10:00 A.M., FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1961.
At age twenty-six, Adam Kellett-Long of Reuters was the only Western news correspondent based in communist East Berlin, and that suited him just fine. A gaggle of reporters fought over each shred of news in West Berlin, but he had the communist side to himself under an arrangement through which the East German government paid its bills to the news agency through supplying his office and accreditation. Ulbricht called Kellett-Long amy little shadow,a acknowledging his frequent presence.
Still, the East German press officeas telephone call that morning was unusual, urging the young reporter to cover an emergency session of the Volkskammer, the countryas parliament, on Luisenstra.s.se at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, August 11. The British reporter usually skipped the Volkskammeras mundane meetings, as his editors were unlikely ever to print a report on them. But if his East German minders were so eager for him to attend, there must be a reason.
The council that day pa.s.sed what Kellett-Long regarded as an aenigmatic resolution,a saying that its members approved whatever measures the East German government wished to undertake to address the arevanchista situation in Berlin. It was an all-purpose rubber stamp for Ulbricht.
Outside the meeting hall, Kellett-Long b.u.t.tonholed his most reliable source, Horst Sindermann, who ran the Communist Partyas propaganda operations. aWhat is all this about?a asked Kellett-Long.
Sindermann was less talkative than usual. He studied the young Brit through thick gla.s.ses, strands of dark hair combed across his balding head, then spoke in a measured, businesslike manner. aIf I were you, and were planning to leave Berlin this weekend, I would not do so,a he said.
The East German then disappeared into the crowd.
Kellett-Long would later recall, aYou could not have a stronger tip in a communist country that whatever was going to happen was going to happen that weekend.a The British reporter checked out news reports, but found no further clues. Sender Freies Berlin, the U.S.-funded West Berlin radio station, had that morning reported yet another record number of East Germans arriving at the Marienfelde emergency refugee camp. Kellett-Long had joked to his wife that, by his calculations, East Germany would be entirely empty by 1980 or so.
The official East Berlin radio station Deutschlandsender didnat report on refugees at all that daya"or anything else that would help Kellett-Long. It was running a feature on the second human to orbit the Earth, Soviet cosmonaut Gherman t.i.tov, who had circled the globe seventeen times in twenty-five hours and eighteen minutes before safely returning to Earth. The accomplishment was aunprecedented in human history,a the radio station said, noting that it further proved the socialist superiority that the refugee flood so stubbornly contradicted.
In a further effort to follow up Sindermannas tip, the British reporter drove to the Ostbahnhof, East Berlinas main station for those arriving from elsewhere in East Germany, where he often tried to monitor the refugee flow. The number of travelers seemed greater than usual, but what struck Kellett-Long even more was the larger presence of uniformed and plain-clothes police.
The police were aggressively working the crowd, fishing out dozens of travelers seemingly at random, arresting some and turning back others. The Brit scribbled in his notebook: aan escalated police operation.a However, it seemed to Kellett-Long that East German authorities were losing the battle, trying to hold back the sea with outstretched palms. He could see the tension in their eyes.
Kellett-Long returned to his office and wrote a story that rang bells in editorial rooms around the world. aBerlin is holding its breath this sunny weekend,a he wrote, awaiting for drastic measures to stem the refugee flow to West Berlin.a Based on the Sindermann steer, he said authorities would be responding aimminently.a It was strong and pessimistic language, just the sort of brash report that had made Kellett-Long so unpopular with his superiors. But he was confident of it. Kellett-Long reckoned there were now several possibilities as to what could happen next. He listed them for his readers: East German authorities could tighten their controls on travelers. They could impose stiffer penalties on those apprehended while trying to flee. A far bigger story, of course, would be if the East Germans shut off transit routes altogether.
Kellett-Long couldnat imagine that alternative. Then he would be writing about a potential war.
STASI HEADQUARTERS, NORMANNENSTRa.s.sE, EAST BERLIN.
LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 11, 1961.
