The Berlin Wall (17 page)

A few weeks later, this claim became daringly specific. The two Germanys would, Ulbricht predicted, achieve parity as soon as 1961. This was clearly a risky fantasy. Even by the somewhat optimistic official figures, industrial and agricultural productivity in the east was 25-30 per cent lower than in the West. The GDR’s reserve of skilled workers was draining away through the open border with West Berlin.

Ulbricht’s trump card was that he could now rely on the support of Khrushchev. The pressing reason for their alliance was that the new Soviet leader, having finally, like Ulbricht, asserted himself against all possible opponents, had decided to reopen the ‘Berlin Question’.

With a bang.

On 27 October 1958, Ulbricht addressed a mass meeting at the
Friedrichstadt-Palast
theatre in the heart of East Berlin. He launched a blistering attack, not just on the West in general but on West Berlin’s very right to exist. During the summer, Ulbricht had been ratcheting up his rhetoric, calling for the West to recognise the GDR and to sign a peace treaty that would ratify the post-war settlement in Europe. This time he went even further. He described the whole of Berlin, including the Western sectors, as ‘part of the territory of the GDR’.

The newly-elected Mayor Brandt responded by mocking Ulbricht as a ‘Saxon Lenin-Imitation’, but something sinister was in the wind. A month later that something became apparent-at last a move by Moscow, and not one that any West Berliner would have wanted.

Nikita Khrushchev was puffed up by the USSR’s success in putting the first satellite into orbit in the shape of
Sputnik
, and by the advances in rocket science that made this possible-successes that, as anyone could
see, could launch not just a capsule into space but a nuclear warhead on to New York or Philadelphia. The West had lost its nuclear monopoly in 1955, when the Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb. Now, with Russian development of long-range missiles, America itself was no longer protected by distance.

At the same time, in another direct challenge to America, Khrushchev declared the Soviet Union’s intention to overtake the West in prosperity and productivity in just a few years. It was a boast that probably influenced Ulbricht’s equally foolhardy statement of intent at the SED’s Fifth Party Congress.

Before he died, Stalin liked to humiliate his henchmen by telling them that once he had gone the capitalists would ‘strangle them like blind kittens’.
⁷
Khrushchev felt these contemptuous remarks acutely. He wreaked revenge in his 1956 posthumous denunciation of Stalin to the Central Committee. Then, at the beginning of 1958, Khrushchev defeated the ‘anti-party’ group within the CPSU (again, see the resemblance to Ulbricht’s ‘factionalists’) and stood alone at the helm of the Soviet Union. He assumed new powers as head of government. Thus equipped, Khrushchev determined to show the shade of the old Georgian murderer what he could do.

In foreign policy, Khrushchev decided to start applying pressure where the West was most vulnerable—in Berlin. He would describe Berlin as ‘the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.’ Publicly, he referred more delicately to a ‘bone in his throat’ which had to be removed.

Two weeks after Ulbricht’s notably aggressive speech on the subject of Allied rights in Berlin, the Soviet leader made a forceful statement calling for the signatories of the 1945 Potsdam Agreement to ‘create a normal situation in the capital of the German Democratic Republic’. The Soviet Union would, he said, soon hand over all functions in Berlin to the East Germans. If they wished to settle the Berlin question, the Allies would have to negotiate with the GDR. Khrushchev ended with an affirmation-cum-threat: the USSR would ‘sacredly honour our obligations as an ally of the German Democratic Republic’.

Eisenhower was initially outraged, and told acting US Secretary of State Christian Archibald Herter, ‘if the Russians want war over the
Berlin issue, they can have it’. However, in the end the administration decided to ignore Khrushchev’s challenge and wait and see.
⁸

They waited. They saw. At four in the afternoon on Thursday 27 November 1958, Khrushchev marched into the impressive, mahoganypanelled oval room that housed the Soviet Council of Ministers. It was the first formal Kremlin press conference he had ever held, and had been called at such short notice that American journalists were forced to desert their Thanksgiving Day dinners in order to attend.

