Permission to translate Ulbricht’s intentions into reality came in the wake of various signals from the Western Allies that they would not go to war to prevent East Germany from sealing its border in Berlin. In a speech on July 25 President Kennedy promised that the United States would do all in its power to protect its position in West Berlin, but he pointedly said nothing about guaranteeing free access between East and West Berlin. In private, as we know, he had expressed sympathy for Khrushchev’s predicament in Berlin, musing that a border-closure might be a reasonable solution. Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared in a speech on July 30: “I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their borders, which I believe they have every right to do.” Even with what they took to be a green light from the West, however, the Warsaw Pact leaders were cautious when they gave Ulbricht his go-ahead on August 5: they merely authorized a wire fence, which might become a wall only if the West made no move to knock it down. As an expression of gratitude to Khrushchev for orchestrating this decision, Ulbricht ordered that Stalin’s name be removed from East Berlin’s showcase-of-socialism boulevard, the Stalinallee, which now became Karl-Marx-Allee. A bronze statue of Stalin that had previously stood on the avenue was broken up and carted away.
Erich Honecker (middle) with Willi Stoph (left), 1984
Despite many rumors that East Germany and the USSR might undertake drastic measures to stop the flow of refugees fleeing through Berlin, Berliners reacted with stunned disbelief to the events of August 13. Most expected the Western powers to eliminate the offending obstacle immediately, with tanks if necessary. In the meantime, because telephone service between East and West had been suspended, people streamed in their thousands to the border in hopes of catching sight of friends and relatives from whom they had been abruptly cut off. Over the din of post-hole digging they yelled greetings and brave words of encouragement. Tearful lovers waved handkerchiefs and blew kisses across the wire. But it wasn’t just greetings and longing looks that were exchanged; some shouted insults and threw stones at the fence-builders.
Willy Brandt was on a campaign trip in West Germany, running as the SPD’s candidate for the chancellorship in the upcoming Bundestag elections, when he got the news of what was happening in Berlin. He immediately flew to Tempelhof and rushed to the Potsdamer Platz. As he examined the emerging barrier, one of his aides, Heinrich Albertz, commented: “They are cutting up a city, cutting into living flesh without anesthesia.” Although Brandt felt the incision as if it were on his own body, his first concern was to calm the West Berliners. The mayor worried that any attacks on the fence from the western side would give the Soviets a pretext for marching into West Berlin.
Brandt’s opponent in the impending elections, Chancellor Adenauer, was considerably less distraught over the events in Berlin. In his view, damming the incoming flood of East Germans, whom he saw as a horde of probable SPD supporters, was hardly a cause for deep distress. As a gesture of solidarity with the city, his aides urged him to fly immediately to Berlin, but having never felt any love for that “pagan” place, Adenauer demurred. After trying to ascertain from the Western powers how they intended to respond, he issued a formal statement containing an appeal for calm: “The need of the moment is to meet this challenge from the East with firmness, but also with deliberation. Nothing should be undertaken that would complicate the situation without improving it.”
Adenauer need not have worried that the Western Allies would adopt any precipitous or provocative measures. The leaders of Britain, France, and America saw no reason for alarm in the Soviet/East German action, so long as Western rights in Berlin were not challenged. British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who was hunting in the north of England when the fence went up, refused to hurry back to London to deal with the situation. Charles de Gaulle, weekending at his country house at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, likewise elected not to return to his capital; the Berlin problem, he felt, could be addressed in the following week. President Kennedy, sailing off Hyannis Port, was not even notified of the events in Berlin until seventeen hours after the action had commenced. “How come we didn’t know anything about this?” he asked. (In fact, American intelligence operatives did know that something was in the works, but they did not know precisely what would be done, or when.) Upon being assured by Secretary of State Dean Rusk that the Soviets and East Germans were not doing anything to obstruct Allied access to West Berlin, Kennedy approved a statement saying that the “violations of existing agreements will be the subject of vigorous protest through appropriate channels.” In the meantime, he instructed Rusk to go as planned to a Yankees-Senators baseball game that afternoon. Later, he explained his sangfroid to his aides: “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin? There shouldn’t be any need of a wall if he occupied the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” As for the some 17 million East Germans who now remained stuck behind that wall, tough luck for them. They had had, Kennedy noted, fifteen years “to get out of their jail.”
The West’s placid response to the events of August 13 convinced Ulbricht and Honecker that they could begin transforming their wire fence into a concrete wall. On August 15, at the Ackerstrasse, cranes lowered a line of prefabricated concrete blocks into place, five meters to the east of the sector border. These were the first of thousands of blocks that would make up the initial Berlin Wall, which stood about six feet high in most places and ran in a zigzag fashion for twenty-seven miles between the two halves of the city. Another seventy miles of wall separated West Berlin from GDR territory to the north, west, and south.
Ambitious though it was, this structure was a backyard fence compared to the final Berlin Wall that evolved in the 1970s and 1980s—a white concrete monolith some thirteen feet high and capped with a rounded top to thwart the use of grappling hooks. Along much of its eastern side ran a broad “death strip” of raked ground enclosed by a smaller wall or electrified wire fence; anyone caught in this no-man’s-land was likely to be fired at by guards posted in watchtowers spaced at regular intervals along the border. At night, spotlights moved across the landscape, lending it a surreal touch. People commonly observed that there was something incongruously “medieval” about the Berlin Wall, but there was nothing medieval about its technology.
As West Berliners watched Ulbricht’s barbed wire fence mutate into a concrete wall, they began to get unruly, combining their curses against the East with jeers aimed at the do-nothing West. At a rally outside the Schöneberg Rathaus people hoisted signs saying “Betrayed by the West” and “Where Are the Protective Powers?” Berlin schoolchildren sent Kennedy a black umbrella, reminiscent of the one Neville Chamberlain had carried when he sold out the Czechs at the Munich Conference in 1938. More dangerously, a group of West Germans attacked the Soviet War Memorial that lay in the British sector just to the west of the Brandenburg Gate; the small contingent of Russian guards at the site might have been killed had not British troops intervened and dispersed the attackers.
Willy Brandt did not approve of attacks against Soviets in West Berlin, but he too was livid over the tepid Western response. Originally he had harbored a high regard for Kennedy, with whom he shared a ribald sense of humor and a predatory attitude toward beautiful women, but he now wondered if his admiration was not misplaced. His deep disappointment with Germany’s Western Allies in this time of testing shaped the rest of his political career, starting him on a search for accommodation with the East that would culminate in his Ostpolitik of the 1970s. For the moment, however, he could not afford to alienate his Western partners, especially the Americans. Hence he dashed off a private letter to Kennedy, warning that West Berliners might flee the city in droves unless the Allies made some significant gesture of support. He recommended reinforcing the Allied garrisons in the city.