The key phrase which could best serve to depict conditions in the Soviet Zone of Germany and fully convey its prevailing political atmosphere to Western observers is that of a reluctant satellite.
Dimensions of resistance by a satellite people are not subject to easy or convenient measurement. Recurring food shortages, inadequate housing, a repressive police apparatus, and a set of foreign-trained and imposed government officials are essential clinical symptoms. Yet in the case of East Germany, the three most signally important criteria emerge in the patterns of a great popular rebellion, the crowding of political prisons throughout the country, and a continuing mass flight of the populace.
The long shadow of the 17 June 1953 explosion is ever-present in East Germany. The outside world mistakenly refers to this climactic event as the East Berlin uprising. A demonstration by East Berlin workers against increased work quotas on 16 June erupted into an anti-Communist riot on the following day. This merely marked the beginning of a country-wide and truly popular uprising, however, which spread like wildfire from village to village and community to community until brutally extinguished by Soviet military force. Beyond demonstrating the depth of German hatred against the tyranny of Soviet occupation, the revolt had a far- reaching double significance in Eastern European politics. First of all, in terms of timing, it occurred a mere three and a half months after the death of Stalin, thus marking the first opportunity of a satellite people to express itself against the fury of Stalinism and indirectly to demand a much needed “thaw” or “relaxation of tensions.” Beyond its immediate impact, the 17 June explosion had a pro found long-term meaning for Iron Curtain Europe: as a true prototype it effectively set the pattern of popular mass-demonstrations and rebellion for the Polish and Hungarian revolts of 1956. The Western world would be most ungrateful if it did not recognize the heroic courage of the unarmed German workers laboring on Stalin boulevard, this perverse show-case of an Asian-imposed tyranny; the road of sacrificial rebellion leads directly from East Berlin to the rest of East Germany, to Warsaw, and eventually to Budapest.
On the whole, the day-by-day administration of justice has been forced to conform ever more closely to the prevailing Soviet concepts of law. There is no law which “stands above classes and states,” recently declared the much-feared Minister of Justice of the puppet government. The entire legal system is harnessed into the service of a Communist-dictated class struggle; justice is merely the will of the class in power translated into law. East Germany affords no room, in the words of an official statement, for the “forces of yesterday,” the capitalists, militarists, factory- or estate-owners, the Junker class (and one might add, the intellectuals), but must redesign its social and legal structure to provide protection for the peasants, workers, and the new soldiers.
Needless to say, such wholesale social engineering is bound to lead to arbitrary laws and unfairness in judicial administration. The West German press daily reports scandalously unfair incidents from the land of party- dictated justice. As an illustration, the case of an East Berlin secretary was described in a recent Federal Republic paper. This lady wanted to visit her father’s grave in a West Berlin cemetery. At the border control point, mistakenly assuming that she was a permanent resident of West Berlin, the people’s policeman spent hours checking her statements, her passport, and opening her purse, even investigated its contents. Finally, in her exasperation, the secretary angrily turned to the policeman and yanked her passport away with the remark: “Bandit.” On her return, she was arrested and although no one had witnessed the incident or heard the remark but the policeman, she was sentenced to four months in jail for slandering the government and causing a public disturbance.
The political police have been exceptionally busy since 1949 and overcrowded prisons have indicated both Communist severity and the depth of popular resentment. East German authorities deliberately turn the violence of the class struggle principle against the intellectuals as potentially the most significant group of resistance to the regime. Since 1945, 1,030 professors and high school teachers have been arrested. Forty have been executed or tortured to death and at least 46 have been in prison for 15 years. Other sources report that there are approximately 10,000 political prisoners in the zone’s prisons who were sentenced for their part in the uprising of 17 June 1953.
Each wave of repression brings a fresh crop of prisoners; as a result of the final and most ruthlessly administered agricultural collectivization drive of 1960, several thousand peasant farmers were arrested. In one long-term prison in Brandenburg, the number of inmates had increased to 2,300 in March 1960. Altogether, according to West German statistics, about 65 per cent of all prisoners in East Germany have been sentenced for political reasons, with sentences of ten years or more for the majority of them.
It is not inaccurate to state that while the reconstruction work of the past ten years has brought artificial prosperity, particularly of the industrial variety, to a few communities and groups of favored Communist officials, workers and peasants, it also has given the rest of East Germany the appearance of a single, enormous prison. Any weakening in the bureaucratic control from the top or any signal-change from Moscow in the direction of the slightest relaxation might well precipitate another mass prison-break for which the abortive, yet heroic, events of June 1953 have set such a lasting and valuable precedent.