In the first briefing for his lieutenants ahead of their weekend work, Stasi chief Erich Mielke gave the historic moment its code name. aThe name of this operation will herewith be known as aRose,aa he said. He did not explain the reasoning behind the name, though the suggestion was that behind the tens of thousands of barbed-wire thorns was a plan of organizational beauty.
Mielke exuded self-confidence. Though he was only five feet, five inches talla"about the same height as Ulbricht and Honeckera"he was more powerfully built, more athletic, and more handsome than either of them. He wore a permanent five-oaclock shadow on his jowls and had bags under his dark eyes.
Back in 1931, at only twenty-four years of age, Mielke had begun his thuggish communist career with the murder of two Berlin police officers who had been lured to a political rally for the planned hit in front of the Babylon Cinema. After the killings, Mielke crowed among comrades at a local pub, aToday we celebrate an act that I have staged!a (aHeute wird ein Ding gefeiert, das ich gedreht habe!a) Party comrades smuggled Mielke out of Germany, where he was convicted in absentia. He then began his education and training in Moscow as a Soviet political intelligence officer.
Mielke had run East German state security since 1957, but the coming hours would be the most crucial test yet for his elaborate apparatus of 85,000 full-time domestic spies and 170,000 informants. Most of his senior officers, gathered in the canteen at secret police headquarters, had known nothing about the operation until that moment.
aToday we begin a new chapter of our Chekist work,a he told them, with one of his frequent references to the Cheka, the original state security arm of the Bolshevik revolution. aThis new chapter demands the mobilization of each individual member of the State Security Forces. In this period we are entering, it will be shown whether we know everything and whether we are firmly anch.o.r.ed everywhere. Now we must prove whether we understand the politics of the party and are capable of carrying out its orders.a Mielke kept fit, drank little, and didnat smoke, but he had three indulgences: a pa.s.sion for Prussian marching music, hunting on private grounds he kept for top communist officials, and the success of the security forcesa soccer team, Sportsvereinigung Dynamo, which would regularly win championships with the help of his manipulation of matches and players. Yet none of that compared with the game he was fixing now.
He told his officers that the work they were about to perform would ademonstrate the strength of our republica. What is the main thing to remember: always be watchful, demonstrate extreme efficiency and eliminate all negative occurrences. No enemy must be allowed to become active; no conglomeration of enemies must be permitted.a He then issued instructions for the weekend ahead. They ranged from how to control individual factories to a.s.sessing precisely the aenemy forcesa on a district-by-district level. He wanted secret police present within the armed forces to ensure combat readiness and political loyalty through the closest possible contact to officers. aWhoever may confront us with antagonistic actions will be arrested,a he said. aEnemies must be seized outright. Our goal is to prevent all negative phenomena. Enemy forces must be immediately and discreetly arrestedaif they become active.a Mielke had taken leadership after the June 1953 failure of his mentor Wilhelm Zaisser to stop worker protests from spreading. Back then, soldiers and police had in many cases joined ranks with the protesters. Strikes had spread like waves across the country, and it had taken Soviet tanks and troops to restore order.
Mielke was determined to preclude all such problems by antic.i.p.ating them and dousing dissent before it gained momentum.
EAST AND WEST BERLIN.
SAt.u.r.dAY, AUGUST 12, 1961.
It was like any other summer weekend for most Berliners.
The weather was a pleasant 75 degrees (24 degrees Celsius), with just enough cloud cover to provide relief from the sun. After the downpours of the previous week, Berliners gathered at sidewalk cafs, in parks, and at lakeside beaches.
One neighborhood near Berlinas Easta"West border had been closed to traffic, but it was for the annual Kreuzberg Kinderfest, or childrenas fair, on the Zimmerstra.s.se. Flags and streamers decorated the narrow street, where children from all sectors of Berlin were laughing, playing, and begging their parents for ice cream and cake. Doting adults tossed children wrapped candies from their apartment windows above the streets.
Most Allied military officers had taken the day off to be with their families. Some steered sailboats on the Wannsee and up it through the undulating Havel. Major General Albert Watson II, the U.S. commandant in Berlin, played golf at the Blue-White Club, where membership was part of occupation rights.
