The troubles had begun in the spring. A fire had started at a large GSFG (Group of Soviet Forces-Germany) storage area near the Saale rail yard. The local commander was convinced he could bring the fire under control and did not evacuate local civilian factories or the local elementary school. It was a costly mistake. In the afternoon, the fire reached the missile and ammunition reserves, setting off a huge explosion, which devastated several nearby factories and part of the school. Casualties were made worse by a large cloud of noxious gas. The Soviets claimed the cloud was created by dispersal of rocket propellant chemicals. Local residents were convinced it was from some sort of chemical weapons. Total casualties were 405 killed and nearly three times as many injured.
What ignited the troubles was the decision by the German Communist party to allow newspaper and television to run the story instead of suppressing it per usual policy. They realized that the underground samizdat press would cover it anyway, and the West German television stations as well. Running the story would give the party a bit of badly needed credibility with an audience weary of the numbing socialist press. The German Democratic Republic was coming down with a bad case of the "Polish disease" that summer, on the fortieth anniversary of the East Berlin riots of 1953.
The story captured nationwide attention and led to a series of protest marches outside the Saale kaserne, led by a coalition of unofficial antiregime groups.[4]
It is doubtful that the Soviets could have done much to defuse the situation. Even had they hung the offending officers at the gate of the garrison, the local citizenry wouldn't have been much placated. German patience had finally worn too thin. All spring, they had been subjected to the usual obsequious television and radio programs about the valiant Soviet soldiers protecting freedom-loving mankind during the Great Patriotic War. Heroes of Kursk! Heroes of Stalingrad! Liberators of Germany! For nearly fifty years, East Germany had been one big Soviet military camp, with German ambitions and dreams suppressed and ridiculed by the Russians and their Communist party puppets. The Germans wanted the Soviets out, and for that matter they wouldn't be unhappy to see the Americans go from the Federal Republic next door. They were sick of hearing of the threat from NATO, the military mischief of the Bundeswehr (the West German Army), and the heinous machinations of American politicians. After fifty years, they wanted to forget about World War II, and they wanted the Russians and Americans to forget about it too. The Germans were ashamed of having acted so passively for the past decades. It was finally a time for action.
No one expected what happened. The Americans had long dismissed the East Germans as the most passive of the Warsaw Pact states. The German economy was relatively prosperous. The Germans had long accepted the sacrifice of political freedom and honor for well-stocked shops. At least they were better off than the Poles and the Czechs, who usually had neither. The East German Army was rated by NATO analysts as the best trained and best motivated of the Warsaw Pact armies. The Soviet military shared this opinion. The East German NVA (National Peoples Army) was the only Warsaw Pact army to figure in Soviet war operations plans. Soviet plans assumed that the Germans would fight in any direct confrontation with NATO. The Poles and the Czechs would be expected to fight, but in peripheral theaters like Denmark or Austria. What happened in the summer had shattered these preconceptions.
The demonstrations and public meetings spread through East Germany. The Wildner regime responded in the reflexive socialist fashion, using police and tear gas. This infuriated most East Germans, who had been promised a more humane regime as part of recent reforms. It was not the escalating scale of the demonstrations that worried the Soviets; it was something more serious. In early June, a bomb was set off in a restaurant in Dresden frequented by Soviet officers. Sixteen officers were killed and nearly fifty more injured. For the first time since the Soviet occupation of Central Europe in 1945, the Soviets were facing a serious terrorist threat in Central Europe. A group calling itself the National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD) claimed responsibility. The name of the group was particularly insulting; it was the same as the organization of German prisoners of war formed by the Soviets in 1943, which formed the basis of the communist East German state. Neither the Poles nor the Czechs had ever resorted to violence during the disturbances there. The Soviets began suspecting outside agitators, namely West Germans. Bombings and shootings of Soviet officials and soldiers continued through June, and Soviet troops were confined to their base areas. In two separate acts of sabotage, two large ammunition dumps exploded on 21 June. German police arrested at least seven members of the group, and found that two were West German citizens who had been providing arms and explosives to the NKFD terrorists through hideouts in West Berlin. On 27 June, the commander of the 2d Guards Tank Army and his chauffeur were ambushed outside of Fuerstenberg.
The East German militia proved incapable of counteracting the rising violence. General Rostislav Belov, at GSFG headquarters in Zonsen-Wunstorf, called in his staff people to begin planning a martial law crack-down patterned on the successful Polish operation a decade earlier. They were unprepared for the German response. Their "colleagues" in the East German Army stated categorically that they doubted the army would be any more effective than the police. The army had just inducted the usual semiannual crop of draftees, many of whom weeks earlier had been on
the protest lines themselves. Calling out the troops might backfire. They might support the protestors and cause a tragic escalation in the civil violence. After consulting with a high-ranking delegation from the Politburo in Moscow, the GSFG commander informed his colleague in the East German Army that they would be expected to "perform their socialist mission" or the Soviets would be obliged to call in Czech and Polish troops to assist in suppressing civil disturbances. The thought of Polish or Czech troops being used in East Germany infuriated the German officers even further.
The GSFG staff had been surprised by the German Army's response. The East German Army was the one Warsaw Pact army most thoroughly integrated into the Soviet command structure. But the close contact between the two forces came at a price. The Germans were utterly contemptuous of their Soviet counterparts. The East Germans viewed themselves as real soldiers, and the Soviets as country bumpkins. They were appalled by the slovenly Soviet maintenance practices, the disgusting food, and the ignorance and backwardness of the common soldiers. The Germans boasted that they spoke better Russian than a lot of the Soviet Central Asian troops!
The East German soldiers were well educated, listened regularly to West German television, and had a less provincial view of the world outside the bloc than average Soviet troops. Few of the young German soldiers enjoyed soldiering, but they took pride in a job well done. This was an attitude alien to most of the Soviet troops. The tragic fire at Saale was symptomatic of the Soviet forces' casual attitude toward safety. The Soviet Ground Forces recruited mainly out of the rural areas. Any Russian kid with brains got a posting with the Air Force, Navy, or some technical branch. Serving with the motor rifle troops or tanks was two years of backbreaking work, poor food, humiliation, and confinement. As a result, there were a lot of non-Slavic ethnic troops in the ground forces, more than 40 percent. Thousands of miles from home, with no chance for leave in the local towns, they were a sorry bunch.
Like the community around them, the young German troops were fed up with the Soviet presence in their country. They quickly grew tired of the endless lectures about maintaining fraternal relations with their brothers-in-arms, the Soviets. The dim German view of the Russians was exacerbated by the sheer number of Soviet troops in Germany. In Poland, Soviet troops were hardly ever seen in the major city, only in a few towns in the western provinces. Even in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet presence was confined to a few regions. But in Germany, it was hard to escape the thousands of kasernes and bases of the GSFG.
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