Berlin 1961 Part 5

Like Stalin, Ulbricht was an organizational zealot who remembered peopleas names and closely cataloged their loyalties and personal foibles. It was useful data for manipulating friends and destroying enemies. He lacked rhetorical skill and personal warmth, deficits that made it impossible for him to ever gain public popularity, but he compensated with methodical organization skills that would be crucial to running a centrally planned, authoritarian system. Though his East Germany provided a far smaller canvas than that of Stalinas Soviet empire, he shared the Soviet dictatoras knack for taking and holding power against all odds to achieve improbable outcomes.

Ulbricht was also a man of precision and habit. He started every day with ten minutes of calisthenics and preached to his countrymen in rhyming slogans about the value of regular exercise. Before skating on winter evenings across his private lake with his wife, Lotte, he demanded that the staff smooth the surface so that it did not show a scratch. The fact that Ulbricht, unlike Stalin, did not execute his real or perceived enemies did not alter the single-minded purpose with which he had imposed a Bolshevik system on the Soviet-occupied third of a broken postwar Germany. And he had done so against the instructions of Stalin and other Kremlin officials, who had doubted their own particular style of communism would take among Germans, and thus dared not impose it.

Ulbricht had no such qualms. Almost from the hour of n.a.z.i Germanyas collapse, Ulbrichtas vision had shaped the Soviet-occupied zone. At six in the morning on April 30, 1945, just hours before Hitleras death, a bus picked up the future East German leader and ten other German leftistsa"known as the Ulbricht Gruppea"from the Hotel Lux, the wartime hostelry for exiled communist leaders. Ulbrichtas a.s.signment from Stalin was to help create a provisional government and rebuild the German Communist Party.

Wolfgang Leonhard, the youngest member of the group at age twenty-three, observed that from the moment they landed, aUlbricht behaved like a dictatora over local communists, whom he considered unfit to rule postwar Germany. Ulbricht had fled n.a.z.i Germany to fight in the Spanish Civil War before retreating to exile in Moscow, and he didnat hide his disdain for German communists who had remained inside the Third Reich but who had done so little to bring down Hitlera"leaving the job to foreigners.

Ulbricht provided a preview of his leaders.h.i.+p style when he received a group of a hundred communist district leaders in May 1945 to provide them with their orders. Several of them stood to argue that their most urgent task was to heal the social wounds from widespread incidents of Soviet soldiers raping German women. Some called upon Ulbricht to provide doctors with permission to abort the resulting pregnancies. Others sought a public condemnation of the Red Armyas excesses.

Ulbricht snapped. aPeople who get so worked up about such things today would have done much better to get worked up when Hitler began the war,a he said. aAny concession to these emotions is for us quite simply out of the questiona. I will not allow the debate to be continued. The conference is adjourned.a As would happen so often in the future, Ulbrichtas would-be opponents remained silent, a.s.suming he had Stalinas blessing. The truth was that Ulbricht exceeded Stalinas orders from the beginning. One example came in 1946 when the Soviet dictator asked Ulbricht to fully merge his Communist Party of Germany, or KPD, with the less doctrinaire Social Democratic Party, SPD, to create a single Socialist Unity Party, or SED. Instead, Ulbricht purged enough of the SPDas key figures to ensure his own leaders.h.i.+p and a more dogmatic party than even Stalin had sought.

As late as April 1952, Stalin had told Ulbricht, aAlthough two states are being currently created in Germany, you should not shout about socialism at this point.a Stalin preferred a unified Germany with all its national resources, one that would exist outside Americaas military embrace, rather than Ulbrichtas rump state inside the Soviet bloc. Ulbricht, however, had his own plans, and he campaigned to create a distinct and Stalinist East Germany through the nationalization of 80 percent of the industry and the exclusion from higher education of the children of so-called bourgeois parents.

By July 1952, Stalin had embraced Ulbrichtas plan for a draconian period of forced collectivization and greater social repression. Ulbrichtas convictions only grew deeper after Stalinas death, when he survived at least two efforts by liberalizing party comrades to unseat him. Both failed after Soviet military interventions put down first the East German and then the Hungarian uprisings of 1953 and 1956a"rebellions that had been inspired by reforms that Ulbricht had opposed.

Just as Ulbricht had been more determined than Stalin to create a Stalinist East Germany, he was also more determined than Khrushchev to protect his creation. Speaking to his Politburo on January 4, 1961, he bluntly blamed East Germanyas own shortcomings for 60 percent of all refugee departures. He declared that the party had to address housing shortages, low pay, and inadequate pensions, and that it must reduce the workweek from six to five days by 1962. He complained that 75 percent of those fleeing their country were under twenty-five years old, evidence that East German schools were not properly preparing young people.

The most important action of the Politburoas emergency session was its approval of Ulbrichtas plan to create a highest-level working group whose purpose would be to design plans to afundamentally stopa the refugee bleed. Ulbricht put his three most loyal, reliable, and resourceful lieutenants on the job: Minister for State Security Erich Honecker, Interior Minister Karl Maron, and Erich Mielke, the head of his vast secret police operation.

