The Berlin Wall (27 page)

The sneer with which the young representative of the regime greeted her request would stay burned in Lochner’s memory.

‘None of that any more, grandma,’ he told her. ‘You’re all sat in a mousetrap now.’
¹

By the time dawn broke at around five o’clock on the morning of 13 August 1961, the East German construction brigades and their armed escorts were already at work.

They had achieved complete surprise, and consequently a trouble-free start to their task. Comrade Erich Honecker’s triumph in ‘Operation Rose’ was clear for all to see. To those who were awake, that is. Götz Bergander was then thirty-three years old, a political journalist with another West Berlin broadcasting station, Radio Free Berlin (Sender Freies Berlin = SFB). Between two and three a.m., he was wrenched from his slumber by the ringing of his bedside phone. He picked it up, recognised the voice of his night news editor.

‘Götz,’ the man growled, ‘they’re sealing the border. Get yourself over here.’
²

Bergander eased his lanky frame out of bed and hastily dressed. Within minutes he was at the wheel of his pale-blue Volkswagen Beetle, nosing through the streets of suburban Zehlendorf. He arrived at the Avus highway, and from there sped north-eastwards towards the heart of Berlin. At this early hour, it was all but empty. The almost dead-straight high-speed route had been built in the early 1920s, to connect the suburbs directly with the city. It was also used for car races. Bergander made it to the SFB building in Charlottenburg in fifteen minutes, an all-time record. Other bleary-eyed colleagues were gathering in the boss’s office. No one could say for certain what was really going on. They decided there was only one thing to do: each reporter would choose an area to scout, and so they would build up a picture.

Bergander hurried back to his car and drove over to the Invalidenstrasse, a frequently used East-West crossing point on the northern edge of the British sector. He arrived there as the sun rose, expecting to find a scene of drama. He was disappointed.

‘It was a glorious Sunday morning, the birds were singing. So, anything but an atmosphere of crisis in the air. No cars around, no one about.’

By the time he had parked, he could see a few journalists hanging around, and some West Berlin policemen. He asked what was going on. A cop shrugged. ‘They’re not letting anyone over the border.’

On the far side, besides the familiar green uniforms of the
Vopos
, there were also members of the Factory Fighting Groups, dressed in their drab khaki paramilitary fatigues and distinctive peaked baseball-type caps.

Bergander waited there for a while, but nothing much seemed to be happening. He got back in his car and headed for the famous Branden
burg Gate, a few blocks distant in the British sector. There he found a lot more to see. More Factory Fighting Group members on the Eastern side, this time drawn up in large numbers and in military formation, automatic weapons slung across their bellies. A human barrier. Behind them were no armoured vehicles but a handful of water cannon. One thing, however, was the same. The eerie silence.

‘Nothing was actually happening yet, at that early hour. It was like the quiet before the artillery barrage. You know, when you feel, “Any moment now it’ll start”.’

Bergander again found a cop and asked what was happening. All the policemen knew was that the border was closed. No one going in, no one coming out.

Such things had happened before. Temporary closures of parts of the border, usually for spot checks on border-crossers and possible refugees. But this was bigger. Bergander asked the cop where the British army was. The man didn’t know. By contrast with the heavily armed East Germans, the scattering of Western policemen carried only service pistols. They were outnumbered and outgunned.

A half-hour passed. An hour. After a while, trucks arrived on the Eastern side. Slowly, barbed wire was rolled out across the area in front of the Brandenburg Gate.

‘I must say,’ Bergander recalled, ‘that I have seldom felt so abandoned as at that moment. I thought, the Western Allies have to show themselves here. If only as a presence. A psychological measure.’

He rang his girlfriend (later wife), Regine, who lived with her parents in Steglitz, in the American sector. She quickly dressed and joined him. Of Western forces there was still no sign. They watched the East Germans’ purposeful, disciplined activity for a while. A silent, gloomy crowd of local civilians gathered.

