Berlin 1961 (53 page)

To his relief, it had never come to that. Kennedy had never tested them.

WEST BERLIN
SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST
13, 1961

When he first heard the news of the border closing, RIAS radio director Robert H. Lochner had been up late, preparing for a series of meetings the next morning for his boss, the legendary U.S. television journalist Edward R. Murrow. Murrow was visiting from Washington on an inspection trip as chief of the United States Information Service.

Lochner laid his work aside and ordered RIAS to alter its program from the usual weekend rock and roll to more serious music and news bulletins every quarter hour. He knew RIAS, with the largest transmitter in Europe, would be expected to provide East Berliners a lifeline at a time of crisis, just as it had done on June 17, 1953.

Then he set off for East Berlin in his car with State Department plates, making three trips across the Soviet zone throughout the evening, recording whatever he saw on a hidden tape recorder. He told stories of families divided and of forlorn lovers, using their recorded, troubled voices to dramatize the moment. Lochner had never seen as large a group of miserable human beings as those gathered at shuttered East Berlin train stations that morning, having failed to hear or believe overnight radio reports that the Berlin border had been closed.

At 10:00 a.m. he walked through the vast waiting hall of the Friedrichstrasse station, which overflowed with thousands of people “with desperate faces, cardboard boxes, some with suitcases.” They sat on packed bags with nowhere to go.

On a staircase leading up to the elevated S-Bahn tracks stood black-suited Transportpolizei, or Trapos, blocking public access. They reminded Lochner of Hitler’s SS in their threatening uniforms and with their stony, young, obedient faces.

An old woman timidly walked up to one of the Trapos, standing about three steps above her, and asked when the next train was due for West Berlin. Lochner would never forget the sneering tone of the officer’s answer.

“That is all over,” he said. “You are all sitting in a mousetrap now.”

Lochner the next day showed the new East Berlin to Murrow, who doubted whether his friend Kennedy understood the seriousness of the situation that had been spawned by his inaction. He wrote a cable that evening telling the president that he was confronting a political and diplomatic disaster. If the president didn’t show resolve quickly, Murrow predicted a crisis of confidence that could undermine the U.S. far beyond Berlin’s borders. “What is in danger of being destroyed here is that perishable quality called hope,” he wrote.

POLICE HEADQUARTERS, EAST BERLIN
6:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST
13, 1961

Erich Honecker was in an agitated state of excitement throughout the night, driving along the border and relishing the near-perfect execution of his plan.

He supervised every detail: he saw police checking out entry shafts to sewer systems for would-be escapees. Boats patrolled waterways that couldn’t be closed as easily as streets. The extra troops he had ordered for the Friedrichstrasse station had been sufficient to manage the Sunday numbers.

Honecker had praised every commander he met throughout the night, occasionally suggesting changes in some finer details. At 4:00 a.m., satisfied that the most critical phase had been executed without a hitch, he returned to his office. By 6:00 a.m., all commanders had reported in that their missions had been carried out as instructed.

There was much work yet to be done to complete the job in the days ahead, but Honecker could not have been more satisfied. A few hundred East Berliners had rushed through the border in areas that had not yet been reinforced, and some had swum across lakes or canals. Other East Berliners would simply remain in the West, where by luck they had been spending the weekend. A few West Berliners would smuggle out their partners or friends in car trunks or under car seats in the first hours. A couple of more inventive East Berliners had replaced their own license plates with friends’ West Berlin plates and had driven through.

From noon on Saturday to 4:00 p.m. on Monday, Marienfelde welcomed a record 6,904 refugees, the most of any weekend in East German history. But West Berlin authorities estimated that all but 1,500 had crossed the border before communist security forces had closed it down. The numbers were acceptably small, considering the fact that the refugee exodus had been brought to an end.

Honecker phoned Ulbricht with his final report. He then told his staff, “Now we can all go home.”

Khrushchev would reflect later: “The establishment of border control restored order and discipline in the East Germans’ lives, and Germans have always appreciated discipline.”