Having circled the communist wagons at home, he was ready to turn his attention to Khrushchev.

FEDERAL CHANCELLERY, BONN.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 1961.

By tradition, Catholic and Protestant orphans arrived first to congratulate Konrad Adenauer on his eighty-fifth birthday. Shortly after ten in the morning, two boys dressed as dwarfs and a girl clad as Snow White entered the cabinet hall, where West Germanyas first and only chancellor was receiving well-wishers. One dwarf wore a red cap, blue cape, and red pants, and the other was dressed in a blue cap, red cape, and blue pants. Both shrank behind their identical white beards as the nuns pushed them forward to greet one of German historyas great men, who sniffled badly with a lingering cold.

The chancelloras friends were convinced that Adenaueras inconsolable concerns about Kennedyas victory had worsened his illness, contracted before the election, from a cold to bronchitis and then to pneumonia. He was only now recovering. Though the chancellor had publicly praised Kennedy with false effusiveness, he feared privately that Americans had elected a man of dangerously flawed character and insufficient backbone. His intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, had provided Adenauer with reports of Kennedyas s.e.xual infidelities, a weakness the communists would know how to exploit. Yet Kennedyas undisciplined personal behavior was just one of many reasons Adenauer concluded that Kennedy, forty-two years his junior, was aa cross between a junior naval person and a Roman Catholic Boy Scout,a both undisciplined and naive at the same time.

Adenauer knew Kennedy had little higher regard for him. The incoming president considered the chancellor a reactionary relic whose considerable influence in Was.h.i.+ngton had constrained U.S. flexibility in negotiations with the Soviets. Kennedy preferred that Adenauer be replaced in the upcoming elections by his Social Democrat opponent, w.i.l.l.y Brandt, the charming and handsome Berlin mayor, who at age forty-seven was presenting himself as the German Kennedy.

Adenauer faced four challenges in 1961: managing Kennedy, defeating Brandt, resisting Khrushchev, and wrestling with the inescapable biological fact of his own mortality. Nevertheless, the chancellor smiled with delight as Snow White and the dwarfs recited memorized rhymes about animals of the forest and their love for him. The children presented him with homemade gifts, and Adenauer, after wiping his dripping nose with a handkerchief, handed each of them some of his favorite Sarotti chocolates.

One of the great men in German history would be photographed for the next dayas newspapers standing ramrod stiff and looking oddly serious between two frightened-looking children in the attire of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

Call it the ba.n.a.lity of success.

Adenaueras young country was growing more robust by the month. The average annual growth of per capita income in the decade leading up to 1961 had been 6.5 percent. The country had reached full employment, driven by a manufacturing boom of everything from cars to machine tools, and it was now the worldas third-largest exporter. No other developed country was performing as well.

For all that accomplishment, Adenauer was an unlikely hero of sometimes comical contradictions. He was a b.u.t.toned-down man who sang German drinking songs with relish, a proper Catholic who like Churchill napped naked at midday, and a fierce anticommunist who ran his democracy with authoritarian zeal. He craved power but vacationed frequently on Italyas Lake Como when the stress grew too great. He championed Western integration just as intensely as he feared U.S. abandonment. He loved Germany but feared German nationalism.

Dean Acheson, President Trumanas secretary of state, spoke of his longtime friend Adenauer as a man of astiffness and inscrutabilitya who at the same time valued nothing more than good gossip or a close male friends.h.i.+p, which he opened up to cautiously but then nurtured over years irrespective of the individualas continued position. Said Acheson, aHe moves slowly, gestures sparingly, speaks quietly, smiles briefly, and chuckles rather than laughs when amused.a He particularly valued Adenaueras sharp wit deployed against politicians who refused to learn historyas lessons. aG.o.d made a great mistake to limit the intelligence of man but not his stupidity,a Adenauer often told Acheson.

On the morning of his birthday celebration, Adenauer walked briskly to the cabinet hall, where he would receive his guests. An automobile accident in 1917 had left the chancellor with a medically rebuilt, parchment-like face that appeared more Tibetan than German. He had high cheekbones and blue, oriental eyes set apart by the flat bridge of his uneven nose. Some likened his profile to that of the Indian on the American nickel.

Adenaueras twelve years in power had already equaled the length of Hitleras reign, and he had used that time to undo much of the harm his predecessor had inflicted on Germany. While Hitler had excited nationalism, genocidal racism, and war, Adenauer projected a sense of serene and peaceful belonging to Europe, with himself as Germanyas custodian within the community of civilized nations.

Just eight years after the Third Reichas collapse, Time magazine had made Adenauer its Man of the Year in 1953, calling his Germany aa world power once moreathe strongest country on the continent save Soviet Russia.a He had built on that reputation since then, joining NATO and negotiating diplomatic relations with Khrushchev in Moscow in 1955, then easily leading his Christian Democrats to reelection with an absolute majority in 1957.