The Severin + Khn company tour buses were having a b.u.mper day showing off the Cold Waras epicenter to tourists, including stops in the Soviet sector. They instructed pa.s.sengers not to photograph certain public buildings but urged them to snap as many shots as they liked of the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, with its statue of a giant Red Army soldier cradling a German baby in one arm while crushing a swastika with his boot.
The biggest story of the day in West Berlin papers was that of the record inflow of refugees. A flat nasal voice at the Marienfelde refugee center provided the count over loudspeakers for all who were waiting in linea"aseven-hundred sixty-five, seven hundred sixty-six, seven hundred sixty-sevenaa"to reach more than two thousand by dayas end.
Church workers, members of civic clubs, and other volunteers, including the spouses of Allied forces, had gathered to help feed hungry refugees and console weeping babies. The campas facilities overflowed, so refugees had been distributed around the city to sleep in church naves and in cla.s.srooms on military camp beds and hospital cots. Heinrich Albertz, Mayor Brandtas chief of staff, telephoned George Muller, the deputy political adviser at the American Mission, to ask for field rations, as Marienfelde had run out of food. aThe matter just canat continue like this,a he said.
Muller extracted several thousand C rations from the U.S. garrison to help. They would last only a few days, but Albertz would take what he could get.
Not since 1953 had West Berlin seen such a stampede. Marienfeldeas twenty-five three-story apartment blocks were filled to bursting, as were twenty-nine other temporary camps set up to absorb the flood. Twenty-one daily charter flights were ferrying thousands of the new refugees from West Berlin to other parts of West Germany where jobs were plentiful.
Yet none of that was sufficient to manage the human tide. Processors had all but given up trying to sift out real from bogus refugees, among them certainly dozens of East German spies that Ulbrichtas foreign intelligence chief Markus Wolf was planting in the West.
As dark settled over Berlin, a fireworks display for the childrenas festival illuminated the sky. Dancing couples on the rooftop terrace of the new Berlin Hilton stopped to take in the pyrotechnics. West Berlin movie houses were sold out that weekend, and more than half of the customers were East Berliners. It was no wonder, considering the hits they could see for a mark and twenty-five pfennigs in Eastern or Western currency: The Misfits, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, at Atelier am Zoo; Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston; or The Old Man and the Sea, with Spencer Tracy, at the Delphi Filmpalast. Or they could watch For Whom the Bell Tolls, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, at the Studio on Kurfrstendamm, or The Third Man, with Orson Welles, at the Ufa Pavillion.
On a live stage, Leonard Bernsteinas new musical, West Side Story, was taking West Berlin by storm. East Berlin also had its stage attractions. Hundreds of West Berliners crossed each evening to see the latest Bertolt Brecht performance at the famous Berliner Ensemble, or political cabaret in the Distel. Some made the trip for cheap drinks at places like the Rialto Bar in the northeast Pankow district, which had no closing hour.
Soviet troops were restricted to barracks that night, due to nonfraternization policies. However, British, French, and American soldiers were doing the town, enjoying their considerable attraction to Berlin girls whose own German men had far less pocket money to entertain them. The First Welsh Regiment had gathered at a British sector dance hall. The French had a dance floor at the Maison du Soldat. American GIs gathered in their own service clubs and favorite pubsa"and as so often on Sat.u.r.days, they would make it a long and liquid night.
NUREMBERG, WEST GERMANY.
SAt.u.r.dAY EVENING, AUGUST 12, 1961.
Berlinas mayor w.i.l.l.y Brandt launched the final phase of his national campaign for chancellor in Nuremberg in Bavaria, some one hundred miles north of Munich. Before 60,000 voters on the cityas cobbled market square, he attacked his opponent Adenauer for refusing to engage him in a public debate of the Nixona"Kennedy variety.
