In the midst of these competing tensions a political earthquake
suddenly occurred. On March 5 Stalin died. For Ulbricht and the
rest of the leadership the news raised a host of questions. Who
would emerge on top in Moscow? What would his commitment be to
the GDR? Would he want a unified Germany?
Some senior SED members, though not Ulbricht, hoped that Stalin's
death would at last produce a relaxation of the political climate
throughout Eastern Europe and ease the pressure for trumped-up
trials. These had reached their nadir with the false confession
extracted under torture from Rudolf Slansky, once the first secretary
of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He and several other distinguished
Communists were executed. In the last months of Stalin's rule
the anti-Semitic "doctors' plot" led to fears among
the Jews in the GDR's leadership that they too would be made scapegoats.
In earlier and less severe purges several Jews had lost power
in the SED. Some thought that the reason may have been that they
had spent the war in the West. Some of those who had survived
in power began now to prepare to escape from the GDR on the S-Bahn,
the suburban railway which thousands of lesser refugees had used
to go from one side of Berlin to the other.
To test the new mood in the Kremlin the SED approached Moscow
for special economic help to overcome the country's crisis. Stalin's
successors replied with a polite but firm "No." They
urged the Germans to abandon their hard line on internal dissidence
and slow down their program of socialization. The Kremlin's message
was a strong rebuke for Ulbricht. He chose to defy it. In a speech
published in the next day's Neues Deutschland, Ulbricht invoked
the ghost of the dead dictator. He praised his "wise leadership,"
and appealed for greater vigilance, and the "exposure of
agents and disrupters." He blamed the country's problems
on "sabotage, arson, and the theft of documents" and
said that the most pressing task for the state was to overcome
low work norms. He provoked a new clash with church authorities
by announcing plans for a new "socialist" city to be
called Stalinstadt which would have no churches.
Ulbricht's defiance of the new Soviet leaders was probably not
based on loyalty to Stalin nor on traditional conservatism. He
shrewdly calculated that the Kremlin itself was divided between
those like Molotov who wanted to retain Stalin's hard line and
others like Malenkov who favored change. There was also the question
of the survival of the GDR itself. At the end of April President
Eisenhower and the new Soviet Prime Minister, Georgi Malenkov,
made conciliatory speeches on the need for détente. Churchill
called a summit conference on Germany. The idea was unwelcome
to Adenauer who feared the neutralization of Germany. He wrote
to Eisenhower on May 29 stressing that any peace treaty for Germany
must allow a reunited country to enter into any alliance it chose.
He clearly had in mind the European Defence Community.
Ulbricht was equally suspicious of the Allies' intentions. The
old specter of the Russians one day giving up the GDR raised itself
again in his mind. He framed his tactics accordingly. It would
be hard for him to oppose Soviet foreign policy outright. Instead
he decided to play up to the Soviet conservatives by resisting
any softer line on domestic affairs. He also wanted to move against
the moderates in his own Politburo. The device he and his two
closest allies chose was to remove Franz Dahlem, one of the party's
most respected members. A veteran of the Spanish civil war and
the symbolic leader of the "Western émigrés'"
Dahlem seemed to many of the old Communists the only possible
alternative party leader. He had been a rival of Ulbricht's since
the days of the Weimar Republic. After the war he served as party
secretary in charge of cadres and head of the SED's department
dealing with the West.##
On May Day the crowds that paraded through the streets of Berlin
were thinner than usual in spite of measures to compel attendance.
Those who were noticed that Dahlem's picture was not being carried
in the parade of Politburo members. Two weeks later the rumors
which this strange omission had aroused were confirmed. The central
committee met and Ulbricht pushed through an astonishing three-point
resolution. The first part dealt with the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia
and its "lessons" for the SED. One might have thought
that Stalin, the instigator of the purges of the 1950s, was still
alive. The resolution condemned the destructive activities "of
bourgeois elements and the whole iniquitous rabble of Trotskyites,
Zionists, freemasons, traitors, and morally depraved individuals."
it said that enemies of the state were bringing up the "so-called
theory of the weakening class struggle," which was said to
go with the establishment of socialism. It declared war on "saboteurs,
parasites, and traitors."
