By Frederick Taylor
The Berlin Wall was a tangible symbol of the suppression of
human rights by the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, but Frederick Taylor asks
whether it was more convenient to the Western democracies than their
rhetoric suggested. - See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/frederick-taylor/berlin-wall-secret-history#sthash.najnkLIz.dpuf
The building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 divided
families and neighbourhoods in what had been the capital of Germany. The Wall
represents a uniquely squalid, violent, and ultimately futile, episode in the
post-war world. And we know that the subsequent international crisis, which was
especially intense during the summer and autumn of 1961, threatened the world
with the risk of a military conflict, one that seemed as if it could escalate
at any time into nuclear confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union.
But was all as it seemed, with the noble democracies vainly
opposing yet another Communist atrocity? Did the leaders of the West genuinely
loathe the Wall, or was it – whisper if you dare – actually rather convenient
to all the powers concerned?
In 1945, the victors of the Second World War, the US, the
Soviet Union, Britain and by special dispensation the French, had divided
Germany into four zones of occupation and its capital, Berlin, into four
sectors. To the wartime Allies, Germany had been a problem ever since its
unification in 1871, a big, restless country in the heart of Europe. The over-
mighty Germany of the Kaiser’s and Hitler’s time must never be allowed to
re-emerge.
Then came the Cold War. From the late 1940s, Germany itself
– what was left of it after the Poles and the Russians had carved chunks off
its eastern territories – became a creature of the Communist-capitalist conflict.
It divided into West Germany (the ‘Federal Republic of Germany’) and the
smaller East Germany (the ‘German Democratic Republic’), the former a
prosperous democracy of some 50 million anchored into what was to become the
Western NATO alliance, the latter a struggling social experiment, a third as
large, allied to the Communist Warsaw Pact. The Iron Curtain ran through
Germany, with a fortified border between the two Cold War German states.
Until 1961, however, Berlin remained under joint occupation and
kept a special status, still more or less one city in which fairly free
movement was possible. It represented an ‘escape hatch’ through which East
Germans could head to the now booming West in pursuit of political freedom and
a higher standard of living than their Stalinist masters were prepared to allow
them.
Between 1945 and 1961, some 2.5 million had fled in this
way, reducing the GDR’s population by around 15 per cent. Ominously for the
Communist regime, most emigrants were young and well qualified. The country was
losing the cream of its educated professionals and skilled workers at a rate
that risked making the Communist state unviable. During the summer of 1961,
this exodus reached critical levels. Hence, on that fateful August weekend, the
Communists’ vast undertaking to seal off East from West Berlin, to close the
‘escape hatch’.
Sunday, August 13th, became known as ‘Stacheldrahtsonntag’
(barbed wire Sunday). Within a few weeks the improvised wire obstacle across
the city started to morph into a formidable cement one that would soon become
known as the ‘Berlin Wall’, a heavily fortified, guarded and booby-trapped
barrier almost a hundred miles long, dividing the city and enclosing West
Berlin.
Since the end of the war, Berlin had been a constant running
sore in East-West relations. In 1948-49 Stalin had tried to blockade the Western
sectors into submission by closing off all the land routes into the city, which
lay almost a hundred miles inside Soviet-occupied territory. The West surprised
him with a successful airlift that kept West Berlin supplied with sufficient
essentials to survive. Only Stalin’s death had prevented a wall, or something
like it, being constructed in 1953. In 1958, his successor, the ebullient,
unpredictable Nikita Khrushchev, had started threatening West Berlin’s status
once more. The Soviet leader compared the Allied-occupied sectors to the West’s
testicles. If, he joked, he wanted to cause NATO pain, all he had to do was
squeeze ...
Most Germans experienced the building of the Wall as a
devastating blow. It was not just a brutal act in itself but also final proof,
if proof were needed, that the reunification many still hoped for must remain a
distant, even an impossible, dream. There was genuine outrage in West Germany
(and to some extent in the East, though this was rapidly suppressed by the
Communist secret police, the Stasi, who carried out thousands of arrests).
However, given the renewed dangers of conflict during the
previous few years, the building of the Wall, although it unleashed a brief
East-West showdown, was – seen from a global perspective -- not necessarily the
catastrophe that it first appeared.
None of the former victors of the Second World War was about
to go to war in order to prevent the division of Germany. The Western powers
were unanimous in declaring their horror at the Wall, in making the right
public noises - it wouldn't do to upset the West Germans - but what was going
on behind the scenes?
The West officially promoted the recreation of a unified
German state. In reality, however – as the crisis made clear – it privately
accepted the division of Germany and saw no reason to oppose it by force.