In a raspy, emotional voice, the forty-seven-year-old mayor rhetorically asked the crowd why so many refugees came to West Berlin every day. aThe answer,a he said, ais because the Soviet Union is preparing a strike against our people, the seriousness of which only a very few understand.a He said East Germans fear athe Iron Curtain will be cemented shuta and they will be left alocked into a giant prison. They are agonizingly worried that they might be forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of indifference and lost opportunities.a As prophetic as he was poetic, Brandt fired another shot across the bow of his opponent Adenauer. aToday we stand in the most serious crisis of our postwar history, and the chancellor belittles that mattera.a He called for all Germans on both sides of the divide to join in a plebiscite about their future, confident they would choose a democratic, Western course. If East Germans could not be included in such a referendum, West Germans and West Berliners should vote on their own, he said. aWe also have a claim to self-determination,a he said, in reference to Germanyas wartime defeat, anot because we are better than others, but rather because we are no worse than other people.a The crowd cheered wildly, wanting even more of Brandt when he retreated in exhaustion to the two railway carriages that had been carrying him from one campaign stop to another. The train would drive overnight to Kiel on the North Sea coast.
While Brandt was in Nuremberg, Adenauer was campaigning closer to his Bonn home in Lbeck. His less focused, more meandering speech asked East Germans to stop their westward stampede and stay home, helping to prepare East Germany for unification.
aIt is our duty,a he said, employing the emotive German concept of Pflicht, ato say to our German brothers and our German sisters on the other side of the zone border: Donat panic.a Germans together would someday overcome their difficult separation, he said, and become as one again.
GROSSER DOLLNSEE, EAST GERMANY.
5:00 P.M., SAt.u.r.dAY, AUGUST 12, 1961.
Walter Ulbricht appeared uncharacteristically relaxed to guests attending his garden party at Grosser Dllnsee, some twenty-five miles outside Berlin. The government guest quarters, known as aHouse Among the Birches,a had once served as the hunting lodge for Luftwaffe commander Hermann Gring, something Ulbrichtas guests knew but did not mention.
Ulbrichtas party had a dual purpose. First, he was quarantining government officials who would later sign off on his operation in an environment that he could hermetically seal. Second, he was executing a diversionary maneuver. Any Western intelligence agency monitoring his movements would report that East Germanyas leader was throwing a summer party at his countryside retreat.
His guests speculated among themselves about why they had been summoned. Some noticed a larger-than-usual number of soldiers and military vehicles in the woods surrounding the guesthouse. But none of them had risen in Ulbrichtas hierarchy by asking too many questions.
The August sun beat down as they gathered in the shade of birch trees in the meadow beside a serene lake. For those who remained inside, Ulbricht was showing a film, the popular Soviet comedy with the German t.i.tle of Rette sich wer kann! (or Each Man for Himself), about the chaos aboard a Russian freighter carrying lions and tigers.
Only a handful of Ulbrichtas guests knew that at four p.m. their boss had signed the final order that gave Honecker the green light to put Operation Rose into motion. Standing by his side had been the crucial players in that eveningas chain of command: Politburo members Willi Stoph and Paul Verner, who ran the government; Defense Minister Heinz Hoffmann; Minister of State Security Erich Mielke; Minister of Interior Karl Maron; Minister for Transport Erwin Kramer; Peopleas Police President Fritz Eikemeier and his chief of staff Horst Ende.
While standing before them, Honecker had briefed his senior officers on their a.s.signments for the evening, and none had raised any questions or objections. He had then provided each of them their written instructions, having signed them as he would all the other orders for that evening: aWith socialist greetings, E. Honecker.a HYANNIS PORT, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS.
MIDDAY, SAt.u.r.dAY, AUGUST 12, 1961 (6:00 P.M. IN BERLIN).
Apparently unaware of what was occurring in Berlin, President Kennedy was trying to beat the 90-degree heat on Cape Cod with a midday boat outing. He had spent Sat.u.r.day morning reading reports that followed up on Friday discussions about how to prepare for a possible Berlin crisis with Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Defense McNamara.
The dayas diplomatic traffic contained some reason for concern.
