Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  As would happen so often in the future, Ulbricht’s would-be opponents remained silent, assuming he had Stalin’s blessing. The truth was that Ulbricht exceeded Stalin’s orders from the beginning. One example came in 1946 when the Soviet dictator asked Ulbricht to fully merge his Communist Party of Germany, or KPD, with the less doctrinaire Social Democratic Party, SPD, to create a single Socialist Unity Party, or SED. Instead, Ulbricht purged enough of the SPD’s key figures to ensure his own leadership and a more dogmatic party than even Stalin had sought.

  As late as April 1952, Stalin had told Ulbricht, “Although two states are being currently created in Germany, you should not shout about socialism at this point.” Stalin preferred a unified Germany with all its national resources, one that would exist outside America’s military embrace, rather than Ulbricht’s rump state inside the Soviet bloc. Ulbricht, however, had his own plans, and he campaigned to create a distinct and Stalinist East Germany through the nationalization of 80 percent of the industry and the exclusion from higher education of the children of so-called bourgeois parents.

  By July 1952, Stalin had embraced Ulbricht’s plan for a draconian period of forced collectivization and greater social repression. Ulbricht’s convictions only grew deeper after Stalin’s death, when he survived at least two efforts by liberalizing party comrades to unseat him. Both failed after Soviet military interventions put down first the East German and then the Hungarian uprisings of 1953 and 1956—rebellions that had been inspired by reforms that Ulbricht had opposed.

  Just as Ulbricht had been more determined than Stalin to create a Stalinist East Germany, he was also more determined than Khrushchev to protect his creation. Speaking to his Politburo on January 4, 1961, he bluntly blamed East Germany’s own shortcomings for 60 percent of all refugee departures. He declared that the party had to address housing shortages, low pay, and inadequate pensions, and that it must reduce the workweek from six to five days by 1962. He complained that 75 percent of those fleeing their country were under twenty-five years old, evidence that East German schools were not properly preparing young people.

  The most important action of the Politburo’s emergency session was its approval of Ulbricht’s plan to create a highest-level working group whose purpose would be to design plans to “fundamentally stop” the refugee bleed. Ulbricht put his three most loyal, reliable, and resourceful lieutenants on the job: Minister for State Security Erich Honecker, Interior Minister Karl Maron, and Erich Mielke, the head of his vast secret police operation.

  Having circled the communist wagons at home, he was ready to turn his attention to Khrushchev.

  FEDERAL CHANCELLERY, BONN

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 1961

  By tradition, Catholic and Protestant orphans arrived first to congratulate Konrad Adenauer on his eighty-fifth birthday. Shortly after ten in the morning, two boys dressed as dwarfs and a girl clad as Snow White entered the cabinet hall, where West Germany’s first and only chancellor was receiving well-wishers. One dwarf wore a red cap, blue cape, and red pants, and the other was dressed in a blue cap, red cape, and blue pants. Both shrank behind their identical white beards as the nuns pushed them forward to greet one of German history’s great men, who sniffled badly with a lingering cold.

  The chancellor’s friends were convinced that Adenauer’s inconsolable concerns about Kennedy’s victory had worsened his illness, contracted before the election, from a cold to bronchitis and then to pneumonia. He was only now recovering. Though the chancellor had publicly praised Kennedy with false effusiveness, he feared privately that Americans had elected a man of dangerously flawed character and insufficient backbone. His intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, had provided Adenauer with reports of Kennedy’s sexual infidelities, a weakness the communists would know how to exploit. Yet Kennedy’s undisciplined personal behavior was just one of many reasons Adenauer concluded that Kennedy, forty-two years his junior, was “a cross between a junior naval person and a Roman Catholic Boy Scout,” both undisciplined and naive at the same time.

