Stalin, however, was not full- estranged from a policy that would have resulted in German reunification. Even after the Western zones and the Soviet zone were made into two separate German states in 1949, East German officials were plagued by fears that Stalin would jettison their country if he could gain some strategic advantage by doing so. Indeed, the Soviet leader’s “peace notes” on Germany, written in March 1952, proposed a scheme for German reunification according to which both German states would enter a confederative structure on equal footing, even though East Germany was about one third the size and had about one-third the population of the West. The Western allies did not accept the plan. In addition to its absurd equivalence of the two German states, the strategic disadvantage that losing West Germany’s military and industrial potential was simply too great to countenance.
Stalin’s death in March 1953 and other evolving features of the cold war changed the situation without reducing the tension that surrounded West Berlin. In the power struggle that followed, Stalin’s designated successor, Georgy Malenkov, and his associates followed a “New Course” of developing a broad domestic economic base and trying to relax international tensions. Other Soviet leaders, led by Nikita Khrushchev, attacked this policy as weak and even as a betrayal of socialism. By 1955 Malenkov and his new strategic approach, which reached back to what appeared to be Stalin’s, were no longer factors in the Soviet government. Significantly, one of Malenkov’s associates, secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, was executed after a not-quite-so-fair trial in which he was accused of conspiring to sell out East Germany to the West.
Khrushchev’s confrontational approach was important for the city of Berlin and for Germany as a whole.
By the 1950s the dynamics of the Soviets’ relationship with their East German allies became skewed. When Khrushchev began his de- Stalinization campaign in February 1956, the East German leadership, under the Stalinist Walter Ulbricht, once again feared for its survival. Seeking to compete with the West in order to demonstrate the superiority of
socialism, Khrushchev simply could not afford to let East Germany be subsumed into a reunified German state, regardless of whatever strategic value that solution might have had for Stalin. Allowing a socialist state to revert to something other than socialism was not acceptable in an ideological struggle. The East German economy, moreover, was by far the best in eastern Europe. (Its geographic history as an integral part of industrial Germany predisposed it to be.) Khrushchev believed East Germany would serve as a “display window” (Schaufenster) for socialism.
Keeping East Germany viable, however, was a terrible problem. While the borders of the occupation zones had been relatively free, millions of people simply left to assimilate into the socially and economically freer West Germany. When the borders were closed after East Germany became a separate state, the four-power presence in Berlin still allowed free transit to the West for any East German who took the Berlin subway into the Western sectors. As East German socialism continued to stifle initiative and personal liberty, hundreds of thousands of East Germans chose that way out.
The loss of what were predominantly young, educated people to the West; the ruthless exploitation of the East German economy by the Soviet occupation; and Ulbricht’s continuing Stalinist communization of society and the economy raised serious questions about his regime’s ability to survive without significant help from the USSR. Recent research has revealed that Ulbricht had considerable leverage in the alliance relationship between the two countries; for Khrushchev could either support him to his complete satisfaction or let his state collapse. Demanding that the West evacuate Ulbricht’s capitol in November 1958, Khrushchev was attempting to shore up his ally’s legitimacy. (Having half one’s capital city occupied by mortal enemies does raise questions of legitimacy.) He was also trying to employ what many believed to be the Soviet advantage in strategic weapons to make a major play for Soviet foreign policy.
Khrushchev’s ploy did not work. Recently released evidence shows that President Eisenhower almost certainly knew that Khrushchev’s bluster about Soviet superiority in nuclear-missile technology was a bluff. Intelligence reports about the problems of the Soviet strategic-weapons program and the complete lack of aerial-espionage evidence to sustain the Soviet leader’s claims of superiority enabled the West to ignore him without suffering undue consequences over Berlin.
By mid 1959 Khrushchev was aware that his bid for strategic-weapons superiority was at an end and that the success of the American strategic-weapons program might well leave the Soviet Union at a disadvantage. The Soviet leader began to approach the West with what seemed to be a desire to relax tensions. After a successful visit to the United States in the fall of 1959, relations warmed for a time. The downing of an American spy plane over Soviet territory in April 1960, however, threw a wrench into a planned summit between Khrushchev and Eisenhower in Paris and caused the attempt at an early d tente to founder.
