Berlin 1961

Ulbricht looked at his watch. aWeare going to have a little meeting,a he said to his guests.

It was precisely 10:00 p.m. and thus time to a.s.semble his garden partyas guests in a single room for the announcement. They were tired, overfed, and ready to go home, having already been with him for more than six hours. More than a few were drunk or at least tipsy. All gathered obediently.

Ulbricht then informed them that the sector border between East and West Berlin would be closed in three hoursa time. In a printed edict, which the ministers there would approve, he would authorize action by East German security forces to place aunder proper control the still open border between socialist and capitalist Europe.a aAlle einverstanden?aa"All agreed?a"Ulbricht asked, noting the nodding of his mostly silent guests.

He informed his guests that they, like his domestic staff, would not be able to leave Dllnsee until the operation was well under way to ensure complete security. But, he offered, there was still plenty of food and alcohol for them to enjoy.

No one protested. As Ulbricht had told Soviet Amba.s.sador Pervukhin three days earlier: aWe will eat together. Iall share with them the decision to close the border, and I am entirely convinced that they will approve this measure. But above all else, I will not let them leave until we have completed the operation.

aSicher ist sicher,a he had said: Better safe than sorry.

REUTERS NEWS AGENCY OFFICE, EAST BERLIN.

10:00 P.M., SAt.u.r.dAY, AUGUST 12, 1961.

Kellett-Long was worried more about his career than about Berlinas fate.

It was past ten oaclock, and he had no additional facts to back up his Friday story that Berlin was facing a decisive weekend. He returned to the Ostbahnhof to look for any unusual activity and seek out the vendor who regularly provided him with an early edition of Neues Deutschland, the Communist Party paper that contained any news of importance.

He hungrily scanned its pages, feeling ashattereda to read only routine stories with anothing to suggest anything was about to happen.a Kellett-Longas London editors, under pressure from subscribers, were pressing him to either file a story to support his earlier report or knock it down. aI canat just bury my head in the sand,a he thought to himself as he began to compose leads.

aContrary to expectationsaa he typed out.

aContrary to expectations, what?a he asked himself.

aWhat an amateur I am,a he mumbled to himself.

He crumpled up the paper and tossed it away. In a state of nerves, he smoked one cigarette after another.

RONTGENTAL, EAST GERMANY.

MIDNIGHT, SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961.

Three long, penetrating wails of a siren wrenched Sergeant Rudi Thurow from his slumber. Thurow turned on his light and looked at his watch. It was a minute past midnight. Probably just another drill, he cursed to himself. There had been so many lately. Yet the slender, blond, twenty-three-year-old leader of the 4th Platoon, 1st Brigade, of the East German border police knew his job was to take each one of them seriously.*

Thurow had also seen enough military activity the previous afternoon to suspect something more than an exercise was in the works. Soviet T-34 and T-54 tanks had rumbled by all afternoon past his post in Rntgental, forty kilometers north of Berlin, and he had seen several trainloads of East German soldiers rolling into East Berlin.

It had been six years since Thurow had volunteered to join the border guards, attracted by the good pay and privileged access to scarce consumer goods. He had earned decorations of all sorts since then, and had distinguished himself as his brigadeas top sharpshooter.

He dressed quickly, then ran to the adjoining room, where he awakened his men, who cursed in complaint while he abruptly pulled off their blankets. Once a.s.sembled in the parade yard, First Lieutenant Witz, the company commander, told his men and dozens of others that on this night, they would undertake measures that had been forced upon them by the enemy.

For too long, said Witz, the government had tolerated the loss of its workforce to the West. He said the flesh merchants in West Berlin, who preyed on the citizens of the GDR, would be put in their place. He spoke of eighty-three espionage and terror centers in West Berlin that would be dealt a crippling blow by his menas action that night.

Witz, who said he had been briefed only an hour earlier, carefully tore open a large brown envelope marked aTop Secret,a then took out its contents. Thurow and the others impatiently listened while Witz read for five minutes from the doc.u.ment before it came to the point.

In order to prevent the enemy activities of the vengeful and militaristic powers of West Germany and West Berlin, controls will be introduced on the borders of the German Democratic Republic, including the border of the Western sector of Greater Berlina.

Berlin was to be split in two, and Thurowas men would help draw the dividing line. Thurow heard a fellow sergeant, a loyal communist, whisper a question: aWould the Allies simply stand by and let this happen?a Or were they at war?

REUTERS NEWS AGENCY OFFICE, EAST BERLIN.

1:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961.