15

THE WALL: DESPERATE DAYS

Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?…This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.

President John F. Kennedy, August 13, 1961

The Russians…feel strongly that if they can break our will in Berlin that we will never be able to be good for anything else and they will have won the battle in 1961.

U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, August 30, 1961

HUMBOLDT HARBOR, EAST BERLIN
THURSDAY, AUGUST
24, 1961

G
ünter Litfin, a twenty-four-year-old tailor whose boldest acts until that point had been performed with a needle and thread, summoned the courage to flee East Berlin eleven days after the communists had sealed the border.

Until August 13, Litfin had lived divided Berlin’s ideal life, taking maximum advantage of each side’s benefits as one of the city’s 50,000
Grenzgänger
, or “border jumpers.” By day, he worked in West Berlin earning hard
Westmark
, which he exchanged on the black market at a five-to-one rate for East German money, or
Ostmark.
He worked out of an atelier near West Berlin’s Zoo Station, where he had already become a tailor to show-business greats: Heinz Rühmann, Ilse Werner, and Grete Weiser. Actresses in particular were drawn to his boyish manner, dark eyes, and curly black hair. At night he retreated to a comfortable East Berlin apartment in the Weissensee district, which he rented cheaply for those plentiful
Ostmark.

Overnight, Litfin’s dream life became a nightmare. The border closure prevented him from traveling to West Berlin, so he lost his job and his social position. Worse yet, an East German–mandated job placement process was about to land Litfin in a mind-numbing textile factory job with longer hours and a fraction of his previous pay.

Litfin damned himself for not moving to West Berlin when he had had the chance. A few days before the border closed, he had even rented a studio apartment in West Berlin’s Charlottenburg district on the leafy Suarezstrasse. He and his brother had been slowly transporting his household goods in small loads, using two different cars, to avoid police suspicion. They had already smuggled out his most precious belonging, his modern sewing machine, by dismantling it and moving it in pieces.

Even more maddening was that Günter Litfin had been at a house-warming party in West Berlin with his brother, Jürgen, on the night the city was divided. When they’d returned home on the elevated S-Bahn at just past midnight, they had noticed nothing amiss.

It wasn’t until the next morning at 10:00 a.m., after Jürgen had heard the bad news on the radio, that he woke up his brother: “All access routes are closed and everything is shut down,” he told Günter. The two brothers then reflected on the last time Ulbricht had shut down Berlin’s border: on June 17, 1953, after Soviet tanks had put down the worker uprising. Life had returned to normal several days later, so they expected the same was likely this time. Even during the 1948 Berlin Airlift, the city’s border had remained open. The Litfins at first dismissed the notion that the Americans would allow the border closure to stand, given all that was at stake. Though the brothers distrusted the British and French commitment to Berlin’s freedom, they had little doubt that the Americans would come through.

The Litfins set off on their bicycles to size up the new landscape. They rolled to a stop at Günter’s usual border crossing at the Bornholmer Bridge, where a two-lane highway passed over multiple train tracks. Police had blocked the pavement with barbed wire and tank traps. Günter sighed to his brother, “I can’t believe this will stay.”

But with each successive day the brothers grew more convinced the Americans would not rescue them. The communists had begun replacing the temporary barriers of sawhorses and barbed wire with a ten-foot-high wall built of prefabricated concrete sections and connecting mortar. Ulbricht was rapidly closing all escape hatches. So Günter decided to risk escape before it was too late.

He closely followed the reports on RIAS radio about the many escapes that had succeeded after August 13. Since then, some 150 East Germans had swum to their liberty across the Teltow Canal, many towing children. In a single action, a dozen teenagers had made it across the waterway in a group sprint. One daring young man had driven his Volkswagen right through one border section’s barbed wire safely into the French sector. Another bold East Berliner had disarmed a border guard, taking his sub-machine gun right out of his hands so that he could not shoot, and then had run across the border with it.