At the end of July 1961, the newly-elected American
President John F. Kennedy, had already ordered a military build-up to cope with
possible Soviet and Warsaw Pact designs on Berlin (and by implication West
Germany). However, his actual response to the building of the Wall was
downright muted. Washington made it clear that only if the Soviets and their
East German protégés tried to blockade or invade West Berlin would war become a
possibility. In private, the US Secretary of State Dean Rusk even confessed –
within days of the East German border closure operation – that ‘in realistic
terms it would make a Berlin settlement easier’. In other words, so long as
American prestige was not affected, the Soviets could do what they liked with
the bits of Germany they controlled, including East Berlin. The extension of
the Iron Curtain to the heart of Berlin might even help stabilize the
situation.
The reaction of the other two occupying powers, Britain and
France, was even more ambivalent.
The crisis found Harold Macmillan, prime minister of Britain
since 1957, hundreds of miles north of London, at Bolton Abbey, in Yorkshire.
There he was celebrating, as he did every summer, the opening of the
grouse-shooting season. Macmillan spent Saturday August 12th in the company of
his nephew, the Duke of Devonshire – owner of Bolton Abbey -- engaged in
appropriate use of firearms against indigenous bird-life. Even after hearing
the news from Berlin, the premier saw no reason why he should not continue to
do so on August 13th.
The day afterwards, the British ambassador to West Germany,
Sir Christopher Steel, commented languidly in a dispatch to London: ‘I must stay that I personally have always
wondered that the East Germans have waited so long to seal this boundary.’ His
main concern was to ensure Washington
didn’t do anything silly. London should get together with the Americans to make
sure that ‘they, no more than we, regard this as the issue on which we break’.
Meanwhile, 71-year-old General Charles de Gaulle, last
active Allied leader of the Second World War and since 1958 once more President
of France, was resting at his country home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. So
relaxed did de Gaulle seem about the Berlin affair that he failed to return to
Paris until the following Thursday, August 17th.
This caution was not due to mere indifference on the part of
either leader. Each had problems of his own.
Britain’s military and economic decline had lately
accelerated to a point where even the traditionally imperialistic Conservatives
realized they had to cut their cloth to suit new circumstances. A certain testy
obsession with cost had crept into discussions about Britain’s military
commitments. Even before this latest twist in the Berlin crisis, plans had been
put in motion by defence minister Harold Watkinson, not to increase Britain’s
military presence in West Germany and Berlin, but drastically to reduce it.
Conscription for the British armed services was due to be
abandoned in the early part of 1962. The strength of the British Army of the
Rhine (BAOR) would accordingly fall from 52,000 to 44,000 by the end of that
year. It seemed likely that even the 3,500 troops London maintained in the
British Sector of Berlin might be subjected to a quiet culling operation.
Moreover, Britain had problems elsewhere in the world. In
the Middle East it faced confrontation with the newly-radicalized republic of
Iraq under its fiery strongman, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qassem. Qassem had laid
claim to the small, British-protected (and oil-rich) sheikhdom of Kuwait, and
had spent most of June massing his army in the arid border zone. London had
hastily withdrawn substantial forces from Germany, Cyprus and the Home Command
to defend the Kuwait flashpoint. The cost of such a major, if temporary,
movement of personnel and equipment, including ships and aircraft, was
extremely painful for the British Treasury.
Before August 13th, Macmillan’s diplomats were still
frantically occupied with arranging for peacekeeping forces from the Arab League
to take over the protection of Kuwait, while British conscripts sweated in
temperatures of 50° centigrade (120° Fahrenheit) opposite Iraq’s army in the
desert south of Basra.
Berlin was therefore not high on London’s priorities list,
in great part for financial reasons. For several years, Britain had been locked
in a wrangle with West Germany. London wanted Bonn to share more of the cost of
the British presence there. Formerly an army of occupation, the BAOR was now
part of the first line of defence against attack from the East. This had become
a touchy point. In mid-July, during discussions about contingency plans in case
of another Soviet blockade of Berlin, Macmillan had declared rather sourly that
Britain ‘should make it clear that we will pay nothing’ toward the expenses of
any new airlift.
As for that other overstretched former imperial power,
France still had several hundred thousand troops, mostly young conscripts, tied
up in a vicious guerrilla war in Algeria. Talks to end the bloody Algerian struggle
for independence from France had just begun in the spa town of Evian – a
concession by de Gaulle that had already brought sections of his army and the
Algerian white settlers out in open rebellion. It would be late the following
spring before a ceasefire resulted. With France’s largest ‘overseas province’
in bloody uproar, diverting serious reinforcements to join the 45,000 French
troops already in Germany (of which 3,000 were based at the Quartier Napoléon
military complex in Berlin) was out of the question. Just weeks after the
forced division of the German capital, the French defence minister, Pierre
Messmer, informed his British counterpart
that Frenchmen were not prepared to ‘die for Berlin’.