Shortly before 1:00 a.m., Adam Kellett-Long watched his East German news agency printer cough out its daily good-night message. He decided ato pack it upa and think about finding new employment in the morning.

Just then, his phone rang and a voice he did not recognize advised him in German not to go to bed that night. At 1:11 a.m., his teleprinter came to life. Kellett-Long read as it spat out a 10,000-word Warsaw Pact decree. The British correspondent was frustrated that the printer would not pump out the copy as quickly as he could read it. It spoke of how adeceived people,a namely the refugees, were being recruited as spies and saboteurs. In response, Warsaw Pact member states were ensuring that areliable safeguards and effective control be established around the whole territory of West Berlin.a The declaration rea.s.sured NATO allies that the Warsaw Pact would not touch access routes to West Berlin.

Kellett-Long raced to his car and drove toward the border to see what was happening. Aside from the occasional couple embracing in a doorway, he saw only a deserted city as he steered down the Schnhauser Allee near his home and then turned on Unter den Linden toward the Brandenburg Gate.

There a policeman waved a red flare to stop his car.

aIam afraid you canat go any further,a the policeman said calmly. aDie Grenze ist geschlossen.a (The border is closed.) Kellett-Long then drove up Unter den Linden on his way back to the office to file his report, but he was blocked at Marx-Engels Square, a main parade ground for East German soldiers. Another policeman with another flare stood before its empty expanse, blocking traffic so that a huge convoy of personnel vehicles could pa.s.s, carrying uniformed police and soldiers. It seemed to go on forever.

Kellett-Long rushed back to his office to file a asnapa report that would ring news agency machines around the world. It was easy to write: aThe Easta"West border was closed early todaya.a He followed that with a first-person account: Earlier today, I became the first person to drive an East Berlin car through the police cordons since the border controls began shortly after midnighta. The Brandenburg Gate, main crossing point between the two halves of the city, was surrounded by East German police, some armed with submachine guns, and members of the paramilitary afactory fighting guards.a Kellett-Long then turned on East German radio and heard announcers read one decree after another about new restrictions on travel and how they would be enforced. He filed new reports as quickly as he could type. The British reporter found it curious that East German radio was playing modern, soothing jazz between the endless decrees.

aSo thatas all they are doing,a he thought to himself. aThey are just reading decrees and playing nice music.a FRENCH SECTOR, WEST BERLIN.

1:50 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961.

Twenty minutes after the operation began, West Berlin police sergeant Hans Peters saw the blazing headlights of a half dozen East German army trucks as they rolled down the road he was patrolling. Strelitzer Stra.s.se was a street like 193 others that crossed the previously unmarked boundary between two Berlins.

The trucks belched out soldiers, who scattered up both sides of the street. Each carried long, dark objects that he took to be machine guns. Peters, a Third Reich army veteran who had served on the Eastern Front, pulled his Smith & Wesson revolver from his holster. Yet even as he slipped bullets into the chamber, he knew it was an inadequate defense against such numbers. He sought cover in a doorway, from which he watched a scene that would be repeated throughout the night at dozens of other locations.

Two squads of six soldiers each sprawled and squatted on the sidewalks facing west, pointing their machine guns on tripods in his direction. They had no intention of invading the West and were merely setting up a line to deter a no-show opponent. Behind them, two other squads carried barbed wire. They uncoiled the rolls and hung the strands from wooden sawhorses they had placed across the street. Their cordon was safely within the Soviet zone and well behind the demarcation line.

Though Peters was technically in the French sector, all French soldiers remained in bed. That left only him, a lone West Berlin policeman, to observe a flawless operation. He watched the enemy seal the street so quietly and smoothly that none of the residents of Strelitzer Stra.s.se even rose to turn on a light.

Once the border line was secure, the East German soldiers turned their guns to the East, prepared to contain their own people. Peters alerted his superiors to what he had witnessed.

U.S. MISSION, WEST BERLIN.

2:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961.

After receiving the first reports of the border closure at around 2:00 a.m., the top U.S. official in Berlin, E. Allan Lightner Jr., was reluctant to awaken his superiors. Washington tended to overreact, and Lightner wanted to get his story straight before reporting in. It was also a summer weekend, and his bosses would be more unhappy than usual about an unnecessary wake-up call.

Senior officials of the U.S, British, and French Allied missions in West Berlin were already burning up phone lines among themselves, piecing together what seemed to be occurring. aThere seems to be something going on in East Berlin,a Lightner said with some understatement to diplomatic officer William Richard Smyser, who served in the Eastern affairs section. He wanted them to check it out.

