The Berlin Wall (9 page)

Ominously, ‘special camps’ were set up. Some of these, as an appalled world would later learn, were converted Nazi concentration camps such as Buchenwald, near Weimar, and Sachsenhausen, thirty-five kilometres from Berlin. At least 150,000 Germans and 35,000 non-Germans from
the Soviet Zone disappeared into these brutal places between 1945 and 1949.

Whether these were death camps like those run by the Nazis remains a matter of controversy. There were many executions and beatings. Deaths through disease, malnutrition and maltreatment accounted for at least a third of those imprisoned, as they did in the Soviet Gulag system. Although the Soviets and their German allies claimed that many of those who died were Nazis and war criminals, the vast majority were, in fact, either relatively low-level Hitlerite fellow travellers or simply opponents of the Stalinist system.
²⁸
The leaders of the rapidly growing DVdI would emerge openly in the 1950S as commanders of the internationally notorious
Stasi
.

It took one of the Communists’ own to lead the fight-back. That figure was Ernst Reuter. In common with many who rose to prominence in Berlin (as in New York and London), Reuter was originally from somewhere else.

Born, like Hitler, in 1889, Reuter grew up as son of a sea captain in Friesland. In the First World War, he served on the Eastern Front. He was captured, became a prisoner of war in Russia, and after the revolution was drawn to Bolshevism. Reuter caught the attention of Lenin himself, who sent him back to Germany at the beginning of 1919. He became Berlin Secretary of the infant KPD.

Reuter underwent a meteoric rise to the top of the German Communist Party, but his career as a revolutionary was short-lived. Disillusioned by the KPD’s violent methods, he found his way to the SPD.

Reuter was elected an SPD city councillor and became a successful member of Berlin’s magistracy, responsible for transport policy. He originated the unitary ticket and pushed forward with building more subway lines, aware that the automobile could change the city in profound and probably undesirable ways. From 1931 to 1933, Reuter accepted the job of High Burgomaster of Magdeburg. During the economic crisis, he worked tirelessly on relief projects for the unemployed. After 1933, he was saved from a concentration camp by friends who got Reuter a job advising the Turkish government on transport. He spent the war years exiled in Ankara.

Reuter returned to Berlin in 1945. He was once more elected to the city council and awarded his old job in charge of transport. Then, in May 1947, the existing Mayor was forced to resign, and Reuter was offered the top post.

The Communists hated no one more than an apostate. The Soviet commandant refused to recognise Reuter’s election. He had to stand down in favour of the SPD veteran Louise Schröder, but remained the key figure around whom Berlin’s anti-Communists rallied. Reuter’s understanding, as an ex-KPD insider, of the mentality of
apparatchiks
such as Ulbricht, proved invaluable.

Frustrated by their inability to run Berlin as they wished, the Communists started arresting their opponents, not just in the Soviet Zone but also in the West. Paul Markgraf, a former Wehrmacht captain, captured at Stalingrad and transformed into a keen Communist, was appointed Police President of Berlin by the Soviets in May 1945. More than 5,000 individuals thought undesirable by Markgraf’s masters ‘disappeared’ from the streets of Berlin, including the Western sectors.
²⁹

George Clare described the routine, based on his own experience as a British employee of the Control Commission in Berlin:

The Russians…began to ‘take out’ political and human-rights activists who opposed them. It was all over in seconds. A car screeched to a sudden halt, hefty men jumped out, grabbed their victim, bundled him into their vehicle and, before those who witnessed it could even begin to comprehend what had happened, they were racing off in the direction of the Soviet sector.
³⁰

After each abduction, the Western commandants lodged a protest at Red Army HQ in Berlin-Karlshorst. General Kotikov, their Soviet colleague, would deny involvement, sigh, and remind them that it was their job to prevent ‘banditry’ in their sectors, not his.

4

BLOCKADE

BY MID-1947, MUTUAL
distrust marked relations between the Western powers and their former Russian ally. The so-called Truman Doctrine aimed at the ‘containment’ of Soviet power. In June 1947, after a harsh winter brought Europe to its knees, President Truman’s new Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall, announced a comprehensive system of recovery aid for Europe. Its official title was the European Recovery Plan (ERP). History would call it the ‘Marshall Plan’.

