Early Days

Born 30 June 1893 in Leipzig, Walter Ulbricht left school after only eight years and became a cabinet maker. Joining the German army in 1915, during the First World War, Walter Ulbricht served in both the Balkans and the Eastern Front but deserted towards the end of the war. Imprisoned in Belgium, he was released during the chaotic days of the German Revolution.

In 1920, he became a member of the German Communist Party, the KDP, and quickly rose through its ranks. He studied in the Soviet Union at the International Lenin School, a secretive school in Moscow that taught foreign communists how to be perfect Leninists and Marxists. In 1928, back in Germany, Ulbricht was elected into the Reichstag. It was a time of violent clashes between the communists and Nazis. Once Hitler assumed power as chancellor in January 1933, opposition parties were soon outlawed by his Enabling Act, and communists all over Germany fled or went into hiding. Ulbricht was one of them – fleeing first to France and Czechoslovakia, and then Spain during the Civil War of 1936-39 where he sided with the republicans in the International Brigades. He later received a medal for his time in Spain, angering fellow recipients, as Ulbricht never saw active service, preferring instead to hunt out Trotskyites and other unreliable elements within the KDP.

He returned to Moscow in 1937, and actively supported Stalin’s show trials and purges. Ulbricht watched as many of his superiors were purged, allowing him to rise further up the KDP ladder. It was almost as if his blandness helped him survive while his more charismatic colleagues fell. As a non-entity, no one really noticed Walter Ulbricht. He remained in Russia during the war and was let loose on German prisoners of war in order to ‘convert’ them to communism.

East German Uprising

On 30 April 1945, the day Hitler committed suicide, Ulbricht returned to Germany and within five years had manoeuvred himself into power as General Secretary, effectively head of state of the newly-formed East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic (the DDR, to use its German initials).

Not unlike the power enjoyed by Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary, Ulbricht’s position was secure while Stalin was alive. Stalin died on 5 March 1953, and, sure enough, within four months, Rakosi had been removed from power. Meanwhile, Ulbricht faced his first real test as leader when, in June 1953, East German workers went on strike. But with the help of Soviet tanks, Ulbricht quashed the East German Uprising and survived.

In 1955, Ulbricht committed East Germany to the Warsaw Pact.

No one has any intention of building a wall

By the early 1960s the difference between West and East Berlin had become marked; the former enjoying prosperity and freedom that made the latter seem drab in comparison. The huge migration from East to West Berlin, and then into West Germany, was a great advertisement for capitalism and an equally poor one for communism and for Ulbricht and the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. But proposals for a wall in Berlin to stem the flow were firmly rejected by Moscow – it would only highlight their failure. Better to win the hearts of the East Berliners. But by 1961 almost 3 million, mainly young, East Germans had gone West, a whole sixth of the population, from communism to capitalism in minutes, causing severe labour shortages and an acute embarrassment for the socialist utopia. Their hearts had not been won.

On 15 June 1961, only two months before the Berlin Wall was erected, Ulbricht, at a press conference, said, ‘The builders of our capital are fully engaged in residential construction, and its labour force is deployed for that’; finishing with the now-infamous remark: ‘No one has any intention of building a wall‘. But, with now 1,700 going west every day, of course, they did. On the night of 12‒13 August  1961, a barbed-wire fence was erected. As the wire went up, many East Germans made a last-minute dash for freedom among scenes of high tension. Days later, a concrete wall completely encircled the 103-mile perimeter of West Berlin. The most potent symbol of the Cold War was in place and was to remain so for 28 years.

Retirement

The late 1960s saw a gentle improvement in relations between the Soviet Union and West Germany, and their respective leaders, Leonid Brezhnev and Willy Brandt. But Ulbricht remained firmly anti-West Germany, and the Soviet politburo deemed him out of step. On 3 May 1971, Ulbricht resigned on the grounds of ill health. He was succeeded by Erich Honecker who remained in power until October 1989, just three weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Pictured is Honecker speaking in 1958, with the attentive and beady-eyed Ulbricht behind him, watching). Ulbricht retained various honorary positions, including head of state, until his death, aged 80, on 1 August 1973.

The greatest idiot

Like any communist leader, a cult of personality was built around Walter Ulbricht. Parades and celebrations, such an intrinsic part of life under communism, would include banners and flags bearing his portrait. Every office and every home would have a framed picture of him. If they didn’t – then why not?

Wherever he went, he would be greeted with standing ovations; children would present him with bunches of flowers. Yet, for all this hyerbole, no one really liked Walter Ulbricht. Elfriede Brüning, an East German novelist, wrote that he was incapable of exchanging a pleasant word. Even Laventry Beria, Stalin’s notorious head of his secret police, described Ulbricht as the ‘greatest idiot’ that he had ever met. And Alexander Dubcek, Czechoslovakian leader during the 1968 Prague Spring, called Ulbricht, ‘a dogmatist fossilized somewhere in Stalin’s period;’ adding, ‘I found him personally repugnant.’ Ulbricht even fell out with his stepdaughter to the point of disinheriting her.