At just past three in the morning in the early light of a northern European dawn, Smyser drove his Mercedes 190SL with his colleague Frank Trinka up to Potsdamer Platz, where East German Vopos (Volkspolizei) and factory militia were unrolling the first strands of barbed wire. When they told the Americans they could not pa.s.s, Smyser protested, aWe are officials of the American forces. You have no right to stop us.a It would be the first test of whether the Soviets and their East German clients would prevent Allied right of free pa.s.sage in Berlin, a potential trigger for a U.S. military response. After an exchange by radio with superiors, the East German police rolled back the barbed wire to let the diplomats pa.s.s. They would stop any ordinary East Germans from crossing that night, but the police had clear orders not to impede the movement of Allied officials. Khrushchevas decision to operate within Kennedyas guidelines was now operational.

During an houras drive around East Berlin, Smyser and Trinka witnessed a city of frenetic police activity and private despair. All along the border, Vopos were unloading concrete posts and barbed wire and blocking all streets leading from East to West. At Bahnhof Friedrichstra.s.se, East Berlinas main station from the West, armed police were blocking the dimly lit platforms as anguished would-be travelers sat in the cavernous halls on their suitcases and bundles, many of them weeping. As he looked into their faces, Smyser could imagine them thinking, aOh my G.o.d, if wead only gone twenty-four hours earlier.a Children were separated from parents, lover from lover, and friend from friend. One of border police sergeant Rudi Thurowas men had been so ashamed of stopping people from continuing their lives as before that he had vaulted the barbed wire to freedom that morning.

Smyser and Trinka drove back to West Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate, cleared through again after a short delay by an East German policeman who had gained approval from a senior East German Communist Party official who was supervising the crossing.

The diplomats had gathered such a partial picture that the American Mission chose not to file a full report to Washington as the crisis was unfolding. Lightneras team concluded that they had neither the resources nor the manpower to match news agency reports on what had become a breaking story. Due to State Department bureaucracy, it would take four to six hours anyway to send an official telegram through channels at the U.S. emba.s.sy in Bonn from Berlin and then to Washington. The border closure had also disrupted U.S. intelligence efforts to get hold of their usual contacts, thus impeding independent confirmation of what was occurring in East Berlin.

When Lightner debriefed his scouts, he was particularly keen to hear that they had not seen Soviet forces taking any direct part in the operation. On the one hand, that meant the closure was less of a military threat to the U.S., since Soviet troops werenat ma.s.sing in Berlin. On the other hand, the East German regime was violating existing four-power agreements that prohibited the presence of its troops in East Berlin at all, let alone their use to occupy the city and seal its border.

At 11:00 a.m. Berlin time, Lightner cabled Rusk his first full report, before that having only sent partial information bursts through a so-called critical channel that didnat require the same clearances. He reported simply: aEarly morning Aug 13 East German regime introduced drastic control measures which have effect of preventing entry into West Berlin of Sovzone and East Berlin residents.a He said the move was aevidently as a result of increased refugee flow with attendant economic loss to GDR and prestige loss to socialist camp.a Lightner didnat cable again until 10:00 p.m. that night, when he wrapped up the missionas best knowledge of what had happened in the previous twenty-four hours. He put his emphasis on the ma.s.sive military deployment, including significant backup by the Soviets, which was adesigned to intimidate people from the outset and thus nip in the bud any possible resistance [by showing] civilian disobedience would be ruthlessly suppressed.a He concluded that the sizable Soviet military mobilization throughout East Germany revealed Moscowas doubts about the reliability of Walter Ulbrichtas military. He also noted, however, that the East German authorities were allowing Western military and civilian personnel to pa.s.s freely to and from East Berlin. Lightner reported that eight hundred new refugees had registered in West Berlin between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on the first day of the cityas physical division, having either crossed on August 12 or athrough ca.n.a.ls and fields today.a NEAR POTSDAMER PLATZ, WEST BERLIN.

9:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961.

West Berlinersa mood of disorientation and confusion shifted to rage as the morning wore on. West Berlin policeman Klaus-Detlef Brunzel, new at his job and only twenty years old, arrived for duty at Potsdamer Platz only to discover how drastically the world had changed in just a few hours.

On the previous evening, he had worked a routine shift, confiscating contraband and chitchatting with the prost.i.tutes who loitered on the vacant, war-flattened square, which until that day had been an excellent spot for them to attract clientele from both sides of the city. Now he saw only East German border police in their place, using jackhammers to dig holes for concrete pillars, from which they were stringing barbed wire. Brunzel had only been four years old when World War II ended, but he feared a new war had begun as he watched East German tanks track him with their gun barrels as he walked back and forth in front of them.