Privately the French elite, like the British, still found
the existing division of Berlin, and of Germany, perfectly satisfactory,
although (in the delicate words of a recent French official publication) de
Gaulle thought that ‘it was important to avoid dashing the hopes of the
Germans’, whom he was courting as part of his plan for French dominance of the
continent. Another great Frenchman, the Nobel prize-winning author, friend and
biographer of de Gaulle, Francois Mauriac, would make the classic quip that ‘I
like Germany so much, I want two of her’.
So, even as an appalled world watched machine-gun-toting
East German guards supervise the wall-building – Berlin was the first properly
televised world crisis – the West did nothing. The American Secretary of State
even forbade the US commandant from subscribing to a joint Allied press
release, for fear of arousing negative reactions from the East. The first
deaths at the Wall came. Frantic East Berliners trying to escape to the West
via apartment blocks on the border plunged from high windows and roofs to their
deaths. Ten days after ‘barbed wire Sunday’, a young East Berliner was coldly
and deliberately shot as he tried to swim across a canal into the West. The
deaths were the first of almost two hundred during the course of the Wall’s
existence. Hundreds more were wounded, thousands were punished for their
escape attempts with long jail sentences under harsh conditions.
Many writers at the time and in the intervening four and a
half decades have speculated what would have happened if the Allies had
responded to the Wall with vigorous
‘roll-back’ measures, bulldozing through the wire and defying the East to
respond. It is clear from the documents we can now read in the archives of the
countries involved that this was never a serious prospect.
In fact, the only possibility of 'roll-back' came not in
August 1961 but more than two months later, in late October, when the East
Germans began to demand identity documents from American officials entering
East Berlin. This, which the Americans considered in breach of the postwar
Potsdam Agreement, unleashed the famous 'Checkpoint' Charlie' confrontation,
the only time during the Cold War when American and Soviet tanks actually faced
each other, fully armed and ready to fire. Jeeploads of armed GIs escorted
senior American diplomats for short, passport-free incursions into the East.
Some of the American armour backing these forays was fitted with bulldozer
blades, ready to push down the barrier and advance into East Berlin to
facilitate freedom of movement for Washington's representatives, should the
East try to prevent it. Finally the Americans seemed to be getting tough - not
over the tragedy of the wall but over their own national prestige.
Even then, we can see from the British government documents,
Harold Macmillan’s government had no intention of risking war on this issue.
British civilian personnel entering East Berlin had for some time now been
showing ID if requested, and so London’s sympathy for the American stance was
limited. After reading a report from his embassy in Washington on the
Checkpoint Charlie crisis, the Prime Minister scribbled some marginal comments.
‘What does the Foreign Office intend to do about this?’ Macmillan asked. ‘It’s
rather alarming’. He wondered how long Britain could continue to ‘be associated
with this childish nonsense’.
Almost nobody in London was of the hardline persuasion.
Foreign Secretary Lord Home claimed on October 27th that he was ‘pretty close
to an understanding with Rusk’, who did not want the question of showing passes
to be made into a major show of strength. Home considered the American
military, represented by former military governor Lucius D. Clay, to be the
chief problem. He advised Macmillan:
The trouble is that the US soldiers do not yet seem to have
been brought to heel on this point. I am sending an immediate telegram urging
that specific instructions be sent. You might mention this to the President.
Whether British pragmatism (or weakness) played a role in
taking the heat out of the crisis remains unproven. Then as now, Downing Street
tended to overestimate its influence on the White House.
It now seems more likely that Kennedy had already reached an
agreement with Moscow through unofficial secret service channels. Khrushchev, who had been kept busy managing a
split in the international communist movement, finally decided to pay attention
and clamp down on the notorious ‘salami-slicing’ activities of the notably
wilful East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, which had led to the crisis in the
first place. Khrushchev was only too keen to find a face-saving formula – as
was Kennedy. The end of the ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ confrontation in effect meant
the end of the Berlin crisis. Both superpowers had other fish to fry.
The actual reality of the wall had never been seriously
challenged throughout this time, and this remained the case. It continued in
existence for another twenty-eight years, a hideous scar on the European
landscape and a cruel negation of post-war Germany's right to
self-determination. When the Wall did come down in November 1989, overnight and
as suddenly as it had arisen, it was not because of some exciting, high-risk
initiative on the part of the West but mostly because of the internal decay of
the communist bloc in general and the East German regime in particular.