Dahlem was excluded from the Politburo and central committee after
Ulbricht and Matern accused him of having shown "total blindness
towards the attempt by imperialist agents to infiltrate the party."
It was announced that he investigation into Dahlem's case and
all its ramifications was continuing. The second part of the resolution
called for the work norms to be raised by at least 10 percent.
This ended the policy of shifting most of the economic burden
on to the middle class. From now on workers were being asked to
work 10 percent harder for the same pay, all at a time of growing
shortages. The third part of the resolution added insult to injury.
It called for Ulbricht's sixtieth birthday to be turned into a
"political climax." While criticism of the personality
cult had already begun in Moscow, June 30 in the GDR was to be
the occasion for every worker and official to make "self-commitments
in honor of the sixtieth birthday of our beloved Walter Ulbricht."
The central committee's defiant tone roused the "Russians
into giving the SED a new warning. On June 3 the Soviet politburo,
though itself divided, made it clear that it was watching event
in the GDR with concern. In the SED leadership Wilhelm Zaisser,
the Minister for State Security, and Rudolf Herrnstadt, the chief
editor of Neues Deutschland, were organizing against Ulbricht.
They argued that the party's existing policies were wrong and
divisive, and that a new leadership and anew party policy were
essential. Heinz Brandt, the secretary for agitation and propaganda
on the SED staff in Berlin, wrote later that the aim was "a
peaceful democratic change-over in the GDR" and thereafter
the reunification of Germany. He foresaw that "the present
regime would slide, as it were, towards disintegration in stages
and finally be fully replaced after free parliamentary elections
had been held. SED rule would be dismantled, not blasted sky-high;
the terror abolished; the secret police dissolved. In this way
an explosion with unforeseeable potential conclusions would be
avoided."
Zaisser and Hernstadt were apparently backed by Malenkov and Beria
in Moscow. On June 5 Vladimir Semyonov who had been political
adviser to the Soviet Control Commission returned to Berlin as
High Commissioner. He came with a sheaf of written resolutions
which the SED Politburo and central committee were to adopt. For
a start he told the Politburo: "We recommend that Comrade
Ulbricht celebrate his sixtieth birthday in the same way that
Lenin celebrated his fiftieth." When someone obligingly asked
how that was, Semyonov replied, "He invited a few friends
to drop in for dinner." Semyonov then outlined the "new
course" which Moscow wanted to see in the GDR. the program
was published without comment in Neues Deutschland, on June 11.
Investment in heavy industry was to be cut and production of consumer
goods stepped up. A series of taxes on farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers,
and private firms was lifted. Private businesses that had been
closed down by the authorities could start up again. Refugees
who had gone to the West were invited to return and offered help.
Farmers were promised back their land. They could borrow money,
machines, and seeds. Intellectuals received permission to attend
conferences in West Germany, and West Germans could get passed
more easily to visit relatives in the GDR. Students expelled from
university because of their religious beliefs could come back.
All those arrested on religious grounds were to be released, and
the campaign against the church was to end. The idea of "class
justice" was to go. The middle class would get ration cards
back, and some recent price increases were revoked. The SED Politburo
admitted to "errors in the past."
The whole package was said to be aimed at the great goal of "reunifying
the German people into a national German state," and the
Politburo called for measures on both sides that would "materially
facilitate a rapprochement between the two two parts of Germany."
What this last phrase meant is unclear. Were the Russians prepared
to see the SED and the West German KPD go into opposition in a
united German Parliament? or were they just hoping to restore
the Four-Power dialogue, and thought that a conciliatory offer
on Germany would get them to the negotiating table? Ulbricht himself
was probably in doubt. At all events he was unwilling to take
the risk that Beria and Malenkov, the Soviet initiators of the
"new course," might be serious. It was an amazing reversal
of most of the measures taken since the Second Party Conference
in July 1952 which had been proclaimed as "building socialism."