  Adenauer knew Kennedy had little higher regard for him. The incoming president considered the chancellor a reactionary relic whose considerable influence in Washington had constrained U.S. flexibility in negotiations with the Soviets. Kennedy preferred that Adenauer be replaced in the upcoming elections by his Social Democrat opponent, Willy Brandt, the charming and handsome Berlin mayor, who at age forty-seven was presenting himself as the German Kennedy.

  Adenauer faced four challenges in 1961: managing Kennedy, defeating Brandt, resisting Khrushchev, and wrestling with the inescapable biological fact of his own mortality. Nevertheless, the chancellor smiled with delight as Snow White and the dwarfs recited memorized rhymes about animals of the forest and their love for him. The children presented him with homemade gifts, and Adenauer, after wiping his dripping nose with a handkerchief, handed each of them some of his favorite Sarotti chocolates.

  One of the great men in German history would be photographed for the next day’s newspapers standing ramrod stiff and looking oddly serious between two frightened-looking children in the attire of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

  Call it the banality of success.

  Adenauer’s young country was growing more robust by the month. The average annual growth of per capita income in the decade leading up to 1961 had been 6.5 percent. The country had reached full employment, driven by a manufacturing boom of everything from cars to machine tools, and it was now the world’s third-largest exporter. No other developed country was performing as well.

  For all that accomplishment, Adenauer was an unlikely hero of sometimes comical contradictions. He was a buttoned-down man who sang German drinking songs with relish, a proper Catholic who like Churchill napped naked at midday, and a fierce anticommunist who ran his democracy with authoritarian zeal. He craved power but vacationed frequently on Italy’s Lake Como when the stress grew too great. He championed Western integration just as intensely as he feared U.S. abandonment. He loved Germany but feared German nationalism.

  Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state, spoke of his longtime friend Adenauer as a man of “stiffness and inscrutability” who at the same time valued nothing more than good gossip or a close male friendship, which he opened up to cautiously but then nurtured over years irrespective of the individual’s continued position. Said Acheson, “He moves slowly, gestures sparingly, speaks quietly, smiles briefly, and chuckles rather than laughs when amused.” He particularly valued Adenauer’s sharp wit deployed against politicians who refused to learn history’s lessons. “God made a great mistake to limit the intelligence of man but not his stupidity,” Adenauer often told Acheson.

  On the morning of his birthday celebration, Adenauer walked briskly to the cabinet hall, where he would receive his guests. An automobile accident in 1917 had left the chancellor with a medically rebuilt, parchment-like face that appeared more Tibetan than German. He had high cheekbones and blue, oriental eyes set apart by the flat bridge of his uneven nose. Some likened his profile to that of the Indian on the American nickel.

  Adenauer’s twelve years in power had already equaled the length of Hitler’s reign, and he had used that time to undo much of the harm his predecessor had inflicted on Germany. While Hitler had excited nationalism, genocidal racism, and war, Adenauer projected a sense of serene and peaceful belonging to Europe, with himself as Germany’s custodian within the community of civilized nations.

  Just eight years after the Third Reich’s collapse, Time magazine had made Adenauer its Man of the Year in 1953, calling his Germany “a world power once more…the strongest country on the continent save Soviet Russia.” He had built on that reputation since then, joining NATO and negotiating diplomatic relations with Khrushchev in Moscow in 1955, then easily leading his Christian Democrats to reelection with an absolute majority in 1957.

  It was his conviction that the division of Germany and Berlin was more a consequence of East–West tension
than its cause. Thus, the only safe way to reunite Germany was through European reunification as part of the Western community, and only after a larger U.S.–Soviet détente could be achieved. Adenauer thus had dismissed Stalin’s offer in early March 1952 that Germany be reunified, neutralized, demilitarized, de-Nazified, and evacuated by occupying powers.