It was his conviction that the division of Germany and Berlin was more a consequence of Easta"West tension than its cause. Thus, the only safe way to reunite Germany was through European reunification as part of the Western community, and only after a larger U.S.a"Soviet dtente could be achieved. Adenauer thus had dismissed Stalinas offer in early March 1952 that Germany be reunified, neutralized, demilitarized, de-n.a.z.ified, and evacuated by occupying powers.

Adenaueras critics complained that this wasnat the act of a visionary leader but rather the choice of an opportunistic politician. And it was true that the Catholic Rhinelander likely would have lost Germanyas first elections if the Protestant Prussians who dominated eastern Germany had joined in the vote. That said, Adenaueras suspicion of Russian motivations was real and consistent. As he explained later, aThe aim of the Russians was unambiguous. Soviet Russia had, like Tsarist Russia, an urge to acquire or subdue new territories in Europe.a In Adenaueras view, it was failing Allied determination after the war that had allowed the Soviets to swallow up a big piece of prewar Germany and install subservient governments across Eastern Europe. That had left his western Germany abetween two power blocs standing for totally opposed ideals. We had to join the one or the other side if we did not want to be ground up between them.a For Adenauer, neutrality had never been an option, and he wished to join the side that shared his views of political liberty and personal freedoms.

Over the two days of his birthday celebration, ch.o.r.eographed more for a monarch than a democratic leader, Adenauer received European leaders, amba.s.sadors, German Jewish leaders, political party chiefs, union bosses, editors, industrialists, folkloric groups in colorful costumes, and his political opponent w.i.l.l.y Brandt. Cologneas archbishop bestowed blessings. Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss led a delegation of generals.

Time was allotted like scarce rations: family members got twenty minutes, cabinet members ten, and lesser mortals five. Adenauer had fumed in protest when the West German press reported, on the basis of leaks from inside his own government, that it was because of his fragile health that Adenaueras eighty-fifth birthday celebration had been extended over two days, thus providing him sufficient recovery time between visitors. The real cause for the prolonged observance, Adenauer insisted, was that his protocol people couldnat cram into a single day the hordes who wanted to congratulate Der Alte, or athe Old Man,a as his countrymen endearingly knew him.

Hovering darkly over the entire celebration were Adenaueras concerns about Kennedy. Few issues differentiated the Kennedy administration from the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies more than their att.i.tudes toward Adenauer and his West Germany.

During his election campaign, Kennedy had said of Adenauer, aThe real trouble is that he is too old and I am too young for us to understand each other.a But the problem went beyond the fact that Adenauer was one year short of being twice Kennedyas age. More telling were differences of character and background that gave them little common ground upon which to build other than their shared Catholicism.

Kennedy had been born into a life of wealth and privilege and as an adult had surrounded himself with glamour and beautiful women. He impatiently sought new ideas and solutions to old problems. Adenauer had been raised in the austere, late-nineteenth-century home of a stern civil servant father who had survived the Battle of Kniggrtz, the largest military confrontation until that time in Europe, which had opened the way to German unification. Adenauer prized order, experience, and reflection, while he distrusted Kennedyas reliance on flair, instinct, and razzmatazz.

President Eisenhower had considered Adenauer one of the great men of twentieth-century history, a man who had countered nationalist and neutralist instincts among Germans. In Eisenhoweras view, Adenauer helped provide both the philosophy and the means for the Western containment of Soviet communism, arguing that greater Western military strength had to be a prerequisite for successful negotiations with the Soviets.

Eisenhoweras National Security Council summed up its admiration for Adenauer in a top-secret report handed to the Kennedy transition team. aThe main German development of 1960 was a marked increase in self-reliance and independence,a said the NSCas Operations Coordinating Board, which implemented foreign policy across all U.S. agencies. It said West Germany had emerged as a national state and was no longer viewed by its population as a temporary construct pending unification. Instead, it said, West Germany was asuccessor to the Reich and the essential framework of the reunited Germany of the future.a It gave the afirmly established rule of Adenauera full credit for creating a country that was so successful that even the wayward Social Democrats had abandoned doctrinaire socialism and accommodation with the Soviets in order to give themselves an electoral chance. The group praised West Germanyas sound and strong economy, its hard currency, its export success, and its home market, which all together had produced a labor shortage even while the population was increasing.