Ulbricht looked for ways to undermine it. In subsequent speeches
he emphasized the "all-German" aspects of the Politburo
resolution less than the rest of it. On two points he successfully
resisted Semyonov. He did not let the Politburo rescind the 10
percent increase in the work norms, and he did not call a central
committee meeting although under the party constitution only this
body could ratify the proposed changes. Ulbricht was afraid that
supporters of Dahlem might reopen his case and call for a change
of leadership. There might be an embarrassing post mortem on the
whole Stalinist nature of Ulbricht's domestic policies. Ulbricht
was also concerned that there might be demands for a return to
the old work norms. He may genuinely have thought that the "new
course" could not be paid for economically without an increase
in production which would have to mean maintaining the new norms
due to go into force on June 30. or he may have deliberately tried
to sabotage the "new course," and hoped that the imposition
of the new norms would do the trick.
At all events on the same day that the Politburo decision was
published, Neues Deutschland printed a virulently hostile analysis
of the Federal Republic. It predicted an imminent popular uprising
in West Germany where, it said, "the isolation in which the
traitorous Adenauer clique finds itself is growing from day to
day...the patriots' will to struggle is constantly kindled anew."
It is impossible to say whether this article's language was personally
approved by Ulbricht. it certainly sounds more like his voice
than that of the editor Herrnstadt who supported the conciliatory
line towards West Germany. But Neues Deutschland was full of contradictory
pieces in those days. Certainly the bitter attack on Adenauer
went against the Malenkov and Beria policy of détente,
and reflected Ulbricht's main tenacious concern not to see the
GDR liquidated.
Unexpected and unexplained, the "new course" hit party
members like a bombshell. Some of them were so used by then to
the suggestion that imperialist agents were active under every
bed that they thought the Politburo announcement must be a Western
forgery, planted in Neues Deutschland to confuse the party. Confusion
was indeed the outcome. The progressives in the SED felt it was
the last chance for the liberalization which they had long been
hoping and waiting for. Admittedly the lack of any announcement
about a central committee meeting was strange, and went against
the democratic spirit of the new measures. The conservatives,
meanwhile, feared the worst but took comfort from the retention
of the higher work norms.
In the West the Federal Government played into Ulbricht's hands
by denouncing the changes as proof of the "bankruptcy of
the SED." The Social Democrats welcomed the changes and called
for Four Power negotiations on Germany. They were drowned out
by Adenauer and his inflexible colleagues. Adenauer wanted unification,
of course, but he also wanted to discredit and destroy Communist
rule in the GDR. The second goal was by far the more important
in his eyes.
Through his mouthpiece in the GDR, the Soviet-run Tägliche
Rundschau, Beria appealed in vain for Western understanding. "Our
enemies are working overtime to present the new resolutions as
symptomatic of a mood of panic...A segment of the West German
press has shown an understanding of the importance of these resolutions
to the GDR and has taken an attitude of good will towards them...
Events were now overtaken by the working class. For workers the
"new course's significance was its silence on the issue of
the work norms. In contrast to the middle class who were being
given all kinds of concessions, there was no hint of the work
norms being lifted. A mood of anger, bitterness and incipient
revolt set in.
The events of June 16 and 17 have since become a casualty of Cold
War propaganda. Two rival myths have appeared. In the West the
conventional wisdom is that a country-wide popular uprising for
reunification on the Western model was suppressed by Soviet tanks.
June 17 has become a national day in the Federal Republic, an
occasion for anti-Communist speeches and sanctimonious passing
thoughts by politicians for "our oppressed brothers and sisters
on the other side." (The Social Democrats stopped their June
17 speech-making after Willy Brandt became Chancellor). In the
East the SED's brief moment of self-criticism on the morrow of
the events gave way within days to an attempt to write them all
off as an operation by Fascist bandits and imperialist agents
in the West to incite East Germany's workers. According tot he
official SED history, the imperialists had long prepared a "Day
X for a counter-revolutionary putsch."
The truth was more complex. On June 14, a Sunday, Neues Deutschland
published an article which only added tot he confusion already
caused by the politburo decrees. Called "Time to put aside
the sledgehammer," the article criticized the way the work
norms had been introduced. It said they should only be made legally
binding once workers had been convinced of their necessity. the
next morning the article was passed from hand to hand among building
workers on the site of anew hospital at Friedrichhain in Berlin.
They decided to send a delegation tot he Government the next morning
to find out once and or all what was happening about he work norms.
