CHAPTER FIVE
THE BERLIN BLOCKADE
1948–1949
The history of the Berlin blockade provides inspiring images of cowboy pilots dropping candy to the wide-eyed eager children of Berlin, of brave Berliners hovering around their cooking stoves for the two nighttime hours a day they had for using electricity, and of the U.S. Commander General Lucius Clay looking every bit as worn and gaunt as the hungry population he sought to feed through the miraculous airlift. There is no question that such a dramatic portrayal of the blockade and airlift (“Operation Vittles,” as the pilots dubbed it) captures important aspects of this seminal crisis of the early Cold War.1
Yet these popular images can easily obscure the role of the blockade in the development of Soviet policy in Germany. Perhaps more importantly, they can lead us to neglect the significance of the German reaction to Soviet initiatives on the continent. During the blockade, the Western Allies—and the Americans in particular—committed themselves to the maintenance of West Berlin as an outpost in the middle of Soviet-controlled eastern Germany, a commitment that turned Berlin into a flashpoint for Cold War tensions on the European continent for decades to come. On the heels of the lifting of the blockade, on May 23, 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany (“West Germany”) was created, and, almost in lockstep thereafter, on October 7, 1949, the German Democratic Republic (“East Germany”). These were not just administrative and legal state entities but two separate societies of survivors of a terrible dictatorship and a ruinous war that had defiled the German people and destroyed their cities, the families, and their livelihoods.
There may be some exaggeration in General Curtis LeMay’s description of the Germans’ situation when he arrived in Berlin in fall 1947. But it is worth recalling how bleak the future looked for them:
The war had been over for more than two years, but the Germans were still in a state of utter shock. They looked like zombies, like the walking dead.… There was an eternal nothingness about the place: nothing happening, no work going on; nothing much to eat at home. People sat and stared.… When you passed, their eyes followed you, but blankly, blankly. There was no response, no enlivening humanity in any countenance. The place was bewitched.2
The Allied occupation, American, British, and French, not to mention Soviet, did little to improve the Germans’ mood. As chief of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, George Kennan wrote on February 28, 1948,
They [the Germans] are emerging from the phase of the post-hostilities period in a state of mind which can only be described as sullen, bitter, unregenerate, and pathologically attached to the old chimera of German unity. Our moral and political influence over them has not made headway since the surrender. They have been impressed neither by our precepts nor by our example.3
Both LeMay and Kennan were subject to particularly American perspectives of Germans at the time, but their views also capture the desolation and hopelessness that overwhelmed German society in this period.
Bombed-out and hungry, Berlin, the former Nazi capital—in Hitler’s mad plans, the future capital of the world—was particularly prone to this mood. The terrible violence involved in the taking of Berlin and its occupation by the Soviets was gradually brought under control. But despite providing some upswing to the economy, especially black-market activities, the Four-Power occupation of the city compounded the moral and spiritual problems that were produced by the Nazi defeat. Along with this came a deep pessimism, reflected in the conviction of two-thirds of Berliners that there would be another war within a generation.4
Germans had a “strangely distant relationship to the events of their own epoch,” wrote the author Alfred Döblin, who had returned to Berlin after the war. They could only focus on the needs of daily life and lacked perspective on the destruction that they themselves had brought about.5 Ironically, at least for Germans in the western sectors, the Berlin blockade and the physical suffering it brought to the people of the city provided the kind of jolt they needed to rally their spirits and defend the values of freedom and justice that most observers suggested they had lost.
The currency reform of June 1948, which coincided with the beginning of the blockade and indeed was one of its major causes, worked miracles at invigorating the economic life of the western zones. The blockade turned Germans in the western sectors of Berlin into West Berliners. Responding to the political and existential challenges that the Soviets forced on them, they joined ranks with the Americans and British (less so with the reluctant French) to forge the identity of West Berlin. By embracing the new economic opportunities and allying themselves with the West, the Germans pulled themselves out of the trance described by LeMay. There would be further challenges and other difficult times, but after 1949 there was no question that West German society had learned to respond.
Stalin and Germany
There is still a great deal we do not know about Stalin’s intentions and aims when he ordered his troops to interfere with Allied access to Berlin in the spring of 1948 and then to implement a general blockade of the western sectors in the second half of June.6 From a number of declassified Soviet military documents and post-Soviet interviews with veteran leaders of the occupation, we learn that throughout the time of the blockade Stalin neither placed his forces in the Soviet zone on a war footing nor mobilized additional Red Army troops at home. There were no plans for reinforcing the troops in the Soviet zone, and training and military exercises during the period of the blockade were routine.7
Despite the intensified border controls and surveillance that enforcing the blockade required, Stalin did not inveigh on the East Germans to increase their police and paramilitary forces. Contemporary CIA reports also indicated that neither the Soviet military nor East German police were preparing for a major military confrontation.8 This did not prevent the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff from expressing serious worries about the coming of war and the lack of preparedness for dealing with a Soviet attack. Altogether, there is little evidence, at least until an important 1951 meeting in Moscow with his East European allies, that Stalin thought war with the United States might be imminent.9 Certainly before the first successful Soviet nuclear bomb test, in August 1949, Stalin was cautious in the extreme about confronting the West.
Almost everything about Soviet behavior during the blockade itself indicates that Stalin was using it to further his general aims in Germany and not to provoke a military conflict with the West. The Soviets after all refrained from imposing a total blockade on the city, which would have included interrupting not only all supply and transportation routes but also water, electricity, sewer, and gas networks and would certainly have caused widespread starvation and disease. The Soviet forces did not even try to interfere with air traffic during the airlift nor did they interfere with the Allies’ radar system for air traffic control in Berlin. Instead of taking potentially much more radical measures, they thus exerted carefully calibrated pressure on the Allies and German authorities in western Berlin.10
At the same time, it is hard to call Stalin’s moves in the blockade a “policy,” since serious diplomatic approaches were for the most part suspended during the actual crisis; instead, it was, in the words of a Russian historian of the period, “a very crude and one-sided administrative action.”11 The ultimate goal was to prevent the formation of a separate West German state, which the Western Allies had been working toward over the first half of 1948. The minimum goal was to evict the Western Allies from Berlin, which would have allowed the Soviets to consolidate their hold on the eastern zone and provided them with an easy propaganda victory.12
During World War II, the leaders of the Grand Alliance had bandied about ideas of carving up Germany into smaller units so as to prevent the Germans from causing another war on the continent. There was consensus that Austria would be decoupled from Germany and that the bulk of German territories in the East, including at least parts of East Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania, would be given to Poland in compensation for Polish eastern territories claimed by the Soviet Union. In addition, Germany would be subject to de-Nazification, de-cartelization, demilitarization, and forceful democratization measures. As the war came to an end, none of the Allies was willing to initiate further territorial partitions of Germany. None of them wanted to be accused by the Germans of denying their country a minimum of territorial integrity. Stalin, like Roosevelt and Truman, sought to make junior partners out of the Germans, not perpetual enemies. Moreover, all of them worried that a series of small German statelets might ultimately give rise yet again to a fiercely revanchist Germany. Still, Stalin led the Allies in their joint program of dismantling the Third Reich. Austria was separated from Germany, the Polish border was moved westward to include Silesia and parts of Pomerania, and East Prussia was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union.
At the Potsdam Conference in July and August 1945, the Big Three reaffirmed their commitment to the reconstruction of a unified German state, one that would be treated as a single economic entity. Yet in a fateful decision, the Soviets, Americans, and British also agreed that each occupying power (including France, which was given an occupation zone as well) would be free to draw reparations from its own zone, which effectively nullified this principle.13 At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies had agreed to extract from Germany reparations in the sum of roughly $20 billion, half of which would go to the Soviet Union. By the end of the war, however, the Western powers, unwilling to further impoverish the citizens of a thoroughly demolished country, quickly abandoned this plan. For the Americans and the British (the French did extract considerable sums from their zone of occupation), this policy change was motivated less by worries about the well-being of the Germans in their zones than by the unwillingness to pay for the minimal upkeep of the German populations in their own zones out of their own budgets. Meanwhile, the Soviets used the agreement at Potsdam to remove German industry and eventually to demand huge quantities of finished goods as reparations from the Soviet zone.