  Adenauer’s critics complained that this wasn’t the act of a visionary leader but rather the choice of an opportunistic politician. And it was true that the Catholic Rhinelander likely would have lost Germany’s first elections if the Protestant Prussians who dominated eastern Germany had joined in the vote. That said, Adenauer’s suspicion of Russian motivations was real and consistent. As he explained later, “The aim of the Russians was unambiguous. Soviet Russia had, like Tsarist Russia, an urge to acquire or subdue new territories in Europe.”

  In Adenauer’s view, it was failing Allied determination after the war that had allowed the Soviets to swallow up a big piece of prewar Germany and install subservient governments across Eastern Europe. That had left his western Germany “between two power blocs standing for totally opposed ideals. We had to join the one or the other side if we did not want to be ground up between them.” For Adenauer, neutrality had never been an option, and he wished to join the side that shared his views of political liberty and personal freedoms.

  Over the two days of his birthday celebration, choreographed more for a monarch than a democratic leader, Adenauer received European leaders, ambassadors, German Jewish leaders, political party chiefs, union bosses, editors, industrialists, folkloric groups in colorful costumes, and his political opponent Willy Brandt. Cologne’s archbishop bestowed blessings. Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss led a delegation of generals.

  Time was allotted like scarce rations: family members got twenty minutes, cabinet members ten, and lesser mortals five. Adenauer had fumed in protest when the West German press reported, on the basis of leaks from inside his own government, that it was because of his fragile health that Adenauer’s eighty-fifth birthday celebration had been extended over two days, thus providing him sufficient recovery time between visitors. The real cause for the prolonged observance, Adenauer insisted, was that his protocol people couldn’t cram into a single day the hordes who wanted to congratulate Der Alte, or “the Old Man,” as his countrymen endearingly knew him.

  Hovering darkly over the entire celebration were Adenauer’s concerns about Kennedy. Few issues differentiated the Kennedy administration from the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies more than their attitudes toward Adenauer and his West Germany.

  During his election campaign, Kennedy had said of Adenauer, “The real trouble is that he is too old and I am too young for us to understand each other.” But the problem went beyond the fact that Adenauer was one year short of being twice Kennedy’s age. More telling were differences of character and background that gave them little common ground upon which to build other than their shared Catholicism.

  Kennedy had been born into a life of wealth and privilege and as an adult had surrounded himself with glamour and beautiful women. He impatiently sought new ideas and solutions to old problems. Adenauer had been raised in the austere, late-nineteenth-century home of a stern civil servant father who had survived the Battle of Königgrätz, the largest military confrontation until that time in Europe, which had opened the way to German unification. Adenauer prized order, experience, and reflection, while he distrusted Kennedy’s reliance on flair, instinct, and razzmatazz.

  President Eisenhower had considered Adenauer one of the great men of twentieth-century history, a man who had countered nationalist and neutralist instincts among Germans. In Eisenhower’s view, Adenauer helped provide both the philosophy and the means for the Western containment of Soviet communism, arguing that greater Western military strength had to be a prerequisite for successful negotiations with the Soviets.

  Eisenhower’s National Security Council summed up its admiration for Adenauer in a top-secret report handed to the Kennedy transition team. “The main German development of 1960 was a marked increase in self-reliance and independence,” said the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board, which implemented foreign policy across all U.S. agencies. It said West Germany had emerged as a national state and was no longer viewed by its population as a temporary construct pending unification. Instead, it said, West Germany was “successor to the Reich and the essential framework of the reunited Germany of the future.”

  It gave the “firmly established rule of Adenauer” full credit for creating a country that was so successful that even the wayward Social Democrats had abandoned doctrinaire socialism and accommodation with the Soviets in order to give themselves an electoral chance. The group praised West Germany’s sound and strong economy, its hard currency, its export success, and its home market, which all together had produced a labor shortage even while the population was increasing.