Two hours after Bergander’s arrival, the representatives of British military might finally showed themselves. A jeep appeared. From it clambered two uniformed men wearing the distinctive red caps of the British Military Police. The Brits stood at a safe distance from the sector border, gazing impassively at the activity on the Soviet-East German side. After a while they turned smartly on their heels, got back into their vehicle and drove off again.

That was the last Bergander saw of the British that morning. He had not expected a fully armed battle group, but the minimal nature of the response shocked him.

‘If only they had stayed there, you know? Maybe a jeep with four men. For everyone to see. That would show they cared. As it stood, the message was absolutely clear right from the outset: “Not our business”,’ Bergander recalled with a rueful laugh, repeating the last three words in English. ‘Not our business.’

Bergander drove back to the radio station and compared notes with the other journalists. They filed their reports, trying not to sound as pessimistic as they felt.

To a man, they all believed that the Americans especially would have been in a position, with their powerful tanks and their armoured bulldozers, to simply roll forward and sweep the temporary barriers out of the way. Would the
Vopos
and lightly armed worker-militia members have been able to resist the power of an American armoured unit? Perhaps once Washington understood what was going on, the necessary orders would be given.

Another Berlin journalist, Lothar Löwe, had been posted to Washington as correspondent of the West German Public Broadcasting Service (ARD). The young high-flyer had settled eagerly into the glamorous social life of Kennedy-era Washington, but naturally kept closely in touch with colleagues, friends and family back in West Berlin. He had been attending a starry dinner party in Georgetown that Saturday evening. Those present included a number of young women who were reputedly, shall we say, on friendly terms with the President.

Towards midnight Eastern Standard Time (six a.m. in Berlin), the famous columnist Joseph Alsop dropped by. The young German reporter was introduced to the great man.

‘Where are you from?’ Alsop asked.

‘Berlin.’

‘My God! What are you doing in Washington? Berlin is exactly where you should be.’

‘How so?’

‘They’ve just sealed off the Brandenburg Gate. They’ve got guards there. Looks like the East Germans are closing the border.’
³

Löwe got home to his apartment in Arlington in time to catch an NBC radio news bulletin. The first live transatlantic television pictures would not be beamed across the Atlantic for another year, after AT&T’s ‘Telstar’ communications satellite was launched on 10 July 1962. In the meantime cinefilm or magnetic tape still had to be couriered by air to the US in order to be shown on American TV. The nature of the events in Berlin was thus not entirely clear, but Löwe knew better than most what all this meant. He was genuinely surprised. He had always thought that, if the East took action, it would be to close the border between East Berlin and the GDR rather than between East and West Berlin. The Russians, he believed, had too much to lose from such a drastic step as dividing a city.

Anyway, knowing that it was early morning in Germany, Löwe made some transatlantic calls. First he called his mother in Berlin and assured her that he was certain the Allies would not let the Communists take over. Then to business. He dialled the number of Al Hemsing, press officer for the American military government in West Berlin, whom he knew well from his days as a newspaper reporter. Hemsing was already in his office. He had just received a summary of overnight reports from the German police, and he willingly gave Löwe a thorough ‘rundown of the border situation’, from Spandau in the north to Rüdow in the south.

Löwe took notes as the American spoke. The German reporter had lived in Berlin almost all his life, and had the local’s advantage of being able to picture what was happening where it was happening, and what this meant. This operation, he knew immediately, was a huge event, not just a temporary border closure but something of world importance. After speaking with Hemsing, he double-checked everything with an old friend from West Berlin police headquarters, who confirmed Hemsing’s impressions.

Finally Löwe called the State Department analyst Martha Mautner. She was a respected expert on Central and Eastern Europe, and her husband, Austrian-born Karl Mautner, advised the Berlin Task Force. Surely the Mautners would know something. To his surprise, he found that his call woke Martha up. Literally and metaphorically, Washington was still half asleep.

She reacted with genuine astonishment to the news. Martha too had expected action from the East, but the kind of action that did not threaten the Allied position in Berlin and thus risk war. In any case, how could one divide a modern city and all its complex, delicate systems without destroying the basis of civilised life? She told Löwe that she and Karl were going into the office, and he should join her there.