Stalin paid a great deal of attention to what he called the Potsdam principles. Whenever the Soviets accused the West of misdeeds in the Four-Power administration of Germany, they condemned these as violations of the sanctity of Potsdam. Yet the question arises just how interested the Soviets were in the territorial integrity of Germany. Some historians maintain that the Soviet wartime plans for dividing up Germany into small statelets simply morphed into a determination to divide the country between a Soviet occupation zone and the West.14 By controlling the eastern part of the country, the Soviets could deprive Germany of its ability to challenge Soviet hegemony on the continent and at the same time extract reparations as they saw fit. Moreover, the Soviets could transform the eastern part of Germany along the lines of the “people’s democracies” that were being created everywhere in the eastern half of the continent under Moscow’s tutelage. This new Germany could conceivably serve as a counterweight to the incipient West German state emerging from the three zones in the West and, in the event of serious economic or social problems, might just surrender its sovereignty to the Soviet-controlled and supported entity of the East.
Although there is scattered evidence for this kind of argument about Stalin’s thinking, it seems more likely that the Soviet dictator was—at least for the first two or three years after the end of the war, and even thereafter—averse to the idea of dividing Germany between east and west, especially since the eastern part was both significantly smaller, with roughly one-third the territory of Germany and one-fourth of its population, and less capable of operating independently than the rest of Germany. If the western zones could look at the Ruhr as a potential engine for economic growth and revival, the eastern zone had more economic perspectives, not to mention that the divided Four Power city of Berlin was located in its center. Moreover, as Stalin correctly foresaw, the western sectors of Berlin could be used for espionage and for attempting to destabilize the Soviet presence in eastern Germany and in east central Europe as a whole.
Much preferable from Stalin’s point of view would have been a united Germany, one that was weakened politically and economically by the dismantling and removal of industries, the financial burdens of reparations, the elimination of its Nazi and “reactionary” officialdom, and the destruction of it war-making potential. Stalin was not all that interested in the institutionalization of Soviet-style “socialism” in Germany. As elsewhere on the continent, he envisioned forming a progressive “national front” and a potential “new democracy,” a planned transition stage between bourgeois democracy and socialism.15 Even if his political visions for the future of Germany were challenged by the West, the Soviets, given their overwhelming superiority in ground forces in central Europe, would still be able to control the destiny of Germany and ensure its friendly “neutrality.” Like Finland, though much more crucial to the fate of Europe as a whole, Germany would thus be denied to the West and controlled through Moscow’s military preponderance and ability to intervene whenever necessary.
As the West began to develop its ideas of an independent West Germany in late 1947, in part as a reaction to Soviet political and economic initiatives in the East, in part as a way to deal with the growing economic malaise in western Germany and Western Europe, Stalin began to doubt the potential success of his Germany policy. Serious differences between the East and West had become apparent during the July 1947 meeting of the sixteen prospective participants in the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), where representatives of Bizonia (the British and U.S. combined zonal government) presented their claims for economic help. At the time, Molotov had protested: “Under the guise of formulating a plan for the reconstruction of Europe, the initiators of the conference in fact desire to establish a Western bloc with the participation of western Germany.”16
The abysmal failure of the London Council of Foreign Ministers Meeting in November and December 1947 indicated that these differences could not be bridged. While the Soviets proposed to unify Germany and extract reparations from it, the three Western powers insisted on the integration of the western zones of Germany with each other and their joint participation in the Marshall Plan. Neither could the Soviets convince their former allies to halt the process of creating a distinct German entity in the West, nor were they prepared to compromise with them. Finance and politics worked hand in hand in placing the future of Germany on two disparate tracks.
The diplomatic stalemate prompted the Western Allies to concretize their plans for creating a separate West German administrative unit, not least to supervise the implementation of a much needed currency reform. Beginning in February and March 1948, they met, together with representatives of the three Benelux countries, at the London Conference. By late spring, they had agreed on the creation of a West German state, its inclusion in the Marshall Plan, and its participation in the Western European Union, a collective defense organization that came about as a result of the March 1948 Treaty of Brussels. To Stalin, the London decisions were anathema, since they violated the Potsdam principles of four power decision-making about Germany and of treating Germany as a single economic unit, both of which he had counted on to keep some modicum of control over the evolution of Germany as a whole. “The decisions of the London Conference,” Molotov wrote to Stalin, “are directed towards accomplishing the division of Germany.”17 The anger that Western initiatives in Germany elicited among the Soviet leadership was typified in a memorandum from A. Smirnov, head of the third European Section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to Soviet foreign minister Molotov, dated March 12, 1948: “The Western powers seek to turn Germany into their stronghold and to include it in their newly formed military-political bloc directed against the Soviet Union and the new democracies.” Smirnov added that simple protests were no longer enough: the Soviets had to “actively interrupt their plans.”18
Three days earlier, Stalin had already recalled Marshal V. D. Sokolovskii from his post as head of the Soviet military administration in Berlin to Moscow to discuss limiting communications between the western occupied zones of Germany and Berlin. While Stalin did not call a politburo meeting to discuss this issue, the Soviet leader weighed a variety of possible courses of action, including imposing transportation restrictions on Allied access to Berlin, with both military and political leaders during frequent consultations at the Kremlin about possible courses of action.19
Since diplomatic efforts had failed to stop the Western Allies from pursuing their plans to form a West German political entity, Stalin was determined to undertake more palpable measures—short of war—to force them back to the bargaining table. As a first step directed against the Allied authorities, in January and February of 1948 the Soviets stopped and delayed trains on their way to Berlin from the west, inspecting freight and personal documents when they had not done so before. These disruptions were annoying but not particularly problematic for the Western Allies, who were expecting some Soviet response to their preparations for creating a Western German state and introducing a separate currency reform.20 Yet these initial inconveniences were merely the prelude to the most serious confrontation of the immediate postwar period.
The Blockade
By early March 1948, it was clear that Marshal Sokolovskii had orders to increase the pressure on the Allies to back away from their commitment to Berlin. In the eastern zone, the Soviet and East German authorities confiscated literature from the West, although the Four Powers had agreed on the free circulation of printed materials both in the East and West. They harassed German and Allied citizens for little reason and at any opportunity. The practice of kidnapping political opponents and critical journalists from the western sectors to the east seemed to grow more intense and frightening. Acrimonious attacks in both the Allied Control Council and Berlin Kommandantura (the Allied governing body of Berlin) became more pronounced. The Soviets did not try to limit air flights in and out of Berlin, but an April 17, 1948, memorandum from two of Sokolovskii’s deputies stated, “[W]e intend to institute [such restrictions] later.”21 Still, it is fair to say that no full-scale blockade of Berlin was yet planned.22
“Within the last few weeks,” wrote General Clay on March 5, “I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it [war] may come with dramatic suddenness.”23 This is just what Stalin wanted Clay to feel, calculating that the overwhelming Soviet preponderance in ground forces in central Europe would convince American military leaders that sticking their necks out because of Berlin was not a good idea. Stalin correctly calculated that there were many in Washington—and particularly in the Department of Defense, Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royal and Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley among them—who believed that the Germans were not worth a war with the Soviets, and even if they were, that the military was completely unprepared to fight battle-tested Soviet troops in Europe.24 Soviet intelligence was reporting to Stalin that the Americans were ready to pull out of Berlin.25 As of February 29, 1949, the Soviets still had some half million men in Germany alone, far outweighing the 160,000 U.S. and 120,000 British troops in the western zones.26
The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency believed that neither the airlift nor Clay’s proposals for breaking through the blockade on the ground could solve the Berlin problem. The State Department was also skeptical. Robert Murphy, political advisor for Germany, wrote in March 1948 that Clay was “psychologically” mesmerized by tensions with the Soviets, too anxious to “reorganize” the West German zones, and too ready to advocate the use of force in dealing with the issue of access to Berlin.27 Still, the Washington foreign policy establishment did not want to be pushed out of Berlin. The influential senator Arthur Vandenberg stated that there was no way to get out of Berlin “under satisfactory circumstances.”28
James V. Forrestal, secretary of defense, came up with a similar formulation on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Committed to making an airlift work while preparing for the eventuality of war, he noted that “some justification might be found for withdrawal of our occupation forces from Berlin without undue loss of prestige.”29 The CIA was one of the most pessimistic Washington agencies about the Berlin crisis, predicting that “any of the courses predicated on the Western Powers’ remaining in Berlin is likely in the long run to prove ineffective. The Western position in the city would increasingly deteriorate and ultimate Western withdrawal would probably become necessary.”30