They sent a letter to Grotewohl demanding a meeting and threatening
to strike if he refused to rescind the increase in the norms.
At first Grotewohl hesitated about whether to meet the delegation.
But he was persuaded by his staff to adopt well-worn elitist tactics.
Bruno Baum, a member of the SED secretariat in Berlin, who had
been criticized in the "sledgehammer" article suggested
that once they entered the Council of Ministers building the workers
would be so over-awed by the chance to speak to the Prime Minister
himself and hear a few soothing assurances from him that their
militancy would evaporate.
The next morning, June 16, the building workers found an article
in the trade union newspaper Die Tribüne confirming the higher
work norms. It was written at Ulbricht's request. Traditionally,
building workers are militant in most countries. The seasonal
nature of the job, ramshackle working conditions, the absence
of the discipline of an industrial site, and the tough requirements
of hard, outdoor, physical work tend to create an attitude of
dare-devil militancy. In East Berlin building workers were paid
piece rates, but their comparatively good earning had already
been threatened by the introduction of technically based norms.
The idea of yet higher norms was anathema.
On reading the article in Die Tribüne building workers
at the Stalinallee, which was intended to be East Berlin's
most prestigious street, decided to march immediately to the Council
of Ministers. On the way they were joined by the workers from
Friedrichhain. The move was entirely spontaneous, as was admitted
on the day by Fritz Selbmann, the Minister of Heavy Industry,
and by Max Fechner, the Minister of Justice, in an interview in
Neues Deutschland on June 30. The workers went to the Council
of Ministers en masse, partly because feeling was running high
and partly for fear that a small handful of representatives might
simply be arrested.
Their move was patently not counter-revolutionary in intention.
Their banner read "We demand lower quotas." They had
not even elected a strike committee. As the march went on, it
gathered new recruits, including many young people not in working
clothes. Now, in addition to the demand for lower norms, there
were chants of "Free Elections" and "W are not
slaves." In the square in front of the House of Ministries
in the Leipzigerstrasse the crowd stopped and demanded to talk
to the Government. "Pieck and Grotewohl, Pieck and Grotewohl,"
they shouted. At the SED headquarters some way off, the Politburo
had been in session for some time anxiously discussing the crisis.
Heinz Brandt was called in and told to go out to the workers and
tell them that the new work norms were cancelled. Climbing on
to the seat of a bicycle Brandt stood up and gave the crowd the
news. The response was a "remarkable roar of triumph, mingled
with joy, anger and laughter," according to an eye-witness.
He was Robert Havemann, another old Communist, a professor of
chemistry at the Humboldt University who was later to break from
the establishment himself and become one of its most celebrated
critics. He wrote later that after the first reaction tot he news
that the work norms had been revoked there came calls "Down
with the Government" and "We want free elections."
He climbed up himself to try to address the crowd, and control
its mood. "Yes, we want free and secret elections for a Government
in the whole of Germany-free, equal, and secret elections. But
you know our Government has proposed this to the West German Government...We
must go to the West. That is where we must demand free elections..."
The crowd shouted him down. Fritz Selbmann, a member of the Politburo,
was the next to speak. His voice was drowned. No one else even
tried to speak to the crowd, which gradually dispersed of its
own accord after an hour. Later, on their way back from the Leipzigerstrasse,
some of the demonstrators hijacked a loudspeaker van. One man
broadcast an announcement of a general strike for the following
day and a mass meeting at the Straussbergerplatz on the Stalinallee.
The Politburo issued a statement that it had been wrong to want
to raise the work quotas by 10 percent by administrative order.
This should only be done "on the basis of persuasion and
voluntary cooperation." But this still left an area of ambiguity.
Was the Politburo only trying to buy time? Did it still hope to
bring in the increase, but by other means? The statement was a
disaster. Throughout the night, in the absence of any relevant
news on the East German radio, Western stations broadcast accounts
of the day's events, and plans for strikes in several large factories
the following day.
On June 16 the upheaval had been largely confined to Berlin. The
next day there were disturbances in several parts of the country.
Eastern and Western sources agree on the extent. Western estimates
list 274 towns and 372,000 strikers. Otto Grotewohl said, a month
later, that 300,000 strikers had been involved in 272 towns. In
either case the figure is around 6 percent of the total work force.