The stocky First Secretary, bronzed from a late vacation in the Crimea, announced that he had decided to do some surgery, to remove the ‘malignant tumour’ of Berlin. He assured the assembled scribes that he had sent a 28-page note to Western ambassadors that very morning. This note contained a dramatic ultimatum. The West must agree to sign a German peace treaty within six months. It must also ‘liquidate the occupation regime’ and turn West Berlin into a demilitarised ‘free city’. If the West did not agree to this, Khrushchev would unilaterally sign a treaty with the GDR and turn over all control of access to Berlin to the East Germans.

On receiving the news, Eisenhower-spending the Thanksgiving weekend with his family in Georgia-made aggressive noises. Within a few days, he again backtracked. Nevertheless, the maintenance of the occupation regime and of access rights to the Western sectors of Berlin remained central to American policy. This was made clear to Moscow. As was America’s commitment to West Germany and her readiness to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, to defend it.

It was difficult to work out exactly what Khrushchev hoped to achieve by the 27 November press conference. Once the West had refused to budge, if he went ahead and turned over control of access to Berlin to Ulbricht, then in practice the self-willed East German leader would be given the power to determine peace or war. And the Russians, because of their ‘sacred alliance’ with the GDR, would be committed to supporting him. Meanwhile, the West started carrying out manoeuvres and issuing statements of military solidarity that further heated up the situation.

There was a disconcerting sense in Khrushchev’s unleashing of the Berlin Crisis, as on other occasions, of a gambler tossing all the dice into the air to see where they landed.

His son, Sergei, was then twenty-three. He asked his father what would happen once the ultimatum ran out. Would it mean war? of course not! No one would want a war over Berlin, Khrushchev assured him. Before that time came, his threat would scare the West into negotiations. And if the negotiations failed? Sergei persisted. Khrushchev replied irritably, ‘Then we’ll try something else. Something will always turn up.’
⁹

It was, in fact, the British Prime Minister who turned up. In January 1959, Harold Macmillan came on an official visit, at which an offer of top-level discussions was made. His Soviet counterpart withdrew the time limit on the ultimatum.

The West had agreed to a conference on a German peace treaty. Khrushchev solved the problem of saving face with a breathtaking distortion of the truth. He simply pretended that there had never been an ultimatum. The West had misunderstood him, he insisted.

Nothing actually came of the resulting talks, but the immediate crisis was over. The zigzagging over Berlin went on for more than two more years, until the end of the Eisenhower administration and into the next. Sometimes it was a live issue, sometimes not, but it was always there.

In the words of the post-Communist Russian historian, Vladislav M. Zubok:

Khrushchev must have believed he was killing many birds with one stone. He was pressing hard on an ‘acorn’ of the west to deter the United States in the Far East and to pre-empt
Drang Nach Osten
(drive toward the east) from West Germany. He also gave decisive support to Ulbricht’s regime in the GDR. And all that was couched in the language of a peace settlement designed to sound irresistible to world public opinion.
¹⁰

Berlin was still the West’s most sensitive part. All Khrushchev had to do was squeeze.

Khrushchev seemed to be on the GDR side. But the security of their regime was not the only source of anxiety for the leaders of the GDR. What about their own personal security? Who guards the guards?

As they tightened their grip on the Soviet Zone in the post-war period,
the SED bosses settled into a group of requisitioned villas in the northeast Berlin suburb of Pankow. Ulbricht, Pieck, Grotewohl and the other Politburo members lived within a few hundred metres of each other, in a leafy area surrounding the Majakowskiring, close by the castle of Schönhausen (Pieck’s official residence). This ‘VIP quarter’ was sealed off by a security fence and by guard units.

Even before 17 June 1953, there were signs that this location might prove insufficient for future needs.
¹¹
Then came the Hungarian revolt. The swiftness of the revolutionaries’ seizure of Budapest, and the violent, often lethal, summary punishment they inflicted on the Communist officials and secret policemen they rounded up, were a warning to the SED leadership of what might happen to them in case of another, this time more successful, uprising in Berlin.