On March 20, 1948, Marshal V. D. Sokolovskii, commander of the Soviet forces and head of the Soviet military government in Germany, staged a Soviet walkout from the Allied Control Council and, as its chairman at that point, effectively ended its functioning. Meanwhile, the harassment of Allied trains to and from Berlin intensified. The Soviets ordered not only that passenger trains be stopped, travel documents checked, and baggage subjected to inspection but also that each freight train receive formal permission to pass through the Soviet zone. This violated a series of informal and makeshift agreements about guaranteed Allied access to Berlin that had been in place for almost three years (apparently, there was nothing binding on paper).31 But Clay agreed to provide documentation on the personnel and freight that was transported through the corridors. “However,” he wrote to the Pentagon in March, “the right of free entry into Berlin over the established corridors was a condition on precedent to our entry into Berlin and to our evacuation of Saxony and Thuringia, and we do not intend to give up this right of free entry. I regard this as a serious matter because it is my intent to instruct our guards to open fire if Soviet soldiers attempt to enter our trains.”32
Clay tested the Soviets by sending in military transport trains to Berlin, ordering the personnel to refuse inspection. But these were shunted off to side rails and forced to return to their zone. Clay was still convinced that the Soviets were bluffing and suggested that an armed military convoy be sent to Berlin through the zone, with orders to shoot if Soviet guards tried to stop the convoy. Yet U.S. Army chief of staff General Omar Bradley was so alarmed by Clay’s plan (which became known as the “shoot our way into Berlin” policy) that he wrote, “Had I had enough hair on my head to react, this cable would probably have stood it on end.”33
Meanwhile, Clay had already been flying supplies in and out of Berlin as a way to get around some of the restrictions on the ground. When two further trains were shunted off on side rails on April 1, he suspended rail traffic altogether. Unwilling to obey the Soviets’ orders, he decided to “lay on” an airlift instead, which, he stated in a cable to Bradley “will meet our needs for some days.”34 General Albert Wedemeyer, director of combat operations and strategy for the general staff of the U.S. Army at that time, later took credit for the idea of the airlift, which he had employed during World War II in China.35 This was the beginning of the “Little” airlift, sometimes also called the “Baby” airlift, whose purpose was to provide the Western forces with sufficient supplies and food to support their mission in Berlin.36
Just as Stalin would ratchet up the pressure on the Allies and, starting in June, on the Germans in Berlin, Clay increased the capabilities of the airlift as a way to supply his troops and the city. Seeing the situation in Berlin in the context of the communist takeover in Prague in February 1948, the bleak outlook at the time for Finnish independence, and the critical upcoming Italian elections (on April 18), he felt that he was in the middle of a battle for freedom in Europe. Clay also rejected out of hand the Pentagon’s suggestion that he fly American family members out of Berlin; he wanted to show no signs of weakness and no hints that the Americans might abandon the city. “[The] German people—would be frightened elsewhere,” he wrote, “but in Berlin [they] might become hysterical and rush to communism for safety.”37 He made sure that his interlocutors in Washington recognized Berlin’s importance as an outpost of freedom and a “symbol of the American intent.”38 Anticipating what was to come, he told Bradley on April 11,
I do not believe that we should plan on leaving Berlin short of a Soviet ultimatum to drive us out by force if we do not leave. At that time we must resolve the question as to our reply to such an ultimatum. The exception which could force us out would be the Soviet stoppage of all food supplies to [the] German population in western sectors. I doubt that [the] Soviets will make such a move because it would alienate the Germans almost completely, unless they were prepared to supply food for more [than] two million people.39
On June 7, 1948, the London Conference issued a final communique that called for elections to a constituent assembly in the West and the creation of the Basic Law, which would serve as the constitutional backbone of the new federal entity. For many West German politicians and public intellectuals, this new state still was a provisional one, given the temporary, they hoped, absence of the eastern zone and Berlin. The Soviets, predictably, were outraged. They saw these moves, quite correctly, as a departure from the 1945 Four Power agreements about the future of Germany. The Western Allies responded, somewhat disingenuously, that the German states of the Soviet zone could join the new federal entity if they wished. Soviet propaganda dismissed the Western fiat and excoriated the Western powers for violating the Potsdam Agreement and undermining the unity of Germany with their actions. Many German political leaders agreed and were concerned that moving forward on the London Conference measures would mean the permanent division of their country. German politicians also generally opposed the proposed internationalization of the Ruhr and limitations on their foreign and defense policies.40
Stalin tried to use the appeal of a “unity” platform to mobilize the Germans against the Allied “splitters.” In a late March 1946 conversation with Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotewohl, the leaders of the Socialist Unity Party, the SED (created through the forcible merger of the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party in the Soviet zone in April 1946), Stalin had made it clear that they should not, on their part, form a separate government in the east but rather develop some “surrogate or better embryonic” institutions of an all-German character. Even more importantly, they should work out a constitution for all of Germany that would appeal to both the West and the East, neither too democratic nor too restrictive. “This would be very good. It would form the psychological basis,” Stalin stated, “for the realization of a united Germany.” Don’t just talk unity, Stalin admonished the East German leaders, take concrete steps toward accomplishing it. “The British and the Americans are trying to buy the Germans by putting them in a privileged position. Against this there is only one means—prepare the minds of the people for unity.”41
The successful currency reform in the western zones, which was formally announced on June 18 and introduced on June 20, soon demonstrated to the Germans the advantages of integration into the West.42 Political change was accelerated by monetary reform. Negotiations between the currency experts of the Four Powers on June 22 broke down, as it became clear that the Soviet side would only accept the Soviet zone currency for Berlin, in effect seizing control of the finances of the city. The chief of the financial administration of the Soviet military government, Pavel Maletin, threatened his Western counterparts, “We warn you as well as the German population of Berlin that we will impose economic and administrative sanctions that will force the transition to a single currency in the Soviet zone of occupation.”43
Without consulting Washington, Clay went ahead and initiated the introduction of the new Western currency in the western sectors of Berlin on June 23. Colonel Frank Howley, commandant of the American sector, ordered the Berlin municipal government to ignore the Soviet order to use exclusively the new Soviet-sponsored currency.44 The British agreed with the Americans; both hornswoggled the reluctant French into going along.45 But the Western commitment to reforming the currency in their sectors was less forceful than in western Germany. No sooner than the financial institutions in the western sectors of Berlin started adjusting bank accounts to the new German mark, the American military government announced that the Western powers were ready to reverse the decision for introducing the German mark.46
With no agreement on the currency question from the Western powers, Stalin finally imposed a full-scale blockade of the western sectors of Berlin, closing down all land, railway, and canal traffic in and out of the city. This took place on the night of June 23, under the pretext that “technical problems” prevented normal passenger and freight service on the Berlin to Helmstedt rail line. Quickly, similar technical reasons were given for closing down road and canal access to the city. Delivery of electricity to the city was also drastically cut back. Meanwhile, Sokolovskii implemented the long-planned currency reform in the Soviet zone of occupation, with plans to spread it to all of Berlin on June 24. In short, both the East and the West planned a currency reform in their zones that they sought to implement in Berlin. The situation, George Kennan wrote in his memoirs, “was dark and full of danger.”47
In a note to the U.S. government of July 14, the Soviets claimed that they had no choice but to cut off Berlin from the western zones in order to protect the economy of the eastern zone. But they also tried to convince the Western powers that it would be best for the Berliners to share one currency with eastern Germany. The introduction of a Western currency in the western zones of the city was unacceptable when all of the surrounding territory would have a different currency. The note added that “if necessary, the Soviet government has nothing against supplying from its own means ‘Greater Berlin’ with sufficient provisions.”48
Some historians of the blockade have appropriately pointed out that West Berlin was by no means completely cut off economically from the surrounding Soviet zone.49 Despite intensified border controls, black-market entrepreneurs managed to bring goods and foodstuffs into the city from the nearby farms. Gradually, the Soviets were able to suppress much of the black-market activities, but still, goods found their way into the western zones thanks to a variety of subterfuges thought out by inventive Berliners and abetted by corrupt or indifferent (even sometimes sympathetic) East German police. The Soviets also continued to supply restricted materials on contract to factories in the western sectors, and they offered to supply milk to western zone infants in exchange for manufactured goods.50 In addition, the Soviets offered rations to western sector inhabitants, for which, however, the Berliners in the west had to register in the east. Besides, after some initial interference with air traffic in April, the Soviets did not take any actions to obstruct the airlift.