Inevitably, the demise of the Wall in 1989 exposed the true
feelings and anxieties of the Western allies about Germany every bit as
blatantly as had its construction. The Americans quickly decided that they
were, on balance, happy to see a reunited Germany, but both the French and the
British, atavistic fears reawakened, panicked at the prospect. In her memoirs,
Mrs Thatcher recalls an emergency visit to de Gaulle’s 1980s successor,
President Mitterrand, in which ‘I produced from my handbag a map showing the
various configurations of Germany in the past, which were not entirely
reassuring about the future ….’
For a short while, Mitterrand seems to have considered
Thatcher’s offer to resurrect the wartime Anglo-French alliance against a
resurgent Germany, but on consideration the wily French leader decided against
tying himself to the forceful and passionately Eurosceptic British leader.
Instead, with characteristic subtlety, he took the alternative route: not to
unite with other powers against Germany, but to clutch the Germans so tightly
to France’s bosom that even a mighty, reunited state east of the Rhine would
constitute no threat. Part of the hefty price Mitterrand secured from the
German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, in exchange for France’s support of
reunification was the Federal Republic’s support for a common European currency
and for closer integration.
So, in the end the fall of the Wall brought not just the end
of the Cold War but the final absorption of Germany into Europe – a solution of
sorts for the ‘German problem’ that had haunted the world for more than a
century and brought about two catastrophic world wars.
Timeline
May 8th, 1945
End of the Second World War: Germany and Berlin are each
divided into four zones/sectors (Soviet, American, British and French).
June 24th, 1948
Soviets begin their blockade of the Western sectors of
Berlin.
June 25th, 1948
The Western Allies begin the ‘Berlin Airlift’ to provide
food and basic necessities for West Berliners.
May 12th, 1949
End of the blockade, though harassment of the access routes
continues.
May 24th, 1949
The Federal Republic of (West) Germany is founded in the
Western zones.
Sep 30th, 1949
The Airlift is officially abandoned.
Oct 7th, 1949
The (East) German Democratic Republic is founded in the
Soviet zone. Transformation of East Germany into a Soviet-style ‘people’s
democracy’ accelerates.
May 26th, 1952
‘Operation Vermin’. The Soviets and their East German allies
seal the border between East and West Germany. Berlin alone remains accessible,
the only ‘hole’ in the Iron Curtain.
March 5th, 1953
Death of Josef Stalin in Moscow. Apparent liberalization
follows.
June 17-18th, 1953
A mass uprising against the Communist regime in East Germany
is bloodily suppressed by Soviet troops and loyal East German police.
Dec 11th, 1957
Leaving East Germany without permission becomes a criminal
offence, punishable with three years’ hard labour.
June/July 1961
Tens of thousands of East Germans continue to defy the
regime and flee to the West.
Aug 12-13th, 1961
Barbed wire and breeze-block barricades seal off West from
East Berlin, making escape from East Germany impossible.
Aug 24th, 1961
24-year-old East Berliner Günter Litfin becomes the first
escaper to be shot dead trying to cross into the West. Many more deaths and
injuries follow.
Aug 26th, 1961
West Berliners are barred from East Berlin.
Oct 22-28th, 1961
American and Soviet tanks face each other at the Checkpoint
Charlie border crossing after East German guards restrict American officials’
access to East Berlin. During these days, the world comes close to nuclear war.
However, the mutual withdrawal of US and Soviet units on October 28th also
signifies the de facto end of the Berlin crisis.
Oct 1961
The transformation of the border barrier into a fortified
‘Wall’ begins.
June 26th, 1963 President Kennedy visits West Berlin and
declares ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.
Dec 17th, 1963
Temporary permits are issued for West Berliners to visit
East Berlin for the first time in two-and-a-half years.
Sept 3rd, 1971
Signing of the ‘Four-Power Agreement’. The Soviets and East
Germans recognize West Berlin’s right to exist, and the West grants de facto
recognition to the East German regime.
Aug 1st, 1975
The Helsinki Accords, signed by 35 countries including the
USSR, America, Britain, and East and West Germany, promise universal human
rights, including the right to freedom of movement. Within months, East German
dissidents start to invoke this right in applying for exit visas. Despite
government repression, what starts as a trickle grows into a flood.
June 12th, 1987
President Ronald Reagan visits Berlin. He tells the Soviet
leader: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear this wall down!’
Sept 10th, 1989
The Hungarian government opens the border to Austria.
Thousands of East German 'tourists' escape during the coming weeks.
Nov 9th, 1989
Unable to halt the headlong exodus of its population through
‘third states’, the East German regime concedes its citizens the right to
leave. The Berlin Wall is effectively history. In the coming days, East
Berliners destroy it with their own hands.
Oct 3rd, 1990
East and West Germany are officially reunited.
- See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/frederick-taylor/berlin-wall-secret-history#sthash.najnkLIz.dpuf
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