The Bleeding Border
The “bleeding” or “god-forsaken” border splitting Germany and Europe in two is approximately 30 feet wide and 1,100 miles long. How can it successfully divide Germany from Germany? Ask the exasperated West Germans. They will tell you that from the Communist perspective it has proven to be a perfect boundary line: it can be subjected to total police control from one end to the other. In its arbitrary course the border meanders across farm lands separating farmhouse from fields, across villages and towns cutting employment centers from residential areas and occasionally even splitting houses so that the front door lies in East Germany while the back entrance is squarely in the Federal Republic. Rivers are split in two and’ watch- towers in the center of bridges warn the German population that there can be no point of contact between East and West.
The true tragedy here is not only one of economic impossibility and profound demographic dislocation, but the more fundamental fact that there is no historic tradition whatsoever for the existing boundary between East and West Germany. It is indeed an arbitrary line, without roots in sentiment, custom or domestic politics. “Far from revalidating the dusty maps of the old German states, it slices Prussia in half. With minor variations, it follows unhallowed inner boundaries of the Weimar Republic, which Hitler preserved as the delineation of administrative units,” observes Flora Lewis in a recent article in Foreign Affairs.
Although historically unjustified and of recent vintage, the border separating the two Germanies has rapidly developed a certain amount of permanence (in 1952, East German authorities constructed elaborate barbed wire and watchtower defenses from top to bottom, from the Priwall peninsula on the Baltic Sea to the village of Prex near the Czech border in the south) and has exerted an all- pervasive impact of creeping ideological paralysis. Despite stern official warnings on either side, it has created endless incidents of arrests, kidnapping and even murder of West German citizens by the East German military or border guards. In the Berlin area, it specifically led to numerous situations unpleasantly involving Allied military personnel stationed there; consequently on 1 August 1959, large border zone areas and all trains and subways were declared off-limits for Americans in Berlin.
In the long run, the unhappy Iron Curtain border has become the principal stimulant and catalytic agent in precipitating and keeping at a continuously high pitch the flow of refugees from East to West. This ceaseless exodus is both a cause and an effect of the diplomatically bleak and ideologically almost untenable relationship (or of its conspicuous absence) between the two sectors of a badly truncated German nation.
Refugees, Defectors, and Redefectors
Two distinctive features characterize the German refugee problem: it operates in a historic continuum and is not an accidental feature in the fluctuating political life of Germany. Furthermore, it responds elastically to totalitarian pressures from the East and clearly reflects the periodic tightening and relaxation taking place in Poland and in East Germany.
In the course of the past 15 years, two mass migrations have upset the already tenuous demographic balance of East-Central Europe. Between eight and nine million Germans were, first of all, expelled from the provinces newly awarded to Poland beyond the arbitrarily drawn Oder-Neisse line. Most of these early postwar refugees eventually found a place in West Germany, but in their steady flight from Poland through the Soviet Zone, these enormous population movements have disrupted not only local, but all incipient national patterns. The original post-war figure for East Germany’s total population, approximately 20 million, included about 3 million such expellees from the “lost provinces” (now Polish, stretching behind the Oder-Neisse line) who decided to stay in East Germany. This initial complication undoubtedly added to the economic and political headaches of the artificially carved-out zone which became formally the German Democratic Republic on 7 October 1949.
Since that meaningful date, at least 3.5 million East Germans have fled westward, thus voting with their feet for an illusory freedom. Leaving behind them all personal, family, and economic ties they have streamed out in steady groups representing just about all the major social categories of the “reluctant satellite.” The two most conspicuous high points were the exodus following the popular revolt of June 1953 and, more recently, the farmers’ flight after the collectivization drive of March-April 1960. On the other hand, the elasticity of the refugee flow manifested itself in a rather abrupt numerical decline during the second 6-month period of 1959 when the disarmament negotiations at Geneva, Premier Khrushchev’s impending visit to the United States, and domestic economic improvements cast an aura of optimism over East Germany. Despite these temporary lags, however, even a cursory examination of available statistics1 would indicate that for the last 11 years, approximately 30,000 East Germans have crossed the Iron Curtain border each month, year in and year out, in order to escape Soviet-imposed tyranny. The exodus is a serious blow to East German prestige and manpower. Its authorities have recently stopped publishing figures on refugees.
Three social groups have played a conspicuous part in this dynamic process of political defection. The steady flight of leading intellectuals, college professors, editors, prominent lawyers, engineers, and doctors has been emphatically noted by the West. The medical profession, in particular, has taken a firm stand in rejecting the Ulbricht regime. Annually between 1,500 and 2,000 doctors have escaped to the West ever since 1949, and even in the course of a “slower year,” like 1959, about 400 of them had left by 1 August. The doctor shortage has become one of East Germany’s major headaches. In numerous semi-empty hospitals and clinics, Bulgarian and Czech medical students, imported to help out a fellow-Communist country, are posing as doctors and perform medical tasks. Frequently even North Korean and Albanian researchers are called upon to fill appointments in high-level technical institutes and universities from which most of the permanent (and competent) staff has already fled to the West.
The second group has been youth, particularly of the college student age-category. Here the all-pervasive dreariness and minute