U.S. Amba.s.sador to Bonn Walter Dowling joined the enthusiasm for Adenauer in his own transition memo. aHis self-confidence, fed by the conviction that his grasp of the political verities has been fully vindicated by the events of recent years, is unimpaired. At eighty-five, he still identifies his exercise of political power with the well-being and destiny of the German people. He sees his victory in the coming elections as necessary to the continued security and prosperity of the country.a Dowlingas bottom line: aAdenauer remains the controlling influence at the center of political life, his political instincts still acutely alive.a None of that swayed Kennedy from his contrasting view, first laid out in an article in Foreign Affairs in the autumn of 1957 and still circulated and read with concern by those closest to Adenauer. The then junior senator from Ma.s.sachusetts complained that the Eisenhower administration, like Trumanas before it, alet itself be lashed too tightly to a single German government and party. Whatever elections show, the age of Adenauer is over.a He thought the socialist opposition had proved its loyalty to the West and that the U.S. had to prepare for democratic transitions across Europe. aThe United States is ill-advised to chase the shadows of the past and ignore the political leaders.h.i.+p and thinking of the generation which is now coming of age,a Kennedy had written.

The Eisenhower National Security Council portrayed Adenauer not as historyas shadow but as a man whose influence had only grown with his increased parliamentary majority from the 1957 elections. With Franceas de Gaulle turning more nationalist and anti-American, the NSC regarded Adenauer as the crucial link both for continued European integration and closer transatlantic relations. Beyond that, Adenaueras Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss had vigorously pursued a military buildup that was making West Germany the largest European contingent in NATO, with 291,000 men, eleven divisions, and modern weapons systems.

But at the same time the NSC sounded warning bells about trends that could endanger the relations.h.i.+p, strains that could grow more p.r.o.nounced should the personal links erode between the men who ran both countries. West Germans were tiring of their prolonged division, the report said, and were beginning to doubt whether they could rely on Was.h.i.+ngtonas commitment. They despaired that the most likely U.S.a"Soviet conflict would be fought on their territory and over German corpses.

Kennedyas election had fed Adenaueras fears of being abandoned by the U.S., which had only increased since the death in May 1959 of his friend and staunchest U.S. supporter, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhoweras secretary of state. Adenauer calmed his restless nights only with larger doses of sleeping tablets. Adenauer dismissed Kennedyas brilliant young advisers, known by others as aNew Frontiersmen,a as aHarvard prima donnas,a theoreticians who ahad never served at the political front.a Adenauer was painfully aware of Kennedyas doubts about him. As far back as 1951, after then Congressman Kennedy made his first political visit to Germany, the young man had concluded it was Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher, and not Chancellor Adenauer, who was athe strongest of Germanyas political figures.a Schumacher, who had lost narrowly in West Germanyas first elections two years earlier, would have been ready to take Stalinas deal of unification for neutrality and thus forgo both deeper West European integration and NATO members.h.i.+p. Acheson had considered Schumacher a abitter and violent mana determined to weaken Germanyas links with the West. Even after his death in 1952, Schumacheras Social Democrats continued to oppose West Germanyas NATO members.h.i.+p in 1955.

It wasnat the first time Kennedy had gotten Germany wrong. While traveling through Europe as a student in 1937, four years into Hitleras rule, he had written in his diary: aWent to bed earlyaThe general impression seems to be there will not be a war in the near future and that France is much too well prepared for Germany. The permanence of the alliance of Germany and Italy is also questionable.a Adenaueras successful 1957 campaign slogan and his advice to Eisenhower on Berlin and the Soviets were the same: No experiments. Yet Kennedyas campaign had been all about experimentation; he believed underlying changes in Soviet society offered the chance of more fruitful negotiations. aWe should be ready to take risks to bring about a thaw in the Cold War,a he said at the time, suggesting a new approach to the Russians that might end athe frozen, belligerent, brink-of-war phaseaof the long Cold War.a Adenauer considered such talk naive, an att.i.tude that had hardened following his historic trip to Moscow in 1955 to open diplomatic relations and free German prisoners of war. Adenauer had held out hope that he could bring home as many as 190,000 POWs and 130,000 German civilian captives out of the 750,000 who were believed to have been captured or kidnapped and then imprisoned.

Nothing in Adenaueras life had prepared him for the verbal abuse and battering talks that followed. When the Soviets informed their German visitor that only 9,628 German awar criminalsa remained in Soviet gulags, Adenauer asked what had become of the rest. aWhere are they?a Khrushchev had exploded. aIn the ground! In the cold, Soviet ground!a Adenauer had been shaken by aa man who was, without a doubt, crafty, shrewd, clever, and very savvy, yet at the same time crude and without compunctionsa. He pounded his fist on the table, half wildly. So I showed my fist as well, and that is what he understood.a Khrushchev got the better of Adenauer, gaining de facto recognition of East Germany in exchange for so few living POWs. For the first time, Adenauer accepted that there would be two amba.s.sadors from the two Germanys in Moscow. The physical strain from the trip left Adenauer with double pneumonia. Die Zeit correspondent Countess Marion Dnhoff wrote, aThe freedom of 10,000 was bought at the price of the servitude of 17 million.a The U.S. amba.s.sador to Moscow, Charles Bohlen, wrote, aThey traded prisoners for the legalization of the division of Germany.a Having never forgotten this unsettling encounter, Adenauer worried Kennedy would fare even worse with Khrushchev, though the stakes would be far higher. For that reason, Adenauer had only badly hidden his preference for Nixon over Kennedy. Adenauer even sent Nixon a condolence letter after he lost the election, saying, aI can only imagine the way you feel now.a The suggestion was clear: he shared Nixonas pain.