Encouraged by these success stories and despite a heart condition, Litfin decided to act. At just after four in the afternoon on Thursday, August 24, in the spotlight of a 77-degree midday sun, Günter crossed a railway yard that lay between Friedrichstrasse in the east and the Lehrter train station in the West. Wearing a light brown jacket and black pants, he jumped into the warm waters of the Spree Canal at the Humboldt harbor. Günter wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer, but he reckoned that he was strong enough to make it across the thirty meters or so of water to freedom.

Standing above him on a nearby bridge, a transit policeman, or Trapo, shouted five times at Günter to stop. But the tailor only swam with more determination. The officer fired two warning shots that struck the water just beyond Günter’s head. When Litfin continued to swim, the Trapo sprayed machine-gun fire all around him. The first bullets struck the tailor when he was still ten meters short of the shore.

Wounded, Günter flailed and dived deep to avoid subsequent shots from what by then were three police. When he came up for air and raised his hands in surrender, the Trapos screamed derisively at him. A shot pierced his neck, and Günter sank like a stone.

Günter Litfin would be the first person shot dead while trying to escape East Berlin, a victim of bad timing. What he couldn’t have known was that police that morning had received their first shoot-to-kill orders to stop all those attempting the crime of “flight from the Republic.” Had Litfin fled a day earlier, he would have succeeded. Instead, two East German fireboats carrying police units searched the Spree Canal for more than two hours before three army frogmen pulled Günter’s body from the water at about seven p.m.

The day after Günter was killed, eight secret police tore apart his mother’s apartment while she wept uncontrollably. They ripped off her oven door and disassembled the oven. They slashed open mattresses and dumped out dresser drawers. An officer explained to Günter’s wailing mother, “Your son has been shot dead. He was a criminal.”

To further punish the family, authorities prohibited Günter’s mother and brother from viewing the body before its burial, not even for identification. The family lowered Günter into his grave in a closed casket at Weissensee Cemetery on a bright summer day, Wednesday, August 30. Jürgen was satisfied with the polished black granite headstone he had chosen, and he ran his fingers across its gold script:
OUR UNFORGOTTEN GÜNTER
.

Hundreds of Berliners gathered at the graveside: school friends, family members, and dozens of others who didn’t know Günter at all but had come to make a statement by their presence.

Even with so many watching, Jürgen could not let his brother disappear without confirming it was really him. So he jumped down into the grave site and broke open the coffin with a crowbar that he had concealed until that moment. Though Günter’s skin had blackened and a bandage covered a broad area beneath his mouth and over his neck, concealing the large exit wound from the shot that had killed him, Jürgen had no doubt about the identity.

He looked up and nodded to his mother that it was her son.

B
erlin was in shock in the days following August 13. The city passed through stages of grief: denial, disbelief, rage, frustration, depression, and ultimately resignation. How Berliners responded depended on where they sat, in the East or the West.

For West Berliners, initial anger at the communists was now accompanied by a growing fury over American betrayal. The talk around town was all about how the Americans had not sent a single platoon on August 13 to demonstrate solidarity, nor had they imposed a single sanction on the East Germans or Soviets to punish them for their action.

By comparison, the East Berliner response was one of self-loathing for having missed the opportunity to escape mixed with disgust for the cynical communist leaders who had imprisoned them. Mielke’s omnipresent Stasi agents had succeeded in their mission. Those who might have considered rebellion were deterred by the constant watch kept by Stasi agents at every factory, school, and apartment building.

AT THE BORDER, BERNAUER STRASSE, EAST BERLIN
TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST
15, 1961

A little more than two days after the border closure, East German workmen operating giant cranes began to lower prefabricated concrete segments onto Bernauer Strasse. Each block was precisely 1.25 meters square and 20 centimeters thick. Hundreds more sat nearby on a flatbed truck. Satisfied that the U.S. and its allies were unlikely to do anything to upset his project, Ulbricht was taking the next step. He had issued orders for construction crews to begin replacing the temporary border barriers in several sensitive locations with something more lasting.