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Walter Ulbricht’s plan

East Germany’s economy was stagnating and Ulbricht (pictured), a Stalinist to the core, proposed a range of measures to pump up the economy – increase taxes, increase prices and increase production by 10% – but with no corresponding increase in wages. If the new quotas were not met, workers were told, wages would be cut by a third. The Kremlin viewed these proposals with concern, advising Ulbricht to tone down the measures and slow down the intense pace of industrialisation that the East German leader insisted was necessary. For the workers of the German Democratic Republic, this was a lose-lose scenario.

Citizens of post-war Eastern Europe did as their governments ordered, any protest was silent, whispered in dark corners. But these measures were too much; Ulbricht had gone too far.

Strike

On 16 June 1953, East Berlin construction workers downed tools. The following morning, 17 June, the strike had spread with over 40,000 demonstrators marching through the capital. Their demands at first focused on the economic – a return to the old work quotas. But then as the strike spread to other cities – Leipzig, Dresden, and some 400 cities and towns throughout East Germany, their voices gained strength and their hearts courage. They demanded increasingly more – free elections, a new government, democracy. Meetings were held; workers’ councils elected. In the East German town of Merseburg, workers stormed the police station and released prisoners from the jails.

Protestors tore down communist flags and carried banners proclaiming, ‘We want free elections; we are not slaves’, ‘Death to communism’, and ‘Long Live Eisenhower’. This was no longer a strike but an uprising.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post The East German Uprising – an outline first appeared on Rupert Colley.

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Misery and want

“The seeds of totalitarian regimes,” said US president, Harry S. Truman, a year earlier in March 1947, “are nurtured by misery and want.” In other words, communism appealed to those suffering from hardship. Remove the hardship; you remove the appeal of communism.

Known as the Truman Doctrine, the President believed that communism had to be contained, and that America could not, as it did after the First World War, turn its back on Europe – isolationism was no longer an option. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which brought America into the war, was proof that physical distance was no longer a guarantee of safety. In the post-war era, a stable Europe and the future of the ‘free world’ was a necessity.

The Marshall Plan

To alleviate the hardship, and to deprive communism of its foothold, the US introduced the Marshall Plan, named after its originator, George C. Marshall, a huge package of economic aid offered to all nations of Europe. Sixteen nations of Western Europe accepted the offer, which by 1951 had amounted to $13 billion. Although offered also to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself, Stalin was never going to allow American / capitalist interference with the Soviet economy, and nor would he permit his satellites.

The Marshall Plan, therefore, had the effect of reaffirming Winston Churchill’s concept of the Iron Curtain (a phrase he coined during a speech in Missouri in March 1946) by forcing countries to decide whether their loyalties lay to the West or East.

The Marshall Plan also contributed to the unravelling of the fragile co-existence of East and West Berlin. Berlin, one hundred miles within the Soviet hemisphere, was split into four zones, one for each of the Allied powers, with the British, American, and French zones in West Berlin and the Soviet zone in the east. A line of communication through East Germany linked the western zones of Berlin to West Germany.

“You cannot abandon this city and this people”

In June 1948, America and Britain announced proposals for establishing a new currency, the Deutschmark, into West Berlin. This immediately caused economic chaos in the Soviet sector as people clambered to exchange their old money for the new.

The Soviets responded on 24 June by cutting off all road, rail and canal links between West Germany and West Berlin. The Berlin Blockade had begun. “People of this world,” said the Mayor of West Berlin, “look upon this city and see that you should not and cannot abandon this city and this people.”

If Stalin’s aim was to force the Western powers out of Berlin, it backfired. The communication channels of land and water may have been closed off but not by air. And so began the Berlin Airlift.

During the eleven months (318 days) of the Berlin Airlift, American and British planes supplied West Berlin with 1.5 million tons of supplies, a plane landing every three minutes, day and night. Three years earlier, the Allies had been dropping bombs over Berlin, now, the West Berliners joked, they were dropping potatoes.

The West may have exaggerated the plight of the West Berliners for propaganda purposes but it worked and on 12 May 1949, Stalin, knowing he couldn’t risk shooting down the planes and realising the PR disaster he’d caused, lifted the blockade.

East and West Germany

Within two weeks, the political division of Germany became official with, on 23 May 1949, the formal proclamation in Bonn of the ‘Federal Republic of Germany’ (West Germany). The formation of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), had been agreed a month earlier.

On 7 October 1949, in response, came the proclamation of East Germany with its somewhat misleading title, the ‘German Democratic Republic’.

It was now formal – Germany was divided into two, East and West, and was to remain so for forty long years.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post The Berlin Blockade and Berlin Airlift – a brief summary first appeared on Rupert Colley.

The post The Berlin Blockade and Berlin Airlift – a brief summary appeared first on Rupert Colley.