Khrushchev had given a speech at a Sovieta"Romanian Friendship Rally a day earlier, and the U.S. emba.s.sy in Moscow worried about his blatant threats aof complete destructiona of NATO members Greece, Italy, and West Germany should war break out. At the same time, Khrushchev had talked more emphatically than before of Soviet willingness to provide guarantees of access to West Berlin and ensure noninterference in the cityas internal affairs.
Both could be viewed as messages to Kennedya"a stick and a carrot.
Secretary of State Rusk had sent a sharply worded cable to U.S. Amba.s.sador to Germany Dowling that began, aThe situation in East Germany is causing us increasing concern.a He warned that an aexplosion along 1953 lines at this time would be highly unfortunate.a He feared that such an uprising, in response to the danger of athe escape hatch being closed,a would come abefore the military and political measures now under way for dealing with the Berlin problem have become effective.a He said, aIt would be particularly unfortunate if an explosion in East Germany were based on the expectation of immediate Western military a.s.sistance.a He wanted Dowling to report on what the West German government thought about the alikelihood of early explosiona and awhat action it contemplates to prevent one, and what action by the U.S. and other Allies it would consider useful.a He reminded Dowling to tell the West Germans athat as a matter of policy, the Allies should do nothing to exacerbate the situation.a Despite such clear worries about coming trouble, Kennedy set his papers aside at midday and, with the sun burning through the overcast sky, set off on his motorboat into Nantucket Sound with his wife, three-year-old Caroline, and Lem Billings, his longtime friend and New York advertising man. The president dropped anchor in Cotuit Harbor after the Coast Guard and police boats cleared a swimming area for the First Family. Jackie set aside her pink parasol and jumped into the water dressed in a blue-and-white bathing suit.
The latest report on Khrushchevas activities included little of interest. The Soviet leader had left for a weekend retreat in the Crimea, where he was preparing for his October Party Congress, and the word was that he planned to be away until the first week of September. More excitement was swirling around the New York Yankeesa extraordinary baseball year. Mickey Mantle had just hit his forty-fourth homer and Roger Maris his forty-second.
After a four-and-a-half-hour cruise, the Kennedys returned to their private dock, where they swam, joined by Caroline in an orange life jacket. The Los Angeles Times reported that although athe president did not swim vigorouslyahe showed no trace of his recent back ailment when he agilely climbed a ladder at the stern of the Marlin.a While soldiers in East Germany were secretly loading trucks with tank traps, barbed wire, pillars, and sawhorses, Kennedy drove his white golf cart into Nantucket village, where he bought Caroline and four of her cousins some ice cream at a local candy store. Jackie looked like something out of a fashion magazine in her blue blouse and red shorts.
EAST BERLIN.
7:00 P.M., SAt.u.r.dAY, AUGUST 12, 1961.
Reuters correspondent Kellett-Long had created such a stir with his Friday story, in which he had predicted an imminent Berlin event, that his news editor David Campbell had flown in that afternoon to track the story personally.
By early evening on Sat.u.r.day, the two men were still searching for factual confirmation of Kellett-Longas apparent scoop. aYou put us out on a real limb here,a Campbell told his young reporter. aSomething better happen.a In rereading his story, Kellett-Long wondered whether he should have used somewhat less hyperbolic language. He and Campbell drove around East Berlin in his car, looking in vain for the crisis he had predicted. Yet all Kellett-Long saw was a beautiful day with crowded swimming pools and overflowing cafs.
Perhaps it would happen later in the evening, the reporter told his boss.
PEOPLEaS ARMY HEADQUARTERS, STRAUSBERG, EAST GERMANY.
8:00 P.M., SAt.u.r.dAY, AUGUST 12, 1961.
General Heinz Hoffmann, who was both East German defense minister and army commander, stood proudly before his officers. At age fifty, he looked like something out of a World War II film, standing ramrod-straight in his perfectly pressed uniform with eight rows of medals, wavy blond hair with gray streaks, combed back. With his square and high cheekbones, he was almost too handsome.