The West, on its part, immediately imposed a counter-blockade on the Soviet zone, which created, in the words of one SED leader, “serious problems” for Soviet zone industries and undermined the Two-Year Plan, which communist leader Walter Ulbricht would announce with great hoopla in January 1949.51 Its effects eventually reached the other countries of the newly formed Soviet bloc. Already in June 1948, in response to the closing down of land access to the western sectors of Berlin, General Clay had stopped the delivery of coal and steel from the Ruhr to the Soviet zone. At the same time, Clay continued to encourage inter-sector trade in Berlin. Thus some give-and-take continued even at the height of the blockade during the winter of 1948–1949.
Stalin had no intention whatsoever of starving out the Berlin population with the blockade measures. Few things could have done greater harm to Soviet aims on the continent than Movietone newsreels of hungry, pathetic women and children in Berlin showing in theaters in Rome, Paris, Munich, and London. The blockade was developed in the spring of 1948 as an instrument of Soviet German policy, to be tightened or loosened depending on the circumstances, with offers of food and coal from the east used to entice the West Berliners to join the campaign for a united Germany and abandon the Western Allies’ moves to institutionalize a separate West German government and currency. Stalin put pressure not just on the Allies but even more emphatically on the Germans.
Much like his later March 1952 note, in which he offered to withdraw Soviet forces from Germany in return for German neutrality, Stalin used the blockade as a political and propagandistic ploy. In June 1948, he staged the crisis in Berlin as a last-ditch effort to prevent the formation of a German government in the West, just as in 1952 he sought to prevent the West German government from joining NATO. Meanwhile, his minimum goal in 1948 was to prevent the adoption of the new West German currency in West Berlin and to absorb Berlin as a whole into the Soviet zone of occupation, in effect expelling the Western powers. If he had to make do with a weak German statelet in the east, then at least it would have all of Berlin as its capital. Frustrated by the SED’s continuous lack of popular support in Berlin and in much of the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, the East German Communist leader, Wilhelm Pieck, told Stalin during a March 26, 1948, meeting that his party would be glad “if the [Western] Allies were removed from Berlin.” Stalin replied, “Let’s do it, with our common efforts, let’s try, and maybe we’ll be successful.”52 A gamble on Stalin’s part, no doubt, but one that he and the Soviet leadership had thought through as a way to minimize their losses and perhaps even make some gains on the German question.
There was great optimism among Soviet officials in Berlin that these new limits on transportation would, in Political Advisor Vladimir Semenov’s words of June 11, be “a further blow” to the prestige of the Western Allies in Berlin. Reportedly, Sokolovskii’s staff were ecstatic about the move. In a telegram to Moscow at the same time, Semenov enthusiastically talked about “smoking” the Allies out of Berlin.53
General Clay responded to the June escalation of the Soviet blockade measures by suggesting again to his superiors that the United States call Stalin’s bluff by sending an armed convoy through the Soviet zone to Berlin. Rebuffed again, he argued, supported by Murphy, to the National Security Council on June 20 that the airlift could supply Berlin if he could get 160 C-54s, which had a freight capacity of ten tons each, four times as much as the C-47s he was using to supply the city. The air force agreed, and Clay began his preparations to keep West Berlin alive by air.54 Later in the summer of 1948, Clay also made preparations for a possible Soviet attack, which he thought possible (though highly unlikely) if the West continued its policy of forming a West German government. Troops and supplies would be assembled on the western bank of the Rhine to prepare for the eventuality of war.55 Strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons had been sent to England to counter a potential Soviet attack by bombing Soviet bases. Still, the strong assumption of the American military was that the Soviets, with their overwhelming preponderance of infantry and armored units, could easily take the western zones of Berlin and sweep across Germany.
5.1 Berlin children watch a C-54 airlift plane approach the Tempelhof runway. GERMAN PICTORIAL COLLECTION, ENVELOPE MN, HOOVER INSTITUTION ARCHIVES.
Despite some skepticism in the Pentagon that Berlin could be supplied by air, President Truman backed Clay’s requests for more cargo airplanes. Unlike a number of senior officials in the White House and State Department, Truman clearly sensed the critical symbolic importance of the city to American efforts to stimulate the economic and political development of Europe. Thus the president backed Clay in his determination to hold the line in Berlin, despite Soviet pressure, French wavering, and some skeptical officials in Washington. Truman “read” the Berlin crisis just as Stalin did: as a confrontation of will and prestige in Europe.56 If Stalin hoped to gain an important victory over the Western powers by driving them out of Berlin, Truman was determined to avoid that loss at all costs short of war.
The Allied Control Council ceased to function in March 1948 as a consequence of the increasingly bitter relations between the Soviet and Western occupation authorities. The Kommandantura, which brought the heads of the Four Powers together for the purposes of administering the city, likewise became the site of mutual accusations and acrimonious exchanges, especially between the Soviet commandant, General A. G. Kotikov, and Colonel Frank Howley, commander of the American sector in Berlin. “To me,” Howley wrote, “Kotikov’s attacks seemed all part of the new campaign by the Russians to kill the Kommandantura, blame the West for its demise, and then try to drive us out of the city.” Unlike the land access routes to Berlin, the three air corridors to the city were agreed upon in writing by the Four Powers in the Allied Control Council on November 30, 1945, and updated by a convention of October 22, 1946.57
The confrontation came to a head on July 1, 1948, when Howley stomped out of the meeting, allowing Kotikov to declare an end to the Kommandantura as well.58 Given the crescendo of hostility between the Soviets and the West over the resolution of the German question, the Four Power machinery that had been set up at the end of the war to deal with Germany and Berlin had proven incapable of resolving serious disputes between the two sides. Even the formerly amiable relations between Generals Clay and Sokolovskii, which had been characterized by much good-natured banter, joking, and entertaining with plenty of food and drink, came to a sudden halt. With the closing of the Allied Control Council and the Kommandantura, the Four Powers ceased to adjudicate their disputes and regulate the actions of their respective German clientele in an institutional format. Now the Allied powers and the German politicians lined up in two firmly opposed camps, fighting with salvoes of mutual press and propaganda attacks for the hearts and minds of the Berlin population.
During the summer of 1948, the Four Powers held episodic meetings to try to deal with the difficult currency issue, and the technical questions related to the blockade (or, as the Soviets called them, “disturbances in the transportation networks”). But there were no signs that the Soviets were ready to alter their stance. At the same time, there were still indications that neither side had entirely ruled out the possibility of a negotiated settlement at the highest level. On the Soviet side, Stalin and Molotov still hoped to extract concessions from the West on the calling of the constituent assembly and the introduction of the new West German currency in Berlin. On the former issue, the Western Allies—the French hedged their bets on some issues—were unwilling to compromise. The constituent assembly was scheduled to meet in mid-September 1949, and nothing, at this point, was going to stop the formation of a West German government short of military confrontation. As George Kennan noted, the work on creating the West German state “assumed an irrevocable character” as the months went by, “and the idea of suspending or jeopardizing it for the sake of a wider international agreement became less and less acceptable.”59 Moreover, the Americans completely rejected the incessant Soviet claim that they had forfeited their rights in Berlin as a consequence of supporting the formation of a German government in the West.60 Instead, the Western Allies hoped that some concessions on the currency issue in Berlin might bring the blockade to an end and return an acceptable modicum of Four-Power control to the city.