However, on his eighty-fifth birthday, Adenauer briefly put aside such concerns and basked in the adulation of admirers.

The morning began as Adenauer had ch.o.r.eographed it at a Ma.s.s read by his son Paul at St. Elisabeth Hospital in Bonn, followed by a breakfast with doctors and nurses. He then joined a Catholic service in Rhndorf, a neat village of tidy homes with well-tended flower boxes just across the Rhine from Bonn, where he had settled in retreat from the n.a.z.is in 1935. The official explanation for choosing Bonn as West Germanyas provisional capital was to avoid the greater permanence that would have been a.s.sociated with a major city. However, Germans knew the choice also suited Adenaueras lifestyle.

In Bonn, things were as Adenauer liked thema"unruffled and in their place. The crisis of Berlin some four hundred miles away was real, but Adenauer seldom visited the city, the Prussian charms of which were lost on the Rhinelander. He considered Germany, like ancient Gaul, to be a country of three parts defined by its chosen alcoholic beverage. He called Prussia the Germany of schnapps drinkers, Bavaria the land of beer drinkers, and his Rhineland a place of wine drinkers. Of the three, Adenauer believed only wine drinkers were sober enough to rule the others.

The chancelloras office window looked out upon barren winter trees to the morning s.h.i.+mmer of the Rhine. His room was simply decorated: an old grandfather clock, a Winston Churchill painting of a Greek temple (a personal gift from the artist), and a fourteenth-century sculpted Madonna, presented to him by his Cabinet on his seventy-fifth birthday. Roses that Adenauer raised and cut himself rested in a delicate crystal vase on the s.h.i.+ny surface of the polished credenza behind his desk. If he had not been a politician, he told friends, he would have been a gardener.

His birthday celebration ran according to the same sense of order, aside from Adenaueras indulgence of twenty-one grandchildren. They romped through his Cabinet Hall as West Germanyas President Heinrich Lbke praised the irreversible nature of the chancelloras achievements. Economics minister Ludwig Erhard declared that, thanks to Adenauer, the German people had rejoined the community of free peoples.

In all, Adenauer received 300 guests and 150 gifts during his two-day celebration. But no visit was more revealing than that of Berlin Mayor w.i.l.l.y Brandt, who at age forty-seven was both Adenaueras opponent and his opposite. Born Herbert Frahm, the illegitimate son of a Lbeck shop a.s.sistant, he was a lifelong leftist who had fled the Gestapo to Norway, where he changed his name for safety. When the Germans invaded Norway, he relocated to Sweden and remained there until the waras end.

That Brandt was paying his respects was a reflection of how far West German politics had come. The Social Democrats had concluded that their policy platform of neutrality and closeness to the Soviets would never get them elected. So in 1959 at their Bad G.o.desberg party conference, and again in November 1960, when they elected Brandt as their leader, they revised their domestic program and embraced West Germanyas NATO members.h.i.+p.

The SPDas s.h.i.+ft to the right could not have been more apparent at Adenaueras birthday procession. A year earlier on Adenaueras birthday, the Social Democrat press service had accused him of abusing power and acting autocratically and cynically in executing his countryas highest office. A mid-ranking official had dropped off some carnations. This year Brandt himself visited, and SPD parliamentary leader Carlo Schmid personally delivered eighty-five red tea roses.

Still, Adenauer did not trust the conversion of Brandt or his socialists. He considered Brandt a particularly treacherous opponent due to his charm and significant political skills, and because he represented the more electable center of the Social Democratic Party. So Adenauer applied one of his political maxims: he portrayed his most dangerous foe as the most despicable of characters and questioned the origins of his birth and the genuineness of his patriotism. Adenauer told his partyas ruling council, aConsideration must now be given to what can be said about Brandtas backgrounda.a He told another party gathering later, aWhoever wants to be chancellor must have character and a clean past, because the people must trust him.a When Brandt asked Adenauer to his face whether such unfriendly compet.i.tion was really necessary, the chancellor protested with false innocence, aI would tell you, if I had anything against you,a and then he continued conspiring against Brandt. Some questioned whether Adenauer at his age should seek another term, but nothing injected him with more youthful energy than the necessity of defeating the socialists.