Like so much of the East German leadership, he had been a rambunctious young communist in prewar Germany. Convicted of a.s.sault during anti-n.a.z.i demonstrations, he had done hard jail time. In 1937 and 1938, Hoffmann had been seriously wounded while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, where he had served in an international brigade under the cover name Heinz Roth. After two years in an internment camp, head moved to the Soviet Union, where he had been educated for his future work. In 1949, he had taken charge of creating the East German armed forces that he would now deploy against their own people.
Beside him stood his most impressive workhorse officer, Ottomar Pech, a man of a quite different background who had fought in the Third Reichas Wehrmacht before his capture by the Russians on the Eastern Front. His job was to train the most elite military units and oversee coordination between the secret police and the military, which would be so crucial that evening.
Arrayed before them were the armyas top commanders and senior border police officers at the Peopleas Army headquarters in Strausberg, some thirty kilometers east of Berlin. They had eaten generously from a cold buffet table groaning with the sort and quality of food that was not easily accessible to all East Germans: sausage, ham, veal, caviar, and smoked salmon. Though alcohol had been available, most of the men drank coffee, for rumors had indicated they would be involved in a secret operation that evening.
Hoffmann briefed officers on what was to come after they watched a morale-building film extolling the might of socialist combat forces. At precisely 8:00 p.m., Hoffmann handed his senior officers the first sealed orders. Successively lower-ranking officers were briefed thereafter, many by telephone. They were ready to mobilize soldiers and police, thousands of whom had been held by their superiors in their barracks and at training grounds throughout the weekend.
By 10:00 p.m., Honecker was confident his apparatus had responded exactly as planned and was ready for full mobilization. He would receive reports throughout the night from commanding officers, district party committees, and government departments. His tentacles stretched everywhere. Honecker would later reflect that the operation that he had begun ain the dawning day, Sundaya would make the world ap.r.i.c.k up its ears.a The little information that had leaked out to the West on the operation wasnat resulting in any response. The head of West Germanyas Free Democratic Party, Erich Mende, had contacted Ernst Lemmer, Adenaueras minister responsible for gesamtdeutsche Fragen, or German-German relations, after hearing reports from West German intelligence that they were picking up aindicationsa that showed Ulbricht was planning at some point soon to introduce Sperrma.s.snahmen, or measures to blockade the middle of Berlin. The intelligence had been convincing enough that Mende had come to Lemmeras office to discuss the danger while they inspected an outspread city map together. The two men agreed that sealing the border would be impossible.
aIt just wouldnat work,a Mende concluded.
Yet at midnight on the dot, Honecker rang army headquarters and issued the order to begin the unimaginable.
aYou know the a.s.signment!a he said. aMarch!a Hoffmann immediately set his units in motion: some 3,150 soldiers of the 8th Motorized Artillery Division began to roll on East Berlin from Schwerin, with 100 battle tanks and 120 armored personnel carriers. They would park in the stockyards of the Friedrichsfelde district of East Berlin. Hoffmann would dispatch a further 4,200 troops of the 1st Motorized Division from their barracks in Potsdam with 140 tanks and 200 personnel carriers. They would form the second ring of defense behind the borderas front lines, which would be made up of 10,000 men from units of the East Berlin Volkspolizei, the 1st Brigade of the Readiness Police, and the Berlin Security Command.
In all, some 8,200 Peopleas Police and 3,700 members of the mobile police forcesa"reinforced with 12,000 factory militia men and 4,500 State Security mena"would move into action in the hours ahead. They would be supported by a further 40,000 East German soldiers around the country, just in case the border closure triggered anything similar to the national uprising of June 1953. Soldiers from Saxony, who were considered particularly reliable, would reinforce the 10,000 soldiers of the Peopleas Army stationed in Berlin.
It was a cool and clear nighta"perfect for the purpose.
Perhaps Mother Nature was a communist.
GROSSER DOLLNSEE, EAST GERMANY.
10:00 P.M., SAt.u.r.dAY, AUGUST 12, 1961.