  U.S. Ambassador to Bonn Walter Dowling joined the enthusiasm for Adenauer in his own transition memo. “His self-confidence, fed by the conviction that his grasp of the political verities has been fully vindicated by the events of recent years, is unimpaired. At eighty-five, he still identifies his exercise of political power with the well-being and destiny of the German people. He sees his victory in the coming elections as necessary to the continued security and prosperity of the country.” Dowling’s bottom line: “Adenauer remains the controlling influence at the center of political life, his political instincts still acutely alive.”

  None of that swayed Kennedy from his contrasting view, first laid out in an article in Foreign Affairs in the autumn of 1957 and still circulated and read with concern by those closest to Adenauer. The then junior senator from Massachusetts complained that the Eisenhower administration, like Truman’s before it, “let itself be lashed too tightly to a single German government and party. Whatever elections show, the age of Adenauer is over.” He thought the socialist opposition had proved its loyalty to the West and that the U.S. had to prepare for democratic transitions across Europe. “The United States is ill-advised to chase the shadows of the past and ignore the political leadership and thinking of the generation which is now coming of age,” Kennedy had written.

  The Eisenhower National Security Council portrayed Adenauer not as history’s shadow but as a man whose influence had only grown with his increased parliamentary majority from the 1957 elections. With France’s de Gaulle turning more nationalist and anti-American, the NSC regarded Adenauer as the crucial link both for continued European integration and closer transatlantic relations. Beyond that, Adenauer’s Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss had vigorously pursued a military buildup that was making West Germany the largest European contingent in NATO, with 291,000 men, eleven divisions, and modern weapons systems.

  But at the same time the NSC sounded warning bells about trends that could endanger the relationship, strains that could grow more pronounced should the personal links erode between the men who ran both countries. West Germans were tiring of their prolonged division, the report said, and were beginning to doubt whether they could rely on Washington’s commitment. They despaired that the most likely U.S.–Soviet conflict would be fought on their territory and over German corpses.

  Kennedy’s election had fed Adenauer’s fears of being abandoned by the U.S., which had only increased since the death in May 1959 of his friend and staunchest U.S. supporter, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Adenauer calmed his restless nights only with larger doses of sleeping tablets. Adenauer dismissed Kennedy’s brilliant young advisers, known by others as “New Frontiersmen,” as “Harvard prima donnas,” theoreticians who “had never served at the political front.”

  Adenauer was painfully aware of Kennedy’s doubts about him. As far back as 1951, after then Congressman Kennedy made his first political visit to Germany, the young man had concluded it was Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher, and not Chancellor Adenauer, who was “the strongest of Germany’s political
figures.” Schumacher, who had lost narrowly in West Germany’s first elections two years earlier, would have been ready to take Stalin’s deal of unification for neutrality and thus forgo both deeper West European integration and NATO membership. Acheson had considered Schumacher a “bitter and violent man” determined to weaken Germany’s links with the West. Even after his death in 1952, Schumacher’s Social Democrats continued to oppose West Germany’s NATO membership in 1955.

  It wasn’t the first time Kennedy had gotten Germany wrong. While traveling through Europe as a student in 1937, four years into Hitler’s rule, he had written in his diary: “Went to bed early…The general impression seems to be there will not be a war in the near future and that France is much too well prepared for Germany. The permanence of the alliance of Germany and Italy is also questionable.”

  Adenauer’s successful 1957 campaign slogan and his advice to Eisenhower on Berlin and the Soviets were the same: No experiments. Yet Kennedy’s campaign had been all about experimentation; he believed underlying changes in Soviet society offered the chance of more fruitful negotiations. “We should be ready to take risks to bring about a thaw in the Cold War,” he said at the time, suggesting a new approach to the Russians that might end “the frozen, belligerent, brink-of-war phase…of the long Cold War.”

  Adenauer considered such talk naive, an attitude that had hardened following his historic trip to Moscow in 1955 to open diplomatic relations and free German prisoners of war. Adenauer had held out hope that he could bring home as many as 190,000 POWs and 130,000 German civilian captives out of the 750,000 who were believed to have been captured or kidnapped and then imprisoned.