In a New Yearas radio interview, Adenauer set the standard low for what would const.i.tute success in 1961. When pressed about his ambitions, he said, aI would say that 1961 will have twelve months. No one can dispute that. What will happen in those twelve months no one in the world knowsa. Thank G.o.d that the year 1960 did not bring any catastrophe down upon our heads. And we want to work hard and diligently in 1961 as before. I hope 1961 will also be free of catastrophes for us.a So that was Der Alteas fondest dream: a year free from disastera"providing more time to erode the Soviet bloc through his policy of strength and Western integration. He was convinced Khrushchev would test Kennedy in 1961 and that Germanyas future would lie in the balance. At a Cabinet meeting he held on the fringes of his birthday celebration, he said, aWe will all need to keep our nerves. No one will be able to do that by himself. We have to do that in a common effort.a At the end of the long celebration, Adenaueras secretary Anneliese Poppinga remarked that the chancellor must feel wonderful seeing such adulation.

Waving his hand, Adenauer said, aDo you really think so? A good feeling? When you are as old as I am, you stand alone. All the people I knew, all those I cared for, my two wives, my friends, are dead. No one is left. It is a sad day.a As he scanned stacks of written congratulations with her, he spoke of the stress of the year ahead: the trips in the coming days to Paris, London, and Was.h.i.+ngton, and the need to keep Brandt down and Berlin free. aOld people are a burden,a he said. aI can understand those who talk so much about my age and who want to be rid of me. Donat let all the attention today fool you. Most donat know how I am and that I remain so healthy. They think that with my eighty-five years I must be tottering and not right in my head.a He then laid his papers to the side, stood, and said with a sigh to his secretary in his flawless Italian, aLa fortuna sta sempre allaaltra rivaaa"Good fortune always lies on the far side of the river.

Yet even in Adenaueras darkest moments, he knew the buoyant Federal Republic of Germany, through the irrepressible dynamism of its economy and the free agency of its people, was winning the struggle against communism. No matter what dangers Adenauer foresaw from President Kennedyas inexperience or Mayor Brandtas socialism, none of them amounted to the existential threat facing Ulbrichtas East Germany: the refugee exodus.

The Failed Flight of Friedrich Brandt.

Friedrich Brandt was hiding in his family barnas hayloft when the East German Volkspolizei burst through the front door of his nearby home. Brandt knew his crime: he was resisting the state-mandated collectivization of his family farm, which had been the Brandt property and livelihood through four generations.

Brandtas wife wept and his thirteen-year-old son Friedel stood in stony silence while police ransacked every room, dumping out drawers, overturning mattresses, cutting open picture frames, and tipping over bookshelves in the pursuit of incriminating evidence. However, they already had all the proof they required in a letter that Farmer Brandt had written several weeks earlier to East German President Wilhelm Pieck.

Brandt was confident that Pieck, a trained carpenter whom he considered a hardworking man of integrity, would protect his countryas farmers and their property if only someone would tell him about collectivizationas excesses and its costs to agricultural production: Dear President Wilhelm Pieck: Munic.i.p.al council representatives have revoked my right to farm despite the fact that my grains and harvest are maintained at the highest standards while potatoes are rotting in the fields that have been harvested by the collectivized state farmers under the supervision of Master Farmer Glser.

I beg to know why the police have confiscated all my farm equipment and inventory. They have taken my beautiful young horses to be slaughtered. I consider this a criminal act of robbery and beg for your a.s.sistance and an investigation into these events as soon as possible. And if that is no longer possible, then I ask for an exit permit so that I may leave the GDR in order to live out my twilight years quietly and recover from this land of injustice. For freedom and unity!

Friedrich Brandt Brandt was just one among thousands of East Germans who had fallen victim to Ulbrichtas accelerated efforts at agricultural collectivization and the completion of his industrial nationalization under his second five-year plan for 1956a"1960. The East German leader had executed the Stalinist plan with a vengeance after two efforts by reformers to oust him had been defeated, and the uprisings of 1953 and 1956 showed Soviet leaders that the cost of a too-liberal East German leaders.h.i.+p was dissolution.

The first two years of the plan had introduced an impressive 6,000 agricultural cooperativesa"which quickly became known by the abbreviation LPG, short for the lengthy German name Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft. For Ulbricht, that was insufficient, as 70 percent of all arable land still belonged to the countryas 750,000 privately owned farms. So in 1958 and 1959, the Communist Party sent agitation teams to villages throughout the country to cajole and threaten the locals into avoluntarya collectivization. By the end of 1959, the state set unachievable quota measures for those farmers who remained private. The State Security Directorate then began to imprison farmers who resisted collectivization.

Brandt had been one of the few holdouts. The state sectoras 19,000 LPGs and dozens of other state farms controlled 90 percent of the arable land by then and produced 90 percent of its agricultural products. It was a remarkable achievement for Ulbricht, coming while he reduced private enterpriseas share of total industrial production to only 9 percent. The cost, however, was that tens of thousands of the countryas most skilled business leaders and farmers had fled the country, and state enterprises were being run by individuals more skilled at party fealty than at effective management.

Having terrorized the Brandt family, the Peopleas Police left his farm before even trying to find their missing suspect. They had restricted his and his wifeas ability to travel or flee to the West by taking their ident.i.ty papers, which left them naked in a country of frequent, random doc.u.ment checks. Authorities would return later to arrest Herr Brandt for resisting collectivization and conspiracy to commit the further crime of Republikflucht, or flight from the Republic, which carried a prison sentence of three years.