Several aspects of the day were remarkable. The vast majority
of strikers and demonstrators were workers. Peasants and farmers
were more isolated, and took no part. In the cities the middle
class and the intelligentsia were hardly involved. Partly they
were demoralized by the experiences of the past few years. And
partly they felt unaffected by the strikers' main issue, the demand
for a reduction in work norms. Many probably felt too little solidarity
with workers on any issue to throw off their inhibitions about
joining a workers' demonstration.
In most towns the protests had a broadly similar pattern. Besides
Berlin, the main centers were Bittersfeld, Halle, Leipzig, Magdeburg
and Merseburg, and to a lesser extent, Brandenburg, Görlitz
and Jena. In all these districts the strikes began in large industrial
installations. Workers in heavy industry in general took a more
active part than those in the state trading concerns or the food,
hotel and textile industries. Although they were better paid,
workers in heavy industries in general took a more active part
than those in the state trading concerns or the food, hotel and
textile industries. Although they were better paid, workers in
heavy industry had been the main target for the Government's propaganda
about the need for higher work norms. they were more aware of
the contradictions involved in the party's call for socialism
to be built on the basis of more work for less pay.
As workers in vital industries, they knew their bargaining power
was greater than that of other workers. The only big works that
did not strike was the new iron foundry being built at Stalinstadt,
now Eisenhüttenstadt. Later the authorities made much of
its failure to join the strike. The main reason appears to have
been that workers at Stalinstadt were new arrivals who had little
time to form a cohesive unit. In other towns where there was a
long working-class tradition of organization, strikes took place.
The largest were in Halle and Merseburg, where the Communists
had been the biggest party before 1933. Leipzig and Magdeburg,
the two other main strike centers, had been SPD towns.
Although working-class traditions die hard, it would not be accurate
to claim that the work force was the same in 1953 as in 1933.
Arnulf Baring, who has undertaken the fullest Western investigation
of the June 17 events, points out that few men on the locally
elected strike committees were over forty. A surprising proportion,
around 10 percent, were former professional soldiers. Among this
group were many who were "violently opposed to Communism
in general, and the SED regime in particular." They held
right-wing political views, for which they had suffered a loss
of status, and they resented the official propaganda of anti-militarism.
It is also true that many of the most left-wing workers had been
promoted into Government and civic jobs. The strikers' four commonest
demands were a revocation of the new work norms, an immediate
lowering of the cost of living, free and secret elections, and
no victimization for the strikers.
The day began with industrial workers marching in orderly fashion
to the city centers. In most towns they tore down posters of the
party leaders and other official slogans and banners. They occupied
the town hall and various public party buildings, and tried to
release political prisoners. There was little rioting and looting.
Later on the mood and emphasis changed, as other people-especially
women and teenagers-joined the protests. In several areas members
of the local police (though not the paramilitary units) also took
part. The demands became more political. discipline collapsed,
and there was looting and arson. In a number of morning incidents
crowds beat up some party and Government officials who had unpopular
personal records. officials thought to be decent were spared.
"In the afternoon," Baring writes, "no such distinctions
were made, and anyone wearing a party badge on his lapel was immediately
seized and beaten up." Rioters stormed the prisons, and released
criminal and political detainees alike.
But-and this is one of the most important aspects of the day's
events-Soviet tanks were only brought in after the demonstrations
had assumed a direct political character. Although he Soviet military
commander declared a state of emergency during the day, he did
not send in troops against the demonstrators until very late on.
The Red Army was originally confined to holding strategic positions,
such as the docks along the Baltic, railway stations and post
offices in the larger towns, as well as the border with West Berlin.
On June 16 Waldemar Schmidt, the head of the Berlin police, was
forbidden by the Russians from using force to disperse the first
march. The demonstrators themselves did not direct their anger
against the Russians, except in some instances in Berlin. The
target was the SED. Events in Berlin were different from those
elsewhere in the GDR, mainly because of the open border with West
Berlin and the extra tension caused by the risk of an armed East-West
clash.
Official Western reaction to the disturbances was generally cautious.