At the beginning of August 1948, Walter Bedell Smith, American ambassador to the Soviet Union, led a delegation of the ambassadors of Great Britain, France, and the United States to meet with Stalin and Molotov in Moscow with the goal of finding a compromise on Berlin.61 Usually in meetings like this, Stalin played the good cop and Molotov the bad cop, though Smith noted that Molotov was almost excessively gracious: “Stalin and Molotov were undoubtedly anxious for a settlement. Doubt if I have ever seen Molotov so cordial and if we did not know [the] real Soviet objectives in Germany [we] would have been completely deceived by their attitude as both [were] literally dripping with sweet reasonableness and desire not to embarrass.”62
Stalin, too, was good-natured, affable, and approachable. The Soviet ruler indicated that there were serious grounds to believe that an agreement could be reached, despite the unwillingness of the Western Allies to slow down, much less reverse, the process of the formation of a German government. He did not mind, he said, if the West wanted to integrate their three zones of occupation, and even considered it “progress.”63 The issue was the planned German government. “The Soviet zone also formed a unity but they [the East Germans] had not the right of creating a government there.”64 (Stalin could have added that he had repeatedly rejected initiatives to do so by SED leaders Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck.65) Stop the London Conference process and withdraw the B-Mark (as the West German currency, marked “B” for Berlin, was called in the western sectors of Berlin), “then there would be no difficulties,” he stated.66 In addition, Stalin brought up the issue that the West was taking “large quantities of equipment” out of the city—but like the so-called “technical issues” associated with the blockade, this was something of a red herring.67
The Western ambassadors did express the willingness to delay the implementation of the London decisions until a new meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers reviewed, at Stalin’s request, contentious issues regarding reparations, demilitarization, and the conclusion of a German peace treaty. The real hard nut of the negotiations that prevented a resolution of the crisis came down to the question of which currency would be used in Berlin and who would control its emission. But even here, the two sides reached an apparent consensus at an August 24 meeting of Smith, Stalin, and Molotov. There was no need to extend the use of the new (West) German mark into Berlin. In exchange for the lifting of the blockade, which was to coincide with the lifting of the counter-blockade, the parties also agreed that the new Soviet zone currency would be introduced in all of Berlin and the “B-mark” withdrawn, with the understanding that a “financial commission comprised of representatives of the four [Allied] commanders” would control the issuing and distribution of that currency through an emissions bank.68
In short, Berlin would be reconstituted as a Four Power city within the Soviet zone of occupation, using a single currency from an emissions bank that the Western Allies would be able to control along with the Soviets. In the absence of a Western agreement to postpone the implementation of the London agreement, the Soviets refused to sign a communiqué. Instead the ambassadors sent instructions to their respective commanders in Germany to resolve the currency technicalities with the help of a committee of experts.69 Ambassador Smith explained that the agreement required the commanders “within a week, to find practical ways of doing two things at the same time: lifting the blockade and introducing [the] Soviet currency in Berlin under effective four-power supervision.”70
Neither Moscow nor Washington had much faith in the outcome of the negotiations. In a telephone communication between General Sokolovskii and his political advisor Vladimir Semenov in Berlin and Molotov in Moscow on August 30, the former pair complained about making concessions to the West, suggesting that the Western powers were only interested in an agreement because the Berliners would quickly tire of their difficult position with the coming of fall.71 Molotov sent a telegram back to Sokolovskii on August 31, instructing him to “take under consideration the fact that the western representatives above all will try to expand the competencies of the Finance Commission. This should not be allowed.”72
Ambassadors Smith and Roberts thought that the deal reached in Moscow might work and urged their respective governments to agree. General Clay was justifiably more suspicious; he wanted to be absolutely sure that the West had a constituent role in resolving all currency issues in Berlin. On consultation with Clay, Secretary of State George C. Marshall insisted that U.S. acceptance of a Soviet currency for Berlin was contingent upon a satisfactory agreement regulating the emission and availability of the currency under “some form of quadripartite control.”73
Despite Stalin’s assurances in Moscow, there was little confidence in the West that the Soviet side intended to grant the Allies any significant role in the printing or distribution of the Soviet currency in Berlin. These misgivings were confirmed in the Four-Power negotiations between the respective commanders on August 31 and September 7. From Molotov’s instructions cited above we know that Sokolovskii was not acting on his own when he insisted in these talks that the Soviets would control Berlin’s currency. He supported this position with the already familiar assertion that the Western Allies had forfeited their rights to be in Berlin when they had abandoned the Potsdam principles on the unity of Germany and Four-Power control by taking steps toward creating a West German state.74 The commandants’ talks were “getting nowhere,” reported Robert Murphy, and were quickly abandoned.75 Consequently, the “war of words” between East and West intensified in late September and October 1948, with both sides blaming the other for the breakdown of the talks. Even more important in the failure of these negotiations, no doubt, was Stalin’s and Molotov’s conviction that the coming winter would push the West Berliners to the limit of their endurance and force them to join up with the rest of the Soviet zone in a campaign for German unity. In order to be fed and warm, Stalin no doubt calculated, the Berliners themselves would take the kinds of actions that would delegitimize the Allied presence in Berlin and foster the integration of West Berlin into the rest of the city and the Soviet zone.
The Berliners
Finding provisions grew increasingly difficult for the two million plus population of the western sectors of Berlin in the late summer and fall of 1948 as the Soviets reinforced their previously haphazard control over the borders between the western sectors and the surrounding Brandenburg countryside.76 They also severely cut back deliveries of food, fuel (both coal and firewood), and electricity to the western sectors. Normal inter-zonal thoroughfares were blocked off by barriers manned by Soviet soldiers and East German police, and automobile traffic back and forth between the western zones of occupation and Berlin was severely limited. The post was delayed and post office rules were changed; parcel deliveries were held up for weeks.77 Passengers were inspected on stations of the numerous U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines that ran through the eastern and the western sectors.78 Some commuters, noted one contemporary letter writer, “have their bags taken, purses searched and money (westmarks) seized; one Berliner from the east who wanted to give his mother in West Berlin a potted plant had it taken by the police.”79 Soviet zone residents were given new identity cards as a way of cutting back the traffic between the western sectors of Berlin and the rest of the Soviet zone. Although some deliveries continued, residents of the western sectors most definitely felt the severity of shortages in the late fall. Soviet kidnappings continued to rattle the population, raising levels of tension, and, according to the memoirist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, contributed to a growing suicide rate, which jumped from one and a half to seven per day. “Kidnapping across the border. Police raids. People being dragged into the other sector. People protest. Shots are fired, stones are hurled. People are arrested. People are wounded. Who is the enemy?”80 Many Berliners would have fled to the West if they could have. Being “caught” in the city only added to the trauma experienced by the population.81
After some initial glitches, including the accidental collision over Berlin of a Soviet YAK fighter and a British passenger plane on April 5, 1948, the airlift itself worked extremely well. Berliners themselves rushed to help where they could. In just three months in 1948, German workers, many of them women, took on the task of building in three shifts, twenty-four hours a day, a third airport (Tegel) in the French sector. General Curtis LeMay, generally skeptical of the Germans’ commitment to the West, wrote extremely positively about the work of the German teams: “[I]t would astonish the life out of you to see how quickly those Germans got the sacks out of the airplane; and how soon they helped to get the airplane loaded again.”82
The Western powers quickly began to feel the propaganda benefits among the Berliners for their efforts to keep the population fed and warm. After Sokolovskii introduced the new Soviet-backed “German mark” in the eastern zone and all of Berlin, the Western Allies forbade its use in their sectors and introduced the B-mark currency, which was specific to the western sectors of Berlin, but was tagged to the German mark in the West, which also began to show up in the West Berlin economy. The value of the B-mark quickly exceeded that of the Soviet zone currency (roughly at one to three, eventually between one to four and one to five). The Soviets understood that what they denounced as the “Clay-mark” tilted the balance between the economies in the eastern and the western sectors of the city. Those who worked for the western zonal governments and Western-oriented firms, some still located in the eastern sector, found themselves in a privileged position, whereas the opposite was true for those, including West Berliners, who worked in the East, where they were paid in the Soviet currency.83 Moreover, the best goods from the Soviet zone were smuggled over to the western sectors of Berlin in order to earn B-marks.84
6. The Berlin Airlift
As the months went by, the issues involved in the Berlin blockade became obvious to both sides. The Soviets kept telling anyone who would listen that the blockade would be lifted if the proclamation of a West German state were put aside and the introduction of the Western B-mark in Berlin was reversed. Although the Western Allies continued to offer concessions on the currency issue according to what had been negotiated in Moscow, Stalin played his hand to the hilt. He was certain that the Western powers would cave in once they realized that they could not supply the West Berliners with sufficient food and fuel through the airlift to survive the winter. Not even the calling of the constitutional assembly for the new West German state on September 1, 1948, shook his confidence in the plan. While the SED waged a fierce propaganda campaign against the counter-blockade, in their own Russian language newspapers, the Soviets denied that there was a blockade at all, only rarely referring to it as “the so-called blockade,” and dismissed the “air bridge” as an “air bluff.” According to their propaganda, more was being taken out of Berlin, especially “finished products and other valuable materials,” than was being brought in.85 If Western planes dropped candy and toys for the children of Berlin, then they did so only in order to draw a curtain over the history of the vicious Western bombing campaign against Berlin’s children.86