What Marshall proposed was a delay in the withdrawal of American forces from Europe and a programme of financial aid for receptive European countries. It was actually little more than pump-priming, but came at a time when a psychological boost was badly needed. Britain was struggling to cope with the economic and human aftermath of the terrible winter, as well as running its own zone in Germany, not to mention backing the monarchist Greek government against Communist rebels.

Britain found itself, in truth, at a low ebb. It could no longer provide the balancing factor in Europe that America had originally thought to rely on. Communists in France and Italy, buoyed by their role as heroes of the anti-Nazi struggle, seemed on the brink of power. There was still widespread hunger and unemployment, among the ‘victorious’ nations as well in defeated Germany. An opportunity for Stalin and his supporters. After the traumas of the Great Depression and the catastrophe of Hitlerism, capitalism and democracy were not automatically accepted as panaceas for the ills of civilisation. Communism—especially the shiny, sanitised anti-Fascist version put about by Stalin’s propagandists—still held a wide appeal to many in the West, both workers and intellectuals.

Many non-Communist Germans also blamed Hitler’s rise on the
capitalist system, the Nazi regime as an unholy marriage of big business and reaction. To avoid a new Thousand Year Reich, society must go beyond capitalism. Ulbricht and the Soviets played successfully on this antipathy to the past. They expropriated the big landowners within months of the war’s end (‘Junkers’ lands into farmers’ hands’ went the slogan), and nationalised almost half the big-business concerns in the Soviet Zone as retribution for their complicity in the crimes of Nazism.

The land reform was popular with small farmers, as such redistributions generally are. The substantial majority that voted for it had not read their history. In 1917, Lenin drummed up support in the Russian countryside with the appeal ‘All Land to the Peasants!’. In the 1930S, those peasants found their newly granted lands absorbed into state-run collectives. If they resisted, they and their families were condemned to starve. In Ulbricht’s kingdom things would be little different, as the farmers would soon discover.

Nazi officials also seemed to be more swiftly expelled from their positions in the Soviet Zone. An aggressive anti-Fascist spirit was promoted. Some, especially intellectuals and left-wing idealists, looked disapprovingly at the Western zones, where the Anglo-Americans were willing to rely on ex-Nazi experts and officials to keep things going. Many Germans decided that, for all their faults, Ulbricht and Co. were the only true anti-Nazis. A pro-Soviet Germany seemed a sure guarantee that the far Right would never again plunge the world into war.

The struggle for German hearts and minds continued. Marshall’s aid plan was strongly angled at the Western zones, though it was offered to the Soviet Zone as well, and to the fragile post-war democracy in Czechoslovakia and other Central and Eastern European states. No one in Washington expected Stalin to let the East Germans or any other of his new dependencies benefit, and he did not. The Soviets vetoed the Czechoslovaks’ acceptance and initiated intrigues that would lead to the March 1948 Communist coup in Prague.

In the Soviet Zone, the SED responded with a barrage of political insults that showed the Cold War was already a reality:

The industrial West [of Germany] is being incorporated into a peace-threatening western bloc. The power of the German company bosses will
be maintained. In place of a German economy tailored for peace, a new power-centre of reactionary and warlike elements is arising. In place of co-determination for the work force and economic growth, there will come wage slavery for the benefit of foreign and German monopoly capitalists.
¹

The temerity of Jakob Kaiser, chairman of the CDU in the Soviet Zone, who spoke in favour of the Marshall Plan’s adoption there, led directly to his loss of office, and in short order to his forced flight to West Berlin. The supposedly independent ‘block parties’ were nothing of the sort.

In March 1947, Communist leader Wilhelm Pieck took ex-Social Democrat Otto Grotewohl, his co-chair in the SED, to visit Stalin. They asked permission to take their embryonic German state further towards fully fledged Communism.