Half an hour later, Löwe drove through the gates of the State Department. In 1961 a simple press pass was enough to enter the inner sanctum of American foreign policy. He made his way up to the Berlin Crisis Desk on the fifteenth floor and found himself alone with the night security man. A short while later, Mautner appeared. Soon other members of the Task Force began to trickle in. Löwe quickly realised that he knew more about what was happening in Berlin than did the highest representatives of the most powerful nation on earth.

This was not a good sign.

Even Mayor Willy Brandt was caught away from his post.

On the evening of Saturday 12 August, Brandt gave an election campaign speech in Nuremberg. In it he changed his usual script and specifically mentioned the ever-growing East German refugee problem. That day, aides told him the flood of emigrants from the East was reaching a new intensity. For the first time the number arriving in West Berlin in the past twenty-four hours had exceeded 2,500. If this rate continued, the population of Ulbricht’s proletarian paradise could be expected to diminish at the rate of about a million a year. It was clear something had to give—and even clearer, for those knowledgeable about who held power in the GDR, that the ‘something’ was unlikely to be Walter Ulbricht. But what would the East German dictator do next?

Brandt was running as candidate for the West German chancellorship against the veteran Konrad Adenauer, almost forty years his senior. The theme of the Berlin Mayor’s campaign was in many ways that of energetic, Kennedyesque youth (he was forty-eight) against tired age. But that night the challenger decided it was time to move his campaign on to a larger stage, literally and metaphorically. These refugees, he told his audience, were fleeing East Germany for a good reason.

They are afraid that the mesh of the iron curtain will be cemented closed. Because they fear being shut into an enormous prison. Because they have a burning anxiety that they could be forgotten, written off, sacrificed on the altar of indifference and missed opportunities…
⁴

The West Berlin Mayor all but accused both the West German government and the Western Allies of dragging their feet on the questions of German unity and the status of Berlin, thus encouraging Khrushchev and Ulbricht’s aggression. It was a spine-tingling speech, thick with emotion and somehow lent extra weight by the hoarseness of his delivery. A heavy smoker, Brandt was half-way through a demanding campaign, and it was starting to show. But the effect that night was to enhance rather than diminish the effect of his oration.

It was as if he had foreknowledge of the catastrophe to come. Late that night, Brandt boarded a sleeper train for Kiel, far up by the Danish border, where he was due to speak the next night. Time to snatch some sleep. But at five a.m., as the train rolled northward, the candidate was woken by determined knocking on the door of his wagon-lit compartment. It was the conductor. He bore an urgent message from Brandt’s chief of staff, Heinrich Albertz, in Berlin. The East was closing the border. The governing Mayor must disembark as soon as possible and return to his city.

Brandt got out at Hanover. A car whisked him to the airport. From there his aircraft made the short hop to Berlin, around 170 miles to the east.

Angry crowds of West Berliners were already on the streets, demanding action, but still there was no word from the Western commandants. Brandt arrived in his office at breakfast time. He toyed with the wild idea of putting himself at the head of his people and calling for the East to rise up, then thought better of it.
⁵
He had to exercise his powers of persuasion, to substitute the strength of his own conviction for the firmness he suspected the Allies could not or would not supply. These native emotional and intellectual weapons were all he had, and therefore all the true defence that West Berliners possessed.

Willy Brandt’s great testing-time had begun.

In fact, one of the Americans’ lingering expectations had been precisely that the East would rise up. For a while, some in the administration even half-welcomed the idea.

Now, it was not a hope but a nightmare scenario for the West. The developing situation on 13 August had the potential to turn very dangerous. The East had now gone on the offensive within Berlin, challenging four-power rule. If the blowback consequences of this brought about unrest in the GDR, the Allies would be faced with a new 17 June 1953, this time in the middle of a huge diplomatic and military crisis where anything could happen, up to and including nuclear confrontation. Moreover, what if the hotheads among the West Berliners, especially the young men in their jeans and DA haircuts who were already assembling at the main potential flashpoints along the East-West sector border, including the Brandenburg Gate, were to ‘rush’ the half-built East German border barriers? America’s priority was not to stir anything at all. Calm things down, rather.