As it turned out, Stalin completely miscalculated the effects of the blockade on the population in the western sectors. Since there was already widespread griping and scattered cases of civil disorder, he expected that growing shortages and unemployment would intensify the dissatisfaction of the locals with the Western Allies. Some scholars have speculated that the lack of experience of the Soviets with airlifts made them more skeptical than otherwise of the Allies’ potential success.87 With food and coal supplies assured to their compatriots in the eastern sector, the Berliners in the western sectors would surely put pressure on the Allies to concede, even demanding to join the East. As early as July 20, 1948, Tägliche Rundschau, the German-language Soviet newspaper in the East, announced in a full-sided, front-page article, “The Soviet Union will assume the provisions of the people of all of Berlin.”88 Sokolovskii was willing to offer the West Berliners cooking oil, potatoes, and other goods at the same ration norms as were available in the East.89
This promise, periodically renewed by the Soviets, required that citizens of western Berlin register in the eastern sector in order to receive the appropriate ration cards. The SED made every effort in their propaganda and organizational activities to entice the West Berliners to enlist in this program. “Mothers! No one needs to be hungry or freeze. Buy in the East” was one of the slogans used.90 Thousands of West Berliners followed the calls to use Soviet sector ration cards—according to official Soviet statistics 21,802 in August 1948, and a maximum of 99,246 in January of 1949.91 Yet out of a population of some two million, these were remarkably few enlistees. Many West Berliners were suspicious of the Soviets’ motives and feared the consequences of signing up.92 Many of those who did register in the eastern sector withdrew once it became clear that the airlift could supply enough foodstuffs for survival. The Soviets tried to explain this lukewarm response to their enticement in part by emphasizing the West Berliners’ fear of “repressions by the Western powers” and manipulation by “the SPD’s furious propaganda campaign.” But they also saw that the population in the western sectors was receiving products at a fairly stable rate from the airlift.93
The propaganda officials of the Soviet military administration in Germany understood that the airlift itself produced significant propaganda gains for the Western powers. Lt. Col. V. A. Zdorov noted with some frustration that myriad problems experienced by the Berliners at the time were all blamed on “our security measures” (i.e., the blockade): the speculation, the shortages, the closed factories, the unemployment, the lack of heating supplies; these were all seen as “the result of the Russian policy of blockading the city.” Zdorov added that the Soviet measures in Berlin led to the “strengthening of the West’s position” not just in the western sectors but in the Soviet sector as well. (Sokolovskii wrote in the margins of the report at this point, “Absolutely!”)94 On September 20, 1948, General A. G. Russkikh, deputy commander of the Soviet Occupation Administration for Political Questions, reported to Mikhail Suslov in the Central Committee and General Sergei Shatilov of the Red Army political administration in Moscow:
The very fact of the daily flights over the city at low altitudes of several hundred heavy transport planes creates a great psychological effect on the German population. [This leads to] the strengthening of the anti-Soviet mood of the western sectors of Berlin.95
Russkikh recommended more intense efforts of the SED to demonstrate the nefarious effects of the counter-blockade. But in a report three months later to his superiors in Moscow, the propaganda chief noted that these measures had not yet borne fruit.96 Especially the results of the December 5, 1948, elections to the city council in the western sectors of Berlin, he wrote, showed that the Anglo-Americans and the “reactionary” SPD had “succeeded in gathering behind them the majority of the population of the western sectors and sharpening the anti-Soviet, anti-SED mood.”97 There was a stunning turnout of some 86 percent of the population. The SPD was the clear winner, with 64.5 percent of the vote (an increase from 50.8 percent in 1946).98 General Russkikh complained: the population remains “indifferent or even hostile” to us. Then, in a typically contorted Soviet formulation, he noted, “The masses have not succeeded to a sufficient degree in being convinced of the soundness and correctness of [our] position.” This attitude makes one think of Berthold Brecht’s ironic poem, “The Solution,” about the June 17, 1953, uprising in East Germany, which asked, “Would it not be easier / In that case for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another.”
Stalin and the Soviet authorities in Berlin had decided not to allow the eastern sector of Berlin to take part in the local Berlin elections, scheduled for December 1948.99 Pieck admitted to the Soviets that his party would have been trounced in open elections.100 Groups of SED agitators even attempted to keep the population of the western sectors from voting in the December election, but to no avail. Instead, the best the Soviets and SED could do was to hope that the difficulties of the winter would erode the confidence of the western sectors in their political parties. But fortunately for the Western suppliers of the city—and for the Western parties vying for power in the elections—the winter of 1948–1949 was relatively mild, especially in comparison to the previous winter and, in particular, to the fierce winter of 1946–1947, one of the coldest in modern German history, when many thousands had died of the cold.
As was their wont, the Soviets combined the carrot (of increased food supplies for the population) with the stick of bullying the local German authorities. In the latter respect, their first move after imposing the blockade was to seize control of the city police force by firing the police chief and replacing him with Paul Markgraf, a well-known communist supporter. This prompted the Western Allies to set up their own German police force for the western zones under Johannes Stumm.101 The next target was the city administration, the Magistrat. At its seat located at the provisional city hall on Parochialstrasse in the eastern part of the city, Soviet- and SED-inspired crowds held demonstrations against the elected, anti-communist Magistrat leadership, which included the Social Democrats Louise Schroeder as mayor and Ernst Reuter (who had been elected to this post, but was not allowed to assume it because of Soviet opposition), as well as Ferdinand Friedensburg, a Christian Democrat who served as acting mayor. Ultimately, the conflict got so nasty and threatening that the democratic leadership reconstituted their government in the western part of the city, eventually in the Schöneberg city hall in the U.S. sector. If the Soviets’ intentions were to force the West German authorities to capitulate to eastern institutions, then their tactics were a failure; if the intention was to cement the division of the city, then one could count their actions a success.102
In the political arena, the Soviets’ ability to further their cause during the blockade were limited as well. The leaders of the Socialist United Party (SED) realized that despite three years of intense communist propaganda and organizing in Berlin at large they had relatively little leverage over the western sectors of the city. Not only was the party weakly developed in the West, in some parts of the city, General Russkikh reported to his superiors, it was completely paralyzed. As a consequence, neither the SED nor the democratic Magistrat with communist participation could exert “any noteworthy influence” on the views of the western sector population.103
As Hermann Matern, a SED leader, told General Kotikov, chief of the East Berlin Soviet administration, “in the Berlin trade union movement, there is a strong tendency to oppose the [SED led-] campaign under the slogan: ‘Berlin—a part of the Soviet zone.’ ” The Independent Union Opposition (UGO), in which the anti-communist SPD held sway, had split off from the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), which had been founded and developed largely under SED auspices since 1945. There were even serious problems with the SED control of the FDGB in the East. As for the SPD in the West, Matern stated, exemplifying the uncompromising stance of many East German communists, “we deal with the leadership of the Berlin SPD on the principle that we cannot have any common efforts with this center of Anglo-American spying.”104 Matern blamed the Western powers for the blockade and attributed the pro-Western and anti-Soviet stance of the population in the western sectors to a “smear campaign without equal.”105 In a greeting to the Women’s Congress in the east, Matern called the anti-communist “defamations” of the Social Democrats “worse than those conducted by the Nazis.”106 Otto Grotewohl, an important SED leader, the future first prime minister of the GDR, and a former SPD member, stated that the SED constantly underestimated the strength of the “chauvinist, warlike, anti-Soviet” denunciations from the West and that these made their way even into the SED party ranks.107
Due in part to the splendid leadership of Berlin’s elected mayor Ernst Reuter, leader of the West Berlin SPD, who had returned to Germany in November 1946 from exile in Turkey, the inhabitants of the western sectors rallied behind the Allied cause. In many ways, this was unexpected, given the hardscrabble existence and anti-occupation attitude of Berlin’s population. Convinced that his battered people were fully capable of regeneration, Reuter went about his work “with honest enthusiasm and an unbroken optimism that perhaps only a returned exile could muster,” writes his biographer. His skills as a brilliant, charismatic orator and an indefatigable administrator proved invaluable when he had to lead the city’s efforts to deal with the overwhelming burdens of the occupation and then the blockade. This he did “with the mixture of sobriety, expertise, closeness to the people, and appeals to collective solidarity that was typical for him.”108 His speeches and writing were inspiring paeans to the need for freedom and the importance of the West Berliners’ struggle for their right to sovereignty. Typical was an interview with Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR, Northwest German Radio) on August 12, 1948, in which he spoke about the confidence of the Berliners in the Magistrat and City Assembly in the West who “will do everything that is humanly possible, also to survive these times, because we have to survive them, because only when they are surmounted will we be free at last. And that is finally and at long last the goal of our struggle at the moment.”109
Before launching the airlift, General Clay had a serious conversation with Reuter and asked whether the Berliners would support the action, given the cold and hunger that they would still have to endure, even with Allied support. In what Clay would later consider the most dramatic moment of the blockade’s history, Reuter assured him that the Berliners would stand up to the Soviets and take the hardships of the blockade without complaint.110 Clay knew that the airlift could not succeed if the Germans succumbed to the Soviet’s entreaties and bullying. Reuter (and the other democratic leaders of the city) made sure that this would not happen. “You worry about the airlift,” Clay reported Reuter telling him, “let me worry about the Berliners.”111
In fact, Reuter was concerned, as were many Berlin politicians, that Allied support of a West German state might weaken the West’s willingness to defend a free West Berlin in the face of overwhelming Soviet pressure.112 But as he let Clay and others know, he was also determined that the Germans in the western sector resist Soviet encroachments with or without Western help. In fact, the more pressure the Soviets applied, the readier the Berliners seemed to fight back with volunteer work, defense of their freedoms, and enthusiasm for the Western Allies. At an emotional rally at the Brandenburg Gate on September 9, 1948, as many as three hundred thousand people protested against the violence committed against the Magistrat in the East. Reuter called out to the world to look at the city of Berlin and see how its people were ready to defend freedom and liberty. Not just in Germany but internationally his speech was one of the most dramatic—and effective—of the early Cold War period.
