It all looked well on paper. Yet Azov was not entirely certain. Brigadier Trepovitch had reported a stiffening Western attitude at the Kommandatura. Moreover, the Western military government personnel had too much experience in open elections to fall for trickery. The Russian attempt to have different-colored ballots for each party failed.
The West insisted Trepovitch submit the list of eligible voters and that he use the stamping of ration books to assure a single ballot to a single voter.
British, French, and American officials would be on hand at every polling station in the Russian Sector.... It would be damned hard to rig.
“These bourgeois gestures do not disturb me,” Wöhlman said.
While Wöhlman exuded confidence, Heinrich Hirsch wondered. He had known Wöhlmans, Azovs, Schatzes, Ecks all his life. At a certain point their ability to have individual thought processes stopped, and their minds were completely dominated by party thinking. They functioned without a shred of anger, curiosity, or protest in their being. They were unable to have concepts of right or wrong.
Men who had no anger, curiosity, or protest in themselves could not understand how it could exist in other people.
Hirsch had never entirely lost these traits despite his training. He feared that their efforts had been a deception so transparent that the people of Berlin were going to rally behind Falkenstein in a display of defiance.
Azov was looking at Hirsch. The younger man had been under suspicion, but he possessed a mind far keener that Wöhlman’s.
“What is your opinion, Comrade Hirsch?”
“I cannot completely share Comrade Wöhlman’s confidence. We should win in a stampede. Yet, some final dramatic gesture is called for on the eve of the election.”
“But we have spent millions of rubles to bring in food and coal.”
That was what annoyed Hirsch. In the coal negotiations with the British they were forced to stick to the line that the Soviet Union could not force the Poles to give up Silesian coal. When Azov wanted coal as a campaign gesture, Polish sovereignty did not exist.
Wasn’t this last-minute flood of food rather obvious when it was known the Americans had maintained the ration for over a year? And now they had RIAS to give their story. Had they all underestimated RIAS?
“Comrades,” Hirsch said, “I believe I have the type of message the Berliners will understand.”
Two days before the election, Heinrich Hirsch’s plan unfolded. The Soviet Union controlled the flow of electricity to the Western Sectors.
At darkness, the people of the Steglitz Borough discovered they had no electricity.
Twenty minutes later the lights went out in the French boroughs of Wedding and Reinickendorf.
An hour later the central British boroughs of Tiergarten and Charlottenburg were plunged into darkness.
Alternating borough by borough, the lights went out in a wordless bit of last-minute electioneering. Without Russian electricity there would be no industry, transportation, sewage disposal, communication, schools, or hospitals.
The day of October 20 in the year of 1946 was a misery of cold and drizzle. For the first time in a decade Berliners went to the polls. The outpour of people brought mile-long lines of ragged humanity huddling for warmth against the first real bites of winter. Ballot boxes were crammed to elect the new Assembly of 130 members.
At dawn of the next day, Berlin was awakened by a now familiar voice:
“This is RIAS calling. The results of yesterday’s election is as follows. The Democratic Party, 1,015,000 ballots giving them sixty-three Assembly seats with 49 per cent of the vote.
“The Christian Party was second with over 460,000 ballots, winning twenty-nine Assembly seats and receiving 22 per cent of the vote.
“Third, the Communists under the name of People’s Proletariat received 400,000 ballots, twenty-six Assembly seats and 19 per cent of the vote.
“The Conservative Party won the balance of twelve seats with 195,000 ballots constituting 9 per cent of the vote.
“The free parties have swept the election with a staggering combination of 81 per cent.”
Chapter Twenty-one
THE STINGING DEFEAT AT the polls presented a new tactical problem to V. V. Azov. He realized the new Berlin Assembly would never elect a Communist Oberburgermeister and so he threw their strength to retaining the old Democrat Berthold Hollweg, whom they could control.
The Communist Heinz Eck was unable to attain to higher than second deputy mayor.
In the Kommandatura a new wrinkle was added as Nikolai Trepovitch ordered investigations into the backgrounds of a great number of free party assemblymen for “suspected Nazi pasts.” He was thus able to keep them from taking their office.
Although the West grew passive again after the election, the first open break between America and the Soviet Union had taken place that wild autumn of 1946.
The Berliners were certain that the few gestures of the West were in the nature of face-saving. They remained cool to each other.
Repercussions of the election continued to be felt throughout all facets of the society. At the university a rumble grew and grew.
Heidi Fritag and Matthias Schindler shared the common heritage of having parents murdered by the Nazis.
Heidi was half Jewish, her father once a professor at the university. Except for the “taint” in her ancestry, the intense girl was a physical personification of Hitler’s Aryan dream; tall, full-busted, blond. When her father was taken away, Heidi and her mother lived in seclusion in that low caste of being daughter and wife of a Jew.
Matthias Schindler’s story was one of pure horror. His father had been a Democratic Party leader in Brandenburg. He was sent to Dachau early in the regime as a political undesirable; his mother died shortly thereafter. Matthias was placed in a series of work camps for children of political prisoners and Jews. The end of the war found him having survived a dozen camps and working as a slave laborer of the Krupp Industries and the death of his father confirmed.
The university had a tradition sweeping back a century and a half with such honored names as Humboldt and Niebuhr and the Brothers Grimm. War had ravaged many of the main buildings on the Unter Den Linden.
Heinrich Hirsch re-established the university in the Russian Sector, appointed a Communist rector, filled the faculty with hand-picked teachers, texts, and curriculum to convert it into a school of Marxism.
All the new students were carefully screened. Both Heidi Fritag and Matthias Schindler were clean of Nazi taint and thought to be pro-Russian.
The returning professors and many of the students did not fit neatly into Hirsch’s vision of the institution. They began to complain to the Americans for a liberalization of studies.
In the autumn of 1945 American policy had been to cooperate with the Russians at any price. Neal Hazzard brought up the question of the university at the Kommandatura, taking the view that it should be under four-power control.
Trepovitch made one of his unmovable stands. Hazzard let the matter die. The Russian position was that the university was physically in the Russian Sector and of no interest to the West.
During 1946 Hirsch consolidated his grip. Every political, historical, and philosophical study was derived from a base of Lenin and Marx. All student clubs were under domination of young Communists on the campus. Likewise, the faculty organization was run by Communist professors.
Both the students and faculty came under heavy pressure to join Communist activities. Often students were threatened with being expelled if they did not attend special lectures, join demonstrations, donate time to the Action Squads.
After the Berlin Assembly election of the fall of 1946, a number of Communists were taken out of the educational system in the Magistrat. A ground swell started among the students and non-Communist teachers for reforms.