At a Politburo meeting two months before the Hungarian revolt, on 28 August 1956, security measures for the élite were discussed. The minutes conclude: ‘Measures are to be prepared for a new residential settlement’. There is little question, however, that the experiences of October 1956 gave added impulse for the Politburo to move out of Berlin.

But to where? Ulbricht, a fitness fanatic, was keen to live in the fresh air, near water and trees. Various possibilities were discussed. Then someone suggested the area near the appealing small town of Wandlitz, north of Berlin, as a possible solution to the Politburo’s very special housing needs.

Wandlitz lay amid state forest near the town of Bernau, thirty-five kilometres north of Berlin. It was wooded country threaded through with attractive lakes, far enough from Berlin to provide a good quality of life, yet close enough that a minister’s or Politburo member’s limousine could be circling the Alexanderplatz within half an hour of leaving home. ‘Deep in nature—at the gates of Berlin!’ as the town declares in its tourist literature. Moreover, the summer residence of the Soviet ambassador lay on one of the nearby local lakes, the Liepnitzsee, within easy reach.

In the spring of 1958, a group of bureaucrats suddenly appeared from East Berlin and started inspecting the terrain, under the bewildered and slightly nervous gaze of forestry workers. Word spread that local land was being earmarked for ‘a special purpose’.

By the summer the town of Bernau had been informed that initially 60 hectares (approx. 145 acres) would be required, which was later expanded to 101 hectares (approx. 240 acres) which would finally become 357 hectares (approx. 860 acres). A connecting road would be built to link up with the north-south autobahn. Existing and new woodland and shrubplanting would make the area invisible from outside, and provide visual, personal and weather protection for the individuals who lived and worked there.

The basic building work on the soon-to-be-notorious ‘forest settlement’ (
Waldsiedlung
) was finished by February 1960. There were no street names, and never would be. The houses, comfortable and roomy but not especially grand by most standards, were simply numbered from 1 to 23. They were mostly built of pre-fabricated materials and not considered especially modern even at the time. They enjoyed pleasant gardens.

Years later, the actor and director Vera Oelschlegel married a Politburo member and came to live here. She hated it and wrote of the place they called ‘the bosses’ paradise’:

The houses were situated as nice and symmetrical as matchboxes. They were soulless, and seemed alien in the landscape with its beech and pine trees…It was a ghetto, and while I was there I felt about as at home as an emigrant. When in the mornings the same dark Volvos stopped in front of the garden gates, and when from each house an old man emerged, escorted by a younger man, who carried his bag and opened the door for him…
¹²

This referred to a later period, when the official car for the East German party boss had become a specially lengthened and reinforced Volvo. Earlier, the limo would have been a Soviet-built Chaika, which was standard transport for GDR ministers and party bosses between the 1950s and 1970s. The party leaders were provided with a so-called ‘A-Certificate’, which rendered them exempt from normal traffic rules, especially speed limits (which for normal mortals were strictly enforced).
¹³

The gentlemen of the Politburo moved into their plain but roomy homes in the early winter of 1960. There was a private clinic not far away. In summer, the bosses could follow a private lane down to their own part
of the lake shore, where there were bathing huts and boat houses. For less pleasant contingencies, there was even a system of bomb-proof bunkers a few hundred metres from the VIP residences. Here the SED bosses’ families could take refuge if the Cold War ever turned hot, while the men of the house would be spirited away to an underground governmental complex elsewhere in the area, from which they would direct the GDR’s fight for survival.
¹⁴

They had at their disposal the large and roomy Functionaries’ Clubhouse complex (known as the ‘F-Club’). This contained a cinema and a swimming pool. In the F-Club’s restaurant the SED functionaries and their families could also eat extremely modestly priced meals (four marks for roast venison!), cooked by a team of gourmet chefs who followed their every culinary or dietary whim. The Politburo members could drink a beer in the bar after their car dropped them back from a long day at the ministry or the party office.