The old fox in the Kremlin held back, perhaps hoping he could still achieve a unified Germany that was pro-Soviet, even Soviet-controlled. All the same, when the SED leaders bemoaned the continued presence of the Western Allies in Berlin, Stalin told them: ‘Well, let’s try with all our might, and maybe we’ll drive them out’.
²

There had been some economic progress in the Western zones in 1947/8. Mines had started to produce, factories to manufacture. Life remained hard, but few Germans were starving. The political situation (especially between the Anglo-Saxons and the French) was slowly improving. But industrial production had reached only 50 per cent of its pre-war level. Purchasing power remained dangerously low.

Besides, most of what should have been available was being withheld from the market. The old Reichsmark, still official currency throughout occupied Germany, was all but worthless. This was partly due to the fact that the Soviets had acquired the old Reich Bank’s printing presses and had set to producing paper money as if it were going out of fashion. Which, due to rampant inflation, it soon was. There has been, so far as the world knows, no sophisticated industrial economy that ever depended on the cigarette as its basic monetary unit. Short of creating a gunpoint command economy, how did one persuade the producers of goods to sell and the consumers of goods to buy? The answer was, by creating a currency that was worth something.

In March/April 1948, following the collapse of inter-Allied talks, the Russians withdrew from the Allied Control Commission. This ensured paralysis in the administration of Germany and an end to hopes of a peace treaty. However, the Western allies could now in all (or almost all) honesty cease having to take into account the economic and political needs of the Soviet Zone when judging the requirements of their own. This they were pleased to do.

In April 1948, Secretary Marshall met American military governor General Lucius Clay in Berlin. Something had to happen if the occupation zones were to cease being a burden on the administering powers, become less vulnerable to Communist pressure, and develop their own (capitalist and parliamentary-democratic) social systems. Clay was instructed accordingly.

The British and Americans had already created ‘Bizonia’, a free-trade area in their two zones. France and the USSR had opposed this. The Russians supposedly supported unified German organs of government but in practice did not; while the French supposedly opposed such centralised organs, but in practice were gradually drawn by economic and political necessity into the Anglo-American orbit. On 1 June 1948, the French abandoned claims to the Ruhr and the Rhineland. ‘Bizonia’ eventually became ‘Trizonia’.

On 18 June came a decisive step, not just in German economic history but in the development of the Cold War.

The British, the Americans, and the French withdrew the Reichsmark from circulation and issued everyone in their zones with 40 new Deutsche Marks (D-Marks), with another 20 due shortly, in exchange for 60 old marks. This was a week’s pay for a working man. All payments thereafter would take place at a rate of 1:1. The new D-Marks were put into circulation elsewhere at the rate of between 10:1 and 15:1 to the Reichsmark depending on the type of currency or debt held. Notional savings were lost, but purchasing power was created overnight.

From an economic point of view, the gamble paid off. Goods appeared in the shops, as if by a miracle, almost from the first day. Industrial production would increase by 24 per cent in 1949 and 12 per cent in the first half of 1950. The average annual growth rate rose to 15 per cent per year.

The Russians were furious at this breach of the Potsdam Agreement, but they could do nothing. Then, on 23 June, the West announced plans to introduce the new D-Mark (overprinted with a ‘B’ for Berlin) into Berlin. To the Soviets, this was a step too far. It gave them the justification for drastic measures.

The Soviets had already been making things more difficult for Allied personnel and for Berliners who wished to travel. Russian aircraft had been buzzing Allied planes. Trains had been deliberately re-routed to pass by West Berlin. Civilian road traffic had been all but banned. Travellers were held up for long periods at the interzonal border. The Soviet-licensed press claimed a dramatic increase in banditry, theft and black-market activity. ‘Starving thousands’ from the West were allegedly endangering food supplies in the Soviet Zone, egged on by ‘criminal elements including Fascist activists expelled from the Soviet Zone’.
³

On the day after the currency reform, the Russians announced that rail links between the Western zones and the Western sectors of the city were closed until further notice because of ‘technical difficulties’. The Elbe bridge over which the autobahn to Berlin passed was declared out of use due to repairs. Within a short time, all routes became unavailable. Claiming fuel shortages, Eastern power stations near enough simultaneously ceased to supply electricity to the Western sectors of Berlin.