The next day all hell almost did break loose. When another group of Americans was stopped at Checkpoint Charlie, Clay came to the rescue with a phalanx of ten M-48 tanks. As might have been predicted, the Soviets responded in kind. Soon the M-48s stood muzzle to muzzle with Russian tanks, the first time in history that American and Soviet armor had ever confronted each other in anger. The tanks on both sides were fully loaded, ready to fire. The American commander on the spot worried that “a nervous soldier might accidentally discharge his weapon,” or some tanker might “step accidentally on his accelerator leading to a runaway tank.” After seventeen hours, while rumors circulated the globe that Berlin was about to become the flash point for World War III, word came from the Russian command to pull back. It seems that Kennedy, without telling Clay, had called on the Russians to remove their tanks in exchange for future “flexibility” on Berlin. Knowing that with Clay on the scene it would have been hard for the Americans to withdraw first, Khrushchev gave them a graceful way out.
Dean Rusk later dismissed this contretemps as “the silly confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie brought on by the macho inclinations of General Clay.” The gesture was certainly macho, but hardly without danger. Had one of those tanks opened fire, the other side would undoubtedly have fired back, and the wartime partners of yesteryear, who sixteen years before had embraced at the Elbe, would have found themselves in a slug-out on the Spree. The next step might well have been all-out war.
The Quarantined City
Instead of bringing war, the Berlin Wall helped to keep the Gold War cold. After it went up, the level of political tension in Europe went down. Berlin, which had been the chief site of contention between East and West since the end of World War II, became something of a backwater in the continuing standoff. The two halves of the divided city went their separate ways with considerably less world attention focused on them.
Although East Berlin did not have a wall around it, it too was isolated in important respects, for it was the capital of a country that (at least early on) the Western nations did not recognize, and its masters were determined to keep it as ideologically distinct from the West as possible. During the first two years after the Wall went up, West Berliners were barred from entering East Berlin altogether. Then, just before Christmas 1963, a complicated arrangement was instituted whereby West Berliners could secure passes for brief visits to East Berlin during the holiday season. As of September 1964 West Berliners could visit their relatives five times during the year. In the immediate post-Wall years East Berliners were allowed to go to the West only on official business. Eventually, pensioners were permitted to move West whenever they wished, since this conveniently shifted the burden of supporting them from the GDR to the Federal Republic.
Because the Berlin Wall removed the possibility of disgruntled GDR citizens fleeing en masse to the West, the Ulbricht government could more resolutely impose its vision of socialist progress on the remaining population. In 1963 the government introduced a “New Economic System of Planning and Leadership.” In addition to tightening economic centralization across the board, the plan foresaw extensive development in the field of robotics, which Ulbricht believed was the wave of the future. The SED government promised that the GDR would soon surpass the West in this domain, and in a futile effort to do so it cut spending on housing and consumer-goods production, which had been low to begin with. The money saved on basic consumer necessities, however, turned out to be insufficient to fund the drive for technological supremacy. Ulbricht was forced to go cap in hand to the Soviets for loans. This was not what the Russians had had in mind when they established their East German satellite.
Although East Germany’s rulers no longer had to worry that the inadequacies of their system might generate a vast exodus, they feared that frustration with existing conditions might spark popular resistance, even a new version of the 1953 uprising. To nip any “subversion” in the bud, they expanded the size and operational scope of the Stasi. A great deal of time and effort was spent on identifying and punishing GDR citizens who violated the government’s ban on contacts with the West. Simply tuning in to Western radio or television was a criminal offense. To ferret out offenders, the Stasi encouraged schoolchildren to inform their teachers about the programs that their parents received at home. Virtually every workplace had its Stasi spies, as did most cultural organizations, sports clubs, and church groups. The East German churches were under especially close supervision because they were considered potential sources of opposition. The information collected by the Stasi agents and their army of “informal collaborators” became so voluminous that the floors of the agency’s headquarters on East Berlin’s Normannenstrasse had to be reinforced to hold all the files. What could not be adequately reinforced was the human capacity for making sense of this voluminous data. By recording the tiniest details in the daily lives of millions of people, the Stasi soon began to drown in its own “intelligence.”
The Stasi headquarters in East Berlin’s Normannenstrasse, photographed in 1990
By the end of 1961, East Germany had more than 10,000 political prisoners in its prisons. Keeping so many “subversives” behind bars, like the process of ferreting them out, was very expensive. It soon occurred to the Stasi leaders that some of these costs might be defrayed by “selling off selected political prisoners to the Federal Republic. The inspiration for this idea was provided by the exchange of the U-2 spy Francis Gary Powers for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in early 1961. The famous exchange took place at the Glienicke Bridge, which connected West Berlin to Potsdam. If the West was willing to barter for spies, might not Bonn be willing to “buy out” some of the political prisoners held in East German jails?
To feel out the West Germans on this proposition, the Stasi called on the services of Wolfgang Vogel, a lawyer who had helped with the Abel-Powers exchange. Immaculately dressed and highly pragmatic, Vogel could just as easily have worked in the West (though he probably would not have made as much money). In early 1963 Vogel began negotiating with West Germany’s minister for All-German Affairs, Rainer Barzel, regarding details of the transfers. Although the Stasi was eager to unload some of its prisoners, Vogel was instructed to obtain as high a price as possible for each “sale.” The lawyer claimed that the prisoners sent to the West represented a financial loss to the GDR because of the costs invested in their education. “The training of a doctor costs the state 150,000 marks,” he declared. Eventually a figure was agreed upon, and in September 1963 eight prisoners were shipped west at a total cost to the West German taxpayers of DM 340,000. Over the next twenty-five years, thousands more would follow. These people did indeed represent a “loss” to the GDR in terms of talent, but their expulsion was also an effective means of ensuring political tranquillity at home. The fact that East Germany could use West Germany as a dumping ground for its dissidents was one of the reasons that East Berlin remained largely quiescent well after other Eastern European capitals became hotbeds of anti-Communist protest.