By late morning, a crowd of angry West Berliners had gathered at the border, throwing stones at the East German police and calling them pigs and n.a.z.is. Brunzel took cover ato avoid being hit by masonry thrown by our own people!a Before long, the West Berlin fury turned on absent American soldiers, protectors who they felt should have saved them from this fate. All the rhetoric about American commitment to Berlinas freedom had not produced a single U.S. rifle company.

U.S. MILITARY HEADQUARTERS, CLAYALLEE, WEST BERLIN.

SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST 13, 1961.

General Watson, the American commandant in Berlin, had felt hamstrung by his reporting lines and instructions. He had also doubted his own judgment, having been in Berlin just three months.

He had considered Berlin a sufficiently calm place to have relocated his mother-in-law to the city. He compared the divided cityas role in the U.S.a"Soviet standoff to the aquiet in the eye of the cyclone.a His time in Berlin had been spent less on military response and more on learning German, reducing his golf handicap, and playing what he called aelderly doublesa tennis with his wife.

In profiling the fifty-two-year-old commander, the Berlin press wrote of his fondness for horseback riding, bridge, light opera, and reading paperback mysteries. Watson was resigned to leading a command where he was so outnumbered by the enemy that he knew West Berlin would have been impossible to defend against a concerted Soviet conventional attack. Yet even if he had had the troops, he still lacked the independent authority to use them.

The bureaucracy of getting things done in Berlin was the worst Watson had experienced in the military, and that said a lot. He had one reporting line directly to U.S. Amba.s.sador Walter Dowling, who sat three hundred miles away in Bonn. His second reporting line was to General Bruce Clarke, the U.S. Army Commander in Europe, headquartered in Heidelberg. Then there was a third line to NATO Commander General Lauris Norstad in Paris. Watsonas orders came from all three, and they were rarely consistent.

There were also times, like the night of August 12a"13 and the following morning, when all those channels fell mostly silent. Watsonas instinct in such times of doubt was to stand whatever ground he occupied and hope for the best. For weeks, his instructions from the Pentagon had more often than not included warnings that he should not allow himself to be provoked by the East Germans or Soviets into a military action that could escalate into violent conflict, as if his superiors had known what was coming. So Watson played it safe in the early hours of August 13 and did nothing but observe the operation.

The East Germans hadnat crossed any of his lines. They had not set a foot in any of the non-Soviet Allied zones. And for all the Soviet military activity around the city, his scouts had not reported any major movement inside Berlin. So Watson saw no reason to wake up General Clarke or General Norstad. The State Department folks would alert Amba.s.sador Dowling in Bonn, so Watson didnat contact him, either.

Early that morning, Watson had sent a helicopter over East Berlin airs.p.a.ce to monitor the situation. Yet he opted not to dispatch U.S. troops to the newly reinforced border. A show of U.S. force might have satisfied Berliners looking for a timely demonstration of American commitment, but Watsonas superiors would have considered it a reckless provocation.

Watson felt justified in showing such restraint at 7:30 a.m., when Colonel Ernest von Pawel reported in to his emergency operations center in the bas.e.m.e.nt of U.S. headquarters on Clayallee. Von Pawel told Watson that four Soviet divisions had moved out of their usual garrison areas in East Germany and had surrounded Berlin.

At age forty-six, aVona was the crucially important chief of the U.S. Military Liaison Mission to the Commander in Chief, Group of Soviet Forces, Germany. Though his name had the ring of German n.o.bility, Vonas roots and manner were pure Laramie, Wyoming. He had won a reputation with Watson for getting things right.

Just four days earlier, Von had predicted during the regular meeting of the Berlin Watch Committee that Ulbricht was going to put up a awall.a The committee was a secret interagency intelligence group in the city whose job it was to raise alarm bells at the first indication of hostile military action. Though no one had paid attention then, that gave Von credibility with his commander now.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas McCord, head of the U.S. Armyas 513th Military Intelligence Group, Berlin, had been studying a number of pictures and reports of large quant.i.ties of construction materiala"concrete blocks, barbed wire, and other suppliesa"stockpiled near the cityas dividing line. But the material was in so many places and had been ordered by so many sources that his men had difficulty interpreting what they were seeing.

aDo you think they plan to build a wall, Tom?a Colonel David Goodwin, the chief of intelligence on General Watsonas staff, had asked at the meeting. McCord responded that he had three sources and they were contradictory. One areliablea but untested source said there would be a wall and it was aimminent.a But two sources, who were judged as more reliable, had said there would be nothing of the sort.

