Fearing the worst, the government banned any discussion of the protest in the state-run media, but RIAS in West Berlin gave a full account of the demonstration and call to action, without explicitly endorsing it. As it turned out, RIAS did not have to provide an endorsement. Despite cold rain and a suspension of public transport, thousands of workers began assembling at Strausberger Platz on the morning of June 17. Demonstrators gathered in other GDR cities and towns as well. All told, almost 400,000 workers threw in with the strike. The first—and, until 1989, the only—uprising against Communist rule in East Germany was about to begin.
East Berliners pelt a Russian tank with stones during the uprising of June 17, 1953
In East Berlin, which remained the center of the upheaval, the protesters began marching from the Stalinallee to the center of the city at about ten o’clock. Revealingly, they bore aloft one of the signs that the Soviet occupiers had erected on the border of their sector; it read, “End of the Democratic Sector.” As the demonstrators poured down Unter den Linden they sang workers’ songs and chanted anti-Ulbricht slogans. Some paused before the Soviet embassy to sing the strictly verboten German national hymn, which called for “unity, law, and freedom.” Even more provocatively, a gang of youths clambered atop the Brandenburg Gate, tore down the red flag that flew there, and shouted: “We want freedom, we want bread, we will beat all the Russians dead.” As the day wore on the crowds became increasingly unruly, smashing windows and overturning cars. Flushed with the confidence that mob action often brings, some of the demonstrators apparently believed that the “first socialist state on German soil” was about to come to an end.
But the GDR leaders were not about to concede defeat. On the previous evening Ulbricht had appealed to Moscow for help, and Beria flew immediately to Berlin to take command of the situation. While the Kremlin blamed Ulbricht for the crisis, it could not afford to let his government fall victim to popular insurrection. This might encourage similar uprisings elsewhere, perhaps even in the USSR itself. Beria therefore ordered the Soviet commandant in East Berlin, Major General Pavel Dibrova, to employ all necessary force to disperse the demonstrators. At noon dozens of T-34 tanks, the same models that had rumbled into Berlin in April 1945, began rolling through the city in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate and the Potsdamer Platz. When a few would-be East German Davids tried to stop the armored Soviet Goliaths by throwing stones at them, the tanks opened fire, killing several courageous but foolhardy young men. Upon reaching the sector border the tanks took up positions to block egress to West Berlin, but did not fire directly into the crowds. At this point the East German Volkspolizei appeared in force and began beating demonstrators with clubs, even shooting people in the back as they tried to flee. (Most observers noted that it was the German police, not the Russians, who were most anxious to draw blood.) After a few hours it was all over. When night fell the only people remaining in the streets were policemen enforcing a strict curfew and martial law. In other East German cities, too, the uprising had been crushed almost before it began.
If one of the weaknesses of the uprising was a lack of clear or unified goals, another was an absence of support from the country’s intelligentsia. A few artists and academics joined in the protest, but most preferred to sit on the sidelines, and some even cheered on the regime. Among the latter faction was East Germany’s most prominent writer, Bertolt Brecht. When the protest began he dashed off letters of support to the authorities, including one to Ulbricht stating: “Valued Comrade Ulbricht, history will pay its respects to the revolutionary importance of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Large-scale discussions with the masses on the subject of the tempo at which socialism is being built would lead to recognition . . . and consolidation of socialist achievements. I need to express to you at this moment my allegiance with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.” As the Russian tanks rumbled into position, Brecht watched from the Brandenburg Gate, waving to the soldiers. During the shooting he was back at the Berliner Ensemble, blaming the uprising on “doubtful elements” from the West. Four days later Ulbricht published Brecht’s letter of support, leaving out his advice to negotiate with the workers. This irritated the dramatist, for it was certain to damage his reputation in the West, but he said nothing in public against Comrade Ulbricht. Rather, he privately vented his spleen in a poem written in response to a broadcast from the secretary of the GDR Writers Union admonishing the nation’s workers to win back the confidence of their government. The Brecht verse reads:
After the uprising of June 17
the secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
In which it was said that the people
Had lost the government’s confidence
Which it would only be able to regain
By redoubling its efforts. In that case, would it
Not be simpler if the government dissolved the people
And elected another?
It would have been nobler had Brecht published this now-famous poem in his lifetime. But in reality it was not so much the GDR government that had disappointed the dramatist, but the East German workers themselves. As he sadly told his friend Hermann Henselmann after listening to some workers complain about their lot: “Hermann, I’ve seen the true face of the German working class.”
Two hundred and sixty-seven people died across East Germany in the June 1953 uprising, twenty-one of them in East Berlin; 4,493 GDR citizens were arrested, most of them workers. Following a series of kangaroo trials, some 200 people were executed, and another 1,400 received life sentences. The number of those disappearing into the East German gulag might have been higher had not thousands of East Germans decided that this was the opportune moment to disappear into West Germany via Berlin.
Although the Soviets and the East German government were quick to dismiss the June 1953 uprising as a “fascist putsch” orchestrated by the West, the affair was profoundly embarrassing to the Communist leaders, especially to those of the GDR. The East German system had been shown to be deeply unpopular with its own working class, the very population it was supposed to benefit. Nonetheless, the Ulbricht regime did not emerge weakened from the uprising, but strengthened. Beria still wanted to get rid of the SED chief, but to do so now would look like a concession to the demonstrators. In any event, Beria’s own days as a power broker were numbered, for during his emergency trip to Berlin his enemies at home, led by Khrushchev, had plotted his ouster. On June 26 he was stripped of his powers and arrested. In a political trial much like the ones he had once orchestrated for Stalin he was accused of all manner of offenses, from trying to sabotage the Soviet atomic bomb project to raping little girls. Sentenced to life in prison, he was murdered by his guards before he could serve much time. On July 7 Ulbricht was briefed in Moscow on Beria’s purge. Upon returning to Berlin he immediately purged Zaisser and Herrnstadt, the men who would probably have taken his place had Beria stayed in power in Russia.
Contrary to East German accusations that agents provocateurs from the West had fomented the June uprising, Western authorities had done nothing to abet it beyond broadcasting news of the demonstration on June 16. American, British, and French troops in West Berlin stood by and watched as the Russians, still technically their allies in the former Reich capital, helped the East German police beat down the protesters. What the Western Allies seemed to be saying was that the Soviets and GDR authorities had carte blanche in East Berlin, so long as they did not try to push the Western powers out of West Berlin. It was a message that the Soviets, the GDR government, and most of all the East German people, would not soon forget.