Today is the day when it’s not diplomats and generals who do the talking or negotiating. Today is the day when the people of Berlin lift their voices. Today, this people of Berlin call the entire world.…
You people of the world, you people in America, in England, in France, in Italy! Look at this city and realize that you must not, that you cannot surrender this city and this people. There is only one possibility for all of us: to stand together until this struggle is won, until this struggle is finally sealed at last through the victory over the enemies, through the victory over the power of darkness.
The people of Berlin has spoken. We have done our duty, and we will continue to do our duty. People of the world! You, too, do your duty and help us in the period that stands before us, not only with the drone of your airplanes, not only with transport capabilities that you have brought here, but with the steadfast and unbreakable commitment to the common ideals which alone can secure our future, and yours as well. People of the world, look at Berlin! And people of Berlin, be certain of this, this struggle we will, this struggle we shall win!113
5.2 “Cruel, brutal, aggressive powers will not beat us to our knees”: Ernst Reuter addresses a rally in front of the Reichstag, September 9, 1948. GERMAN PICTORIAL COLLECTION, ENVELOPE MN, HOOVER INSTITUTION ARCHIVES.
While Clay and his supporters worked the corridors of power in Washington, trying to convince the waverers in the administration that Berlin was strategically crucial to the American position in Europe, and with Reuter using his formidable rhetorical and political skills to commit the people of the western sectors of Berlin to resist Soviet offers of food and succor in the blockaded city, a critical alliance was forged between the leader of the American occupation, who was known to have little truck with Germans as a consequence of the war, and a German Social Democrat (and a communist in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s), who was skeptical of American-style democracy but committed to efficient, freely elected, and effective municipal institutions.114 Clay’s success depended on Reuter and the Germans; Reuter’s on Clay and the Americans. In this relationship, Reuter was anything but a puppet of the Americans who merely fulfilled their wishes. He answered such taunts, which emanated from some West German circles, communist and others, himself: “The situation is the reverse, the Americans are the voice of Berlin, because we did not carry out American policy but we caused the Americans to carry out Berlin policy and not to leave Berlin to its fate.”115 Among Germans in the western sectors, meanwhile, expressions of support for the Western Allies only increased as the situation grew more critical. Although a large majority of Berliners in the western sectors—82 percent—worried about the imminence of war in July 1948, almost all—98 percent—stated that the Western powers did the right thing by staying in Berlin.116
The commanders of the occupying forces on both sides, meanwhile, were not keen on letting the situation escalate even further. Clay was unhappy about the fact that the British had allowed the huge Reuter-led demonstration at the Reichstag. After the event itself, matters had turned ugly when several hundred Germans converged on the Soviet war memorial near the Brandenburg Gate, throwing stones at Soviet soldiers and East German policemen and spilling across into Pariser Platz in the Soviet zone. When youths managed to tear down the Soviet flag from the Brandenburg Gate and began to rip it up and burn parts of it, several guards from the war memorial rushed over and fired shots into the crowd.117 Reports vary about how many were killed, but Colonel Howley noted that four demonstrators were buried in the east the following week.118 Five alleged perpetrators whom the Soviets had seized were promptly tried and convicted to twenty-five years each in prison. General Russkikh, worried about the propaganda consequences, was critical of these “harsh and undifferentiated” sentences.119
Clay felt that he could not publicly condemn the German demonstration, which he thoroughly disliked, without undermining the German will to resist the Soviets. At the same time, he suggested instead that he and General Robertson, commander of the British occupation forces, talk secretly to the German leaders to make sure they would thenceforth prevent such demonstrations, which, he feared, could otherwise become routine and eventually turn into violence against the occupation regime as a whole.120 Clay also worried that the Soviets, if faced with an openly hostile population in West Berlin, might simply decide to take the city by force, which, as everyone agreed, would not have been at all difficult.121
The End of the Blockade
Following the failure of the August 1948 Moscow talks to produce a compromise and the subsequent collapse of the commanders’ negotiations about the Berlin currency, efforts to lift the blockade and resolve the disputes about Berlin shifted at the end of September 1948 to the United Nations, with the encouragement of Argentinian foreign minister Juan Atilio Bramuglia, who was at that time president of the Security Council. Though Molotov was no fan of the Security Council and would have preferred that the Council of Foreign Ministers take up the Berlin question, he sought to convince Stalin that continuing talks were necessary. The negative publicity following the breakup of the Berlin Magistrat on November 30, he argued, “might leave the impression that we did not want any kind of agreement on the Berlin question,” which would have been undesirable.122 Stalin concurred and agreed to the formation of a UN committee to study the currency situation in Berlin. Its discussions resulted in a compromise solution not unlike the one concluded in Moscow, but with fewer Western controls over the emission bank. Washington’s opposition ultimately killed the effort in March 1949. But even earlier, Stalin tried playing good cop once more when answering questions from American journalist Kingsbury Smith on January 27, 1949. This time, he did not bring up the daunting issue of the currency reform at all, suggesting instead that the limitations on transportation to Berlin could be lifted if the counter-blockade was brought to an end.123
The UN efforts overlapped with secret talks between Yakov Malik, Soviet ambassador to the UN, and the American deputy chief of mission to the UN and Ambassador-at-Large Philip Jessup. The progress of the talks between Jessup and Malik gave both sides the hope that the situation could be resolved short of war.124 Stalin, initially through Molotov, supported Malik’s efforts to find a compromise with the Americans; Dean Acheson, American secretary of state, similarly supervised Jessup’s negotiating stance. At about the same time, significant personnel changes on the Soviet side signaled that Stalin intended to take more active steps in resolving the crisis. In early March, Molotov was replaced as foreign minister by his previous deputy Andrei Vyshinskii.125 On March 29 Marshal Sokolovskii was replaced as commander of the Soviet zone by General of the Army Vasilii Chuikov. Jessup had asked Malik on February 16 whether Stalin’s omission of the demand for a single currency in Berlin in his interview in late January had been intentional.126 On March 12, Vyshinskii wrote to Malik, “Meet with Jessup and tell him that you have received … an explanation from Moscow regarding the Berlin question that interests him.… You have the opportunity to inform him that according to the explanation from Moscow it was not an accident that Stalin’s answer to correspondent Smith did not contain the mention of a single currency for Berlin.”127
By the early spring of 1949, it was clear to Stalin that the blockade had not accomplished its goals. With Allied airplanes landing every five to seven minutes at three airports in the western sectors, the city was reasonably well supplied and the Berliners in the western sectors were hardly suffering from a shortage of the essentials. Roughly the same tonnage of supplies was delivered to Berlin by air as had been delivered before the airlift by other transportation means. It seemed that the Western Allies could continue with the airlift indefinitely, which was precisely the impression they wanted to convey to Stalin. On March 20, the Western Allies declared that the German mark would become the only legal currency in the western sectors. A historian of the currency issue exaggerates only slightly when he writes that “this date marks a turning point in the history of postwar Berlin.”128 In reality, there still remained great unease among some officials in Washington about concentrating so much of U.S. military air transportation capacity in and around Berlin and about perpetuating an operation that could trigger an armed conflict at any moment.129 On March 10, 1949, Murphy wrote to Clay from Washington that there was no doubt “a certain amount of fatigue regarding the Berlin situation”; many officials wanted out of Berlin, and there were even the “backsliders” who were ready to make concessions on the formation of a West German government.130
