The East German Workers’ Uprising of June 17, 1953
Worried by the growing attraction of West Berlin, the East German government started taking measures to curtail contacts between the two halves of the city. In early 1952 they cut the telephone links with the West, and a year later they suspended bus and tram service into West Berlin. Now the only public transport between East and West were the U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines. However, the fact that one could still move at all across the ideological divide in Berlin made the city an anomaly in Germany after May 26, 1952, for on that date the GDR government barricaded its border with West Germany. From this point on the inner-German border became one of Cold War Europe’s most menacing frontiers—an 858-mile death-strip of barbed wire fences, control points, watchtowers, mines, and, later, automatic shooting devices. East German citizens living near the border who were considered by their government to be “a risk to the antifascistic, democratic order” were summarily expelled from their homes.
Ulbricht’s efforts to isolate the GDR and East Berlin further undermined an economy already burdened by agricultural collectivization, nationalization of industry, neglect of consumer goods, unrealistic productivity quotas, and the huge costs of building up a quasi army, the Kasernierte Volkspolizei. Living standards for the “toilers” plummeted while taxes and other obligations to the state became more onerous. As a result, more and more East Germans chose to move west, which after May 1952 could be accomplished only through Berlin. In the second half of 1952, 48,831 GDR citizens went west; in the first quarter of 1953, the figure rose to 84,034, including 1,836 members of the SED. A high percentage of the refugees were young and well-educated, the kind of people that no state can afford to lose. One would have thought that this situation called for a relaxation of the government’s efforts to force the economy toward full communism through increased collectivization and higher production quotas, but Ulbricht and Grotewohl believed it necessary to raise the productivity “norms” for industrial and construction workers. Insisting that the most pressing problem of the hour was “to overcome the low work norms,” the government decreed on May 28, 1953, a productivity increase of at least 10 percent in state-run operations.
The GDR rulers adopted this policy without backing from Moscow, which in the wake of Stalin’s death was reassessing the advisability of trying to impose a fully socialized economy on East Germany. Worried that the East German state was failing as a countermodel to the West, Stalin’s successors, most notably Minister for State Security Lavrenti Beria, proposed a “New Course” for the GDR that called for a suspension of agricultural collectivization and forcefed industrialization. It might seem odd that Beria should have advocated this softer line, for as head of the dreaded NKVD (Soviet secret political police) he had been Stalin’s chief hatchet man, helping the Great Leader to purge countless enemies, real and imagined. Yet he was also a realist with a full appreciation for the damage that Stalin’s policies had done, not least in East Germany. Because Ulbricht was so closely identified with the hard line, he seemed unlikely to be willing to abandon it. Beria thus began thinking about replacing the SED chief with one of the latter’s critics in the East German Politbüro, either Wilhelm Zaisser (minister for state security), or Rudolf Herrnstadt (editor of Das Neue Deutschland). In early June Beria ordered Vladimir Semyonov, Soviet Russia’s commissioner for German affairs, to instruct Ulbricht to reverse his economic policy or face the consequences.
Ulbricht stood his ground. Aware that his enemies were plotting against him both in Moscow and Berlin, the SED chief coupled his own survival with resisting Beria’s New Course. On June 16, 1953, his government announced another 25 percent increase in work norms, along with a warning that workers who failed to meet state quotas could expect pay cuts of up to 35 percent. Stalin might be dead in Moscow, but his German alter ego was alive and well in East Berlin.
Just as alive, however, was a strong current of resentment among the chief victims of Ulbricht’s policies, the workers of East Germany. The frustration had been building for some time. On June 13, 1953, during a cruise on the Spree, a group of construction workers decided to call a protest strike. At about nine o’clock in the morning on June 16 workers at the Stalinallee, East Berlin’s prestige construction project, threw down their tools and began marching toward the House of Ministries (Göring’s former Luftwaffe headquarters) in the Leipziger Strasse. On the way they picked up hundreds more demonstrators from other construction sites and factories. In addition to carrying banners reading “We Demand a Lowering of Norms,” some of the marchers called for free elections and the resignation of the current government. “Goatee [Ulbricht], belly [Pieck], and glasses [Grotewohl] are not the will of the masses!” they screamed. Upon arriving at their destination they shouted for goatee and glasses to come out and face the workers of the “workers’ state.”
Ulbricht and Grotewohl had plenty of experience talking to workers, but none talking with them. Moreover, demonstrations that were not organized by the state were beyond their ken. In their eyes, this was revolution, or, more accurately, counterrevolution, undoubtedly instigated by West Germany. Rather than appear before the workers, they cowered in the basement of the House of Ministries, then slipped quietly out a side door. Heinz Brandt, the SED’s secretary for agitation and propaganda, was sent out to tell the people that, for the time being, the norm increases would be rescinded.
The gesture came too late. Sensing that they had the government on the run, leaders of the demonstration called for a general strike to begin the following morning. People were instructed to assemble at Strausberger Platz on the Stalinallee. There was, however, no unified or coherent understanding as to what the strike would yield: some simply wanted economic reforms, others apparently hoped for the ouster of Ulbricht and company, while still others seem to have envisaged the end of Communist rule and the reunification of Germany. As the protesters finally left the Ministries building on the night of June 16, no one was certain whether there would be a strike at all on the following day.