All eyes had then turned to von Pawel. He reminded the group that during World War II the Germans had built a wall in Warsaw sealing off the Jewish ghetto, a comparison that seemed outlandish at the time. aIf you think a wall is the least likely option,a he had said, athen that is where I place my bet, because weave never outguessed the Soviets before.a The problem was that von Pawel had lacked any hard evidence at the time to support his conviction.

The deputy chief of the CIA base, John Dimmer, dismissed von Pawelas notion. It would be apolitical suicidea for Ulbricht to build a wall, he had said, and with that he had swayed the group to conclude a wall was the aleast likelya of the many alternatives they were discussing.

Von Pawelas report on the morning of August 13 left no room for doubt about what was occurring. Hiding under a bridge in East Germany from 4:00 to 6:00 a.m., one of his men had seen a whole Soviet division rumble down the Autobahn. Von himself had counted a hundred tanks while making his way to Potsdam. He reported to Watson: The Soviet 19th Motorized Rifle Division, combined with the 10th Guards Tank Division and possibly the 6th Motorized Rifle Division, moved out early this morning and moved into position around Berlin. Elements of the 1st East German Army Motorized Rifle Division moved out from Potsdam and are presently unlocated. Soviet units deployed and moved off the autobahn, deploying units into small outposts and roadblocks composed of three or four tanks, an armed personnel carrier and several troops. These outposts were established 3 or 4 kilometers apart, and appear completely to ring Berlin.

It was an elaborately and perfectly organized operation, about which U.S. military intelligence had reported nothing in advance. What von Pawelas report meant to Watson was that Soviet troops were primed to pounce in such numbers that they would overwhelm his paltry force if it dared respond.

It was 10:00 a.m. before the three Western commandantsa"the French, the British, and the Americana"and their staffs met on the Correnplatz, at Allied headquarters in the suburban Dahlem district of the American sector. All had been taken by surprisea"and none had any good ideas about how to respond. Watson chaired the meeting by the coincidence of their monthly rotation. Yet for all Watsonas lack of Berlin experience, he knew how to count. His twenty-seven tanks, less than one for every mile of the West Berlina"East Berlin internal border, and six 105-millimeter howitzers were not sufficient to take on the Soviet army and their East German clients.

REUTERS NEWS AGENCY OFFICE, EAST BERLIN.

MID-MORNING, SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961.

Mary Kellett-Long looked out their East Berlin office window and saw an angry and growing crowd that had been building in size with every hour of the morning. It had never struck Mary before how close their apartment at Schnhauser Allee was to the Berlin border, just four hundred yards away, as the line had never been so clearly defined.

Most of the crowd was made up of furious East Berlin youth who saw their connection to the West cut off. Her husband, Adam, who by then had made his way into the crowd, thought they looked like angry soccer fans after a heartbreaking defeat, looking for someone to take it out on. Police and the paramilitary factory forces pushed back the line of protesters, which by then was twenty deep.

When the explosions began, Mary feared that East German units had fired on civilians and perhaps her husband. But the blasts were the sound of police firing tear-gas canisters into the protesters, who responded by running in all directions.

Adam recalled a more innocent time. Not long before August 13, a Vopo had stopped his car for a routine check as he returned from a West Berlin shopping trip. As he searched the trunk, Adam pulled a can of baked beans out of a bag and threw it in the air saying, aDas ist eine Bombe!a The police officer fell to the ground and his colleagues pulled their guns. The Vopo then dusted himself off and laughed, letting the reporter pa.s.s. Clearly, the time for practical jokes was over.

Like the few sporadic protests that had occurred across East Germany that day, the demonstration lacked the scale, determination, or reach to challenge Ulbrichtas victory. In contrast to 1953, Ulbricht was firmly in charge, well prepared, and enjoyed the full military and political support of the Soviets. He had prevented any organized opposition both through the element of surprise and the deployment of thousands of police and soldiers at every strategic point throughout the city.

Ulbrichtas lieutenants used water cannons at several key locations to keep riotous West Berliners at bay. As long as the Allied troops stayed put in West Berlin, as they seemed determined to do, Ulbricht knew he could handle anything East Berliners or West Berliners might throw at him. Khrushchevas insurance policya"the Soviet tanks waiting in Berlinas hinterlanda"would not be necessary.

Marshal Konev had won his second battle of Berlin, this time with no bloodshed.