Meanwhile, the counter-blockade was taking its toll on the productivity of the Soviets’ own factories in the eastern zone. In short, both the Americans and the Soviets were weary of the conflict. In the Malik-Jessup talks of March 21, the two sides agreed to put the currency issue on the back burner and to take measures to lift both the blockade and the counter-blockade. Each of the Four Powers issued a communiqué on May 5, agreeing on the conditions to bring the blockade to an end. Stalin gave orders to lift the blockade on the same day; on May 10 the politburo formalized the resolution. One day earlier General Chuikov issued Order no. 56, which rescinded all measures related to the blockade and was published in Tägliche Rundschau.131 Clay was determined to keep the airlift going in the case that the Soviets reimposed restrictions on the traffic to Berlin. Supplies for Berlin were to be warehoused in western Germany in anticipation of a new blockade.132 Both the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the British Foreign Office insisted on maintaining the men and materiel necessary to quickly bring the airlift back into action.133
All in all, 2.35 million tons of goods were delivered to Berlin throughout the airlift. 405 American and 170 British planes were involved—575 altogether, nineteen of which crashed during the period.134 Most of the 101 fatalities (forty British and thirty-one Americans) were caused by accidents on the ground.135 Although the Allies did continue the airlift until late September, their fears did not materialize. Stalin shifted his tack on the German problem, launching a highly visible propaganda campaign for peace in the vain hope of keeping Germany out of the Western camp. On May 23, 1949, a new Council of Foreign Ministers meeting, agreed to in the Malik-Jessup talks, took place in Paris to revisit the disputed issues of the status of Germany and the currency situation in Berlin, yet in the end to no avail. There were some concessions on interzonal trade, which was important to both sides.136 But the Soviets looked to return to the status quo ante, including the Potsdam principles, while the Americans and British would have none of it. U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson greeted the Soviet proposals to conclude a German peace treaty with derision. For him, they were “as full of propaganda as a dog is of fleas; in fact it is all fleas and no dog.”137
Both Berlin and Germany were divided even more than before the crisis had started. Now there was a mobilized population of western Berlin with a sense of Western identity and the élan of a society that had won a battle for its sovereignty after just having lost such a terrible war. As a CIA report at the time put it (note the agency’s unceasing skepticism regarding the Germans), “On the Soviet side, the blockade has increased the anti-Soviet sentiment of Germans and temporarily, at least, strengthened their attachment to the Western camp.”138
Despite his instinctual understanding of the realpolitik inherent in the successful management of foreign affairs, Stalin often misread public opinion on the continent, and especially its fragile relationship with “democracy” and the Western community. Instead of turning their back on the Western Allies, the West Berliners—urged on by their charismatic leader Ernst Reuter—rallied to the side of the Allies despite the serious economic and political pressures on their city. This was critical for turning the airlift not only into a military and logistical success but into a symbol of defiance against the Soviet Union and Stalin. Before the events themselves, it would have been impossible to predict the outcome, as Berliners spent most of their efforts in the daily struggle for economic survival. Postwar escapism was still rampant and the citizens’ commitment to politics tenuous. The growing division of the city and the gradual isolation of the western sectors from the eastern sector compounded the indifference many in the western sectors felt toward politics. Paradoxically, the blockade forged the demonstration of political will among the Berliners in the western sectors for the first time since the war. As Frank Howley noted, the Soviets ceased to be an ally of the West; instead the Germans had taken their place.139
As a consequence of the blockade, the Western Allies themselves had moved closer together; by the end, even the French, who sometimes shared Soviet policy prescriptions for the Germans and Germany, stood solidly with their British and American allies. As the Paris CFM talks in June 1949 confirmed, they, too, were determined that the Americans stay on the continent to serve European security needs.140 Differences over Germany paled in comparison. Stalin’s ideological disposition had led him to believe that the capitalist West, especially Great Britain and the United States, would come to blows over their rivalries in Europe and around the world. The excellent cooperation between Washington and London during the Berlin crisis proved him wrong.141 Instead of dividing the West, the blockade contributed to the building of the Atlantic Alliance.142
The failure of the blockade left Stalin with no alternative but to accept the fact that a new “Bonn Republic” would soon be born under the protection of the Western powers. In response, he intensified his efforts within Germany along two contradictory lines. First, in a mid-December 1948 meeting in Moscow, he encouraged Pieck, Ulbricht, and Grotewohl to pursue an “opportunistic” policy of advancing the formation of a “provisional German government” in the Soviet zone. This government would not be considered a people’s democracy, nor would it institute a dictatorship of the proletariat or join the Cominform.143 There was, however, talk of building such state-like institutions as a standing military and a State Security Service. In mid-1948, the SED declared itself “a party of a new type,” a thoroughly Marxist-Leninist entity to lead the “new democracy” that was being formed in the eastern zone.144
The second line of Stalin’s efforts was to keep hopes alive to unite all of Germany in the German People’s Congress, which had been created in 1947 in the Soviet zone to develop the communist-dominated anti-fascist front into an all-German organization. At the Peoples’ Congress second meeting in Berlin in March 1948, the People’s German Council (Deutscher Volksrat) was proposed to pursue all-German elections and draw up a constitution for all of Germany. The idea of the People’s Council was to appeal to German national feeling and to use the issue of German unity to disrupt the Western Allies’ plans to form a separate West German state. At the beginning of May 1949, Stalin urged the People’s Council to insist on a unified state at the Foreign Ministers’ Conference to take place in Paris later in the month. To no avail. The Western Allies and the West Germans would not halt their plans, and the Soviet Union rejected the invitation at the Paris Conference to join their zone to the new West German entity, which was founded on May 23. The successful founding of the West German state meant that the German National Council simply became the vehicle by which the new German Democratic Republic was created on October 7, 1949, and the division of Germany completed.145
The Berlin blockade turned the western sectors of the city into West Berlin, and the vast majority of their population into friends and defenders of the West. As Reuter correctly put it in a parting word of thanks to General Clay, “The common experience of these months has made us more closely tied to your people, and your people more closely tied to us.”146 It also hardened the opposition of the West to Soviet entreaties for negotiations about Germany and elevated suspicions in the West of Soviet intentions to the point where the United States found itself leading an effort to develop military resistance to counter them. The CIA correctly pointed out that the Soviet “hard” policy in Berlin “has been driving the Western Germans more firmly into the Western camp” and that the prospects of communists gaining serious strength in western Germany were highly reduced.147 On January 14, 1949, the American State Department made public its plans for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with a combined command that would be comprised of the United States and Canada, as well as the members of the West European (Brussels) Union, plus Portugal, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. “Russia’s toughness and truculence in the Berlin matter,” Truman wrote, “had led many Europeans to realize the need for closer military assistance ties among the western nations, and this led to discussions which eventually resulted in the establishment of NATO. Berlin had been a lesson to us all.”148
West Berlin remained a constant irritant for the East Germans and the Soviets. It served as a major center for American spying in Berlin and the eastern bloc. The Soviets seemed as concerned about the perpetuation of that outpost for espionage as the CIA had been about losing it.149 More importantly, West Berlin’s very existence in the middle of the Soviet zone, and later the German Democratic Republic, served as an example of a functioning West German democratic society and economy that undermined the negative propaganda about western Germany that was incessantly disseminated in the East. The blockade and its outcome also meant that until the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989, there would be further Berlin crises that would threaten the stability of the international system.