So Brandt decided to leave the country that night, joining the four million who had left the Soviet zone and then East Germany from waras end until 1961. To avoid possible police inspections on public transport, he rode his bicycle for four hours through the night to the home of his wifeas sister in East Berlin near a border crossing on a bridge over the Teltow Ca.n.a.l. She offered to conceal him, but after a short conversation Brandt decided to make his way west before the border posts had his description or police began checking the homes of his relatives the next morning. The odds were good that Brandt would be spared any ident.i.ty check, along with the tens of thousands of others who safely crossed the open border each day for work, shopping, and social visits.

After she heard the next day from her sister about her husbandas decision, Brandtas wife decided to flee as well, along with her son. With their farm lost and her husband likely to be already safely in the West, it was an easy decision. Her sister, with whom she shared a resemblance, provided her with ident.i.ty papers with which she could travel. If she was caught, to protect her sister she would say she had stolen the doc.u.ments. Life meant nothing to her without her Friedrich.

When stopped by East German police on the same bridge her husband likely had crossed, she collapsed on the ground and cried from the tension. She was certain she had been found out. But luck was on her side that evening. In the random ways that determined East German life, the border police gave Frau Brandtas papers only a cursory look and allowed her to pa.s.s.

When she arrived with her son at the Marienfelde refugee camp in West Berlin, the administrator running the registration office said no one of her husbandas name or description had arrived. After she waited and worried for three days, a friend arrived from their village and reported that Friedrich Brandt had been captured and jailed before he could cross the border. The charge was one that Ulbricht was employing frequently: aendangerment of the public order and antisocial activities.a In a touch of irony, authorities had further justified his imprisonment by pointing to his letteras slanderous contention that East Germany was a land of injustice.

Brandtas village friend urged her to remain in the West, but she protested: aWhat should I do alone with the boy in the West? I cannot allow Friedrich to sit in a jail there with no one to help him.a She returned home the next morning with her boy, hoping she could still land a job on the collective farm to sustain their diminished family while Friedrich was in prison. Their brief freedom became years of quiet desperation as they disappeared into East Germanyas drab society, quietly awaiting his release.

Friedrich Brandtas arrest was a small victory for Ulbricht. But he knew he would lose the larger war on refugees without far more decisive help from Khrushchev.

6.

ULBRICHT AND ADENAUER: THE TAIL WAGS THE BEAR.

We are a state, which was created without having and still does not have a raw material base, and which stands with open borders at the center of the compet.i.tion between two world systemsa. The booming economy in West Germany, which is visible to every citizen of the GDR, is the primary reason that in the last ten years around two million people have left our republic.

Walter Ulbricht in a letter to Premier Khrushchev, January 18, 1961.

The probe which we carried out shows that we need a little time until Kennedy stakes out his position on the German question more clearly and until it is clear whether the USA government wants to achieve a mutually acceptable resolution.

Khrushchevas response to Ulbricht, January 30, 1961.

EAST BERLIN.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 1961.

Walter Ulbricht had never written a letter of greater consequence. Though it was marked SECRET, Ulbricht knew that what he was about to send to Khrushchev would also circulate among all the top Soviet leader s.h.i.+p. Separately, he would forward copies to other communist allies who might support the new pressure he was placing on the Soviet leader.

Every word of the East German leaderas fifteen-page correspondence was written for maximum impact. Just two short months after their last meeting in Moscow, Ulbricht had again lost faith that Khrushchev would get the job done in Berlin. He rejected Khrushchevas plea for patience, feeling his problems were growing too rapidly to be laid aside until Khrushchev could test relations with Kennedy.

aSince Comrade Khrushchevas statement on the West Berlin question in November 1958, two years have flown by,a Ulbricht complained. In a brief concession to Khrushchev, the East German leader acknowledged the Soviet leader had used the time to convince more countries that athe abnormal situation in West Berlin must be eliminated.a But he spent most of the letter arguing why it was finally time to act on Berlin and how to do so. Even Moscowas NATO adversaries, Ulbricht argued, knew negotiations to change West Berlinas status aare unavoidable.a Conditions in the coming year favored communist action, Ulbricht argued, because Adenauer would want to avoid a disruptive conflict before his September elections, and Kennedy would go to great lengths to prevent a confrontation during his first year in office.

Ulbricht then brazenly issued what he called aGDR demands.a Writing more as the ruler than the ruled, Ulbricht listed in detail what he expected of Khrushchev in the coming year. He wanted him to end postwar Allied occupation rights in West Berlin, bring about the reduction and then withdrawal of Western troops, and ensure the removal of Western radio stations and spy services with all their subversive influences.