Despite some efforts to renew the relationship with the Kennedy administration, which came into office in January 1961, the pressures of the East German alliance evolved into a major disruption. After a relatively unpromising meeting with Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961, it seemed apparent to Khrushchev that the best the Eastern bloc could hope for was a solution to the flight of East Germany’s population. This problem became more pronounced in Soviet strategic thinking after Kennedy resisted attempts to lure him into firm American military commitments in Cuba and Laos. On 13 August 1961, with no real hope of dislodging the West from Berlin and the continuing exodus of East Germans for the West, the Soviet leader consented to the implementation of a plan code-named “Rose”: building a wall around West Berlin. The stability crisis in East Germany was shored up, the battle lines of the cold war were solidified, and the Berlin crisis was over.
-PAUL DU QUENOY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
THE BERLIN WALL
On 18 August 1961, five days after the East Germans began building the Berlin Wall, President John F. Kennedy wrote a letter to Willy Brandt, mayor of West Berlin. In the following excerpt, Kennedy expressed his feelings on the Soviet actions and outlined how the United States planned to respond.
The measures taken by the Soviet Government and its puppets in East Berlin have caused revulsion here in America. The demonstration of what the Soviet Government means by freedom for a city, and peace for a people, proves the hollowness of Soviet pretensions; and Americans understand that this action necessarily constitutes a special blow to the people of West Berlin, connected as they remain in a myriad of ways to their fellow Berliners in the eastern sector. So I understand entirely the deep concerns and sense of trouble which prompted your letter.
Grave as this matter is, however, there are, as you say, no steps available to us which can force a significant material change in this present situation. Since it represents a resounding confession of failure and of political weakness, this brutal border closing evidently represents a basic Soviet decision which only war could reverse. Neither you nor we, nor any of our allies, have ever supposed that we should go to war on this point.
Yet the Soviet action is too serious for inadequate responses. My own objection to most of the measures which have been proposed-even to most of the suggestions in your own letter-is that they are mere trifles compared to what has been done ….
On careful consideration I myself have decided that the best immediate response is a significant reinforcement of the Western garrisons. The importance of this reinforcement is symbolic-but not symbolic only. We know that the Soviet Union continues to emphasize its demand for the removal of Allied protection from West Berlin. We believe that even a modest reinforcement will underline our rejection of this concept ….
More broadly, let me urge it upon you that we must not be shaken by Soviet actions which in themselves are a confession of weakness. West Berlin today is more important than ever, and its mission to stand for freedom has never been so important as now. The link of West Berlin to the Free World is not a matter of rhetoric. Important as the ties to the East have been, painful as is their violation, the life of the city, as I understand it, runs primarily to the West-its economic life, its moral basis, and its military security. You may wish to consider and to suggest concrete ways in which these ties might be expanded in a fashion that would make the citizens of West Berlin more actively conscious of their role, not merely as an outpost of freedom, but as a vital part of the Free World and all its enterprises. In this double mission we are partners, and it is my own confidence that we can continue to rely upon each other as firmly in the future as we have in the past.
Source: “Letter from President Kennedy to Governing Mayor Brandt,”Foreign Relations of the United States. 14 (1961-1963): 352-353.
References
Michael R Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (New York: Edward Burlingame, 1991);
Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now, Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
John P. S. Gearson, Harold Macmillan and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 1958-62: The Limits of Interests and Force (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998);
Hope Harrison, “Ulbricht and the Concrete ‘Rose’: New Archival Evidence on the Dynamics of Soviet-East German Relations and the Berlin Crisis, 1958-1961,” Working Paper of the Cold War International History Project, May 1993;
Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, translated by Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974);
Vojtch Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History, of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Avi Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948-1949: A Study in Crisis Decision-making (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1983);
Ann Tusa, The Last Division: A History of Berlin, 1945-1989 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997);
Andreas Wenger, Living With Peril: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nuclear Weapons (Lanham, Md.: Rowman R Littlefield, 1997);
Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).