied troops made a tidy side-income in this way; those at the
Café Wien
could earn five dollars per hundred.
²⁵
A black-market bazaar spread across the huge expanse of the Tiergarten park in the centre of Berlin, where East met West.

In August 1945, it was reported that each day between fifty and a hundred children who had lost both parents, or had been abandoned, were collected from Berlin’s stations and taken to orphanages or foster-parents.
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These were the lucky ones. Gangs of children roamed the streets, thieving where they could, looting abandoned buildings and hoarding scrap to sell.

By October 1945, the German civilian ration was 800 calories per day. In the British sector at New Year 1946, it had fallen to about 400. Fuel shortages were inevitable. Previously, most of Berlin’s coal had come from Silesia, just a few hundred kilometres to the east. Now the Silesian mines were in Polish hands. All coal had to be imported, mostly from the Ruhr, far away in western Germany. It was required at the rate of 600 tons per day as winter came on. There was never enough.

Around 12,000 Berliners died during that first post-war year, of starvation or of illnesses associated with malnutrition. However, for the survivors there ensued a feverish cultural flowering—newspapers opened in the Western sectors, theatres and night-clubs and cabarets, and even
film studios were open again for business. Berliners might have little to eat, and they might freeze in unheated cellars, but for the first time since 1933 they could do, say and write what they wanted. With grim humour, these were known as the ‘golden hunger years’.
²⁷

In the Soviet Zone, SPD and KPD had merged to form the SED. This was not, however, the end of the old SPD. When allowed, most SPD members had voted against union with the Communists. Despite persecution in the Soviet sector, the oldest and largest working-class party continued to operate on a citywide basis.

Elections for provincial and municipal assemblies throughout the Soviet Zone (and in parts of the Western zones) took place in September/October 1946. The Soviets and the Communists did their best to persuade—or intimidate—the electorate into voting for the SED. All the same, the results were, for Ulbricht and his Soviet masters, a disappointment. This was crushingly true in Berlin.

In the Berlin city elections, the SPD won almost 49 per cent of the votes. Second came the right-of-centre CDU with 22 per cent. Despite massive support from the Communist political machine and the Soviet Military Administration, the SED trailed at 19.8 per cent. The SPD beat the SED in every district—even ‘Red’ Wedding, where before Hitler came to power the Communists had regularly won 60 per cent of the vote.

Colonel Sergei Tiul’panov, director of propaganda for the Soviet Military Administration, was outraged. It would in future, he declared, be necessary ‘to forbid categorically even the slightest degree of disrespect towards the Soviet Union and Soviet occupation authorities’.

In the winter of 1946/7, the Communists decided to pursue a ‘hard’ course. There was a wave of arrests, of real or imagined Nazis and ‘subversives’, including liberal and Social Democrat activists. In 1946, the Soviets set up the German Administration of the Interior (
Deutsche Verwaltung des Innern
= DVdI), made up entirely of trusted Communists, which would control a German auxiliary police force soon dubbed the ‘People’s Police’.