The American "Radio in the American Sector" (RIAS) broadcast
regular news items about the events, and this undoubtedly played
a large part in helping workers in different cities to coordinate
their activities. But Western politicians kept a very restrained
line. Jacob Kaiser, the former CDU leader in the GDR and then
Federal Minister for all-German Affairs, broadcast a an appeal
to East Germans on the evening of June 16 not to be persuaded
to take rash or dangerous action. During June 17 the allied Control
Commission, as well as West German and West Berlin politicians,
tried to avoid any statement that could look like interference
in the GDR's internal affairs. All public transport in West Berlin
was blocked in the areas near the border, while police and troops
were used to prevent crowds gathering there. These measures were
only partly successful. Heinz Brandt reported that innumerable
West Berliners, mostly young people, joined the strikers and acted
as couriers. "Many hoodlums and political adventurers with
shady designs of their own" came over from West Berlin and
found a favorable field for activity. Many "had been hired
by obscure agencies in West Berlin to fish in troubled waters."
There is no direct evidence that the United States Central Intelligence
Agency was involved, but now that the extent of its "dirty
tricks" has begun to be documented in various parts of the
world, it would be surprising if it had not taken some part in
Berlin. The West German Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst,
run by the former Nazi, General Gehlen, certainly did. The SPD's
Eastern bureau, the "Ostburo," was also involved. As
the center of the Cold War confrontation, Berlin was a hot bed
of rival espionage and disinformation agencies. The West German
magazine Der Spiegel reported later on a typical organization,
the "Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit" ("Fighting
group against inhumanity") which for a time received American
funds. Staffed partly by former SS men, it made food unusable,
gave out fake ration cards, created food shortages, sabotaged
industrial enterprises, tried to destroy bridges and intimidated
the families of SED officials.
In spite of this external interference in the June 17 events the
current official line in the East is false when it denies that
there was a genuine and spontaneous workers' revolt. All the evidence
is that the events were an unplanned popular outburst of indignation
at the SED's economic policies. on the other hand the Western
myth that it was cut down by Russian tanks is also wide of the
mark. On the basis of meticulous study Baring concludes that with
the exception of Berlin "the Soviet intervention was not
a turning point. It merely served to mark the end of the day's
events: the demonstrators had run out of steam. Their rising came
to a standstill before it really got off the ground." This
largely accounts for the fact that in the whole country the number
of dead was only twenty-one. Contemporary newspaper reports of
the events in Berlin generally agree with this interpretation.
"The Red Army troops evidently were given the strictest instructions
to behave with restraint.
There are few cases reported of their having opened fire on demonstrators
even though they were stoned and insulted, and their tanks and
armored cars were physically attacked by the demonstrators,"
wrote the Manchester Guardian. Precisely because of their spontaneity,
people just drifted home after the meetings were over in all the
larger towns. There were no contingency plans to continue or expand
the rising, and no attempt, except in Dresden, to take over any
communications centers. Workers had achieved their main demand,
the reduction of the work norms, the day before. Eye witnesses
recorded that after the meetings people felt "that nothing
else would happen" and that the movement had "faded
away." The subsequent looting and rioting showed how unplanned
the events had been. Robert Havemann wrote later after his expulsion
from the SED, "The uprising lacked political leadership a
the decisive moment. It lost sight of its original aim and in
effect assumed counter-revolutionary aspects. Thus it was fated
to collapse.
The events had a profound effect within the GDR and particularly
within the party. The struggle inside the Politburo which had
been apparent since the beginning of the year had grown since
Stalin's death and the introduction of the "new course,"
and was now intense. Each side privately blamed the other for
what had happened on June 16 and 27 although the immediate result
was a public facade of unity and calm. Both wings in the Politburo
were stunned by the events, but wanted to convince the Russians
that the SED was in full control. Behind the scenes the in-fighting
went on. A temporary compromise was arrived at under which the
"new course" was reaffirmed but all the blame for the
upheaval was put on American and West German "war-mongers."
Sources: Jonathan Steele, Inside East Germany,
82-95. See also Carola Stern, Ulbricht (New York, 1965);
Arnulf Baring, Uprising in East Germany (Ithaca, 1972).