His catalog of expectations was lengthy, touching on issues small and large. From Khrushchev, he sought the transfer to East Germany of all the state functions in Berlin that were still controlled by the four powers, ranging from postal services to air control. In particular, he wanted control of all air access to West Berlin from West Germany, which would provide him with the capability to shut down the daily scheduled and chartered flights that were ferrying tens of thousands of refugees to new homes and better-paying jobs in West Germany.

If Ulbricht could control all access to West Berlin, he could also squeeze it and over time erode its viability as a free, Western city. Ulbricht knew he was suggesting something similar to Stalinas failed Berlin Blockade of 1948, but he used Khrushchevas own arguments that the Soviets would be more likely to succeed this time because Moscow had closed the gap on Western military superiority and faced a less determined adversary in Kennedy than had been the case with Truman.

On three matters, Ulbricht demanded that Khrushchev make immediate decisions and announce them publicly.

The tail was furiously trying to wag the bear.

First, he wanted Khrushchev to issue a statement that Moscow would ratchet up Soviet economic a.s.sistance to the GDR to show the West that aeconomic blackmaila against his country could not succeed. Second, he appealed to Khrushchev to announce that there would be an East Germana"Soviet summit in April to raise the standing of Ulbricht and his country in negotiations with the West. Finally, he demanded that the Soviet leader convene a Warsaw Pact summit to rally Moscowas allies to support East Germany militarily and economically. Thus far, Ulbricht complained, these countries had been unhelpful bystanders. aAlthough they report in the press about these problems,a wrote Ulbricht, athey basically feel uninvolved in this matter.a Ulbricht reminded Khrushchev that it was the Soviets who had stuck East Germany with such an impossible starting point from which Ulbricht now had to defend the Kremlinas global standing. aWe are a state,a he lectured Khrushchev, awhich was created without having and still does not have a raw material base, and which stands with open borders at the center of the compet.i.tion between two world systems.a Ulbricht groused to Khrushchev that the Kremlin had deeply damaged East Germany during the first ten postwar years by extracting economic resources through reparations, including the complete withdrawal of factories, while the U.S. had built up West Germany through the enormous financial support and credits of the Marshall Plan.

Perhaps reparations had been justified at the time, Ulbricht conceded, given all of the Sovietsa wartime suffering and the need to strengthen the Soviet Union as the world communist leader. But now, Ulbricht argued, Khrushchev should recognize how much such measures had damaged East Germany in its compet.i.tion with West Germany. From the waras end through 1954, Ulbricht said, the per capita investment in West Germany had been double that in East Germany. aThis is the main reason that we have remained so far behind West Germany in labor productivity and standard of living,a he wrote.

In short, Ulbricht was telling Khrushchev: You got us into this mess, and you have the most to lose if we donat survive, so now help get us out. Ulbricht escalated the economic demands he had made in November, which Khrushchev had mostly accepted. aThe booming economy in West Germany, which is visible to every citizen of the GDR, is the primary reason that in the last ten years around two million people have left our republic,a he said, adding that it was also what allowed the West Germans to apply aconstant political pressure.a An East German worker had to labor three times as long as a West German to buy a pair of shoes, if he could find them at all. East Germany had 8 cars per 1,000 people, compared with 67 per 1,000 in West Germany. The East German official growth rate of 8 percent came nowhere near measuring the real situation for most citizens, since the figures were inflated by heavy industrial exports to the Soviets that did nothing to satisfy consumers at home. The result in 1960, when West German per capita income was double that of East Germans, was a 32 percent increase in refugees, from 140,000 to 185,000, or 500 daily.

Because of all that, Ulbricht appealed to Khrushchev to dramatically reduce the remaining East German reparations to the Soviet Union, and to increase supplies of raw materials, semifinished goods, and basic foodstuffs like meat and b.u.t.ter. He also sought new emergency loans, having already asked Khrushchev to sell gold to help East Germany. aIf it is not possible to give us this credit, then we cannot maintain the standard of living of the population at the level of 1960,a he wrote. aWe would enter into such a serious situation in supplies and production that we would be faced with serious crisis manifestations.a Ulbrichtas message to Khrushchev was clear: If you donat help now and urgently, you will face the prospect of another uprising. Khrushchev had barely survived the 1957 coup attempt that had followed Budapest, so Ulbricht knew the Soviet leader could not ignore his warning.

Ulbricht was combining maximalist demands with threats of dire consequences if Khrushchev failed to act. His letter might offend the Soviet leader, but that was the least of Ulbrichtas worries. Khrushchevas failure to act could bring the end of East Germanya"and of Ulbricht.

On the same day, Ulbricht sent an indirect but just as unmistakable message through Khrushchevas nemesis: Beijing.

Ulbricht did not seek Khrushchevas permission, nor did he provide prior notice before dispatching a high-level mission to Chinaas capital, led by Politburo member and party loyalist Hermann Matern. Given Ulbrichtas insider knowledge of Khrushchevas ugly dispute with Mao, it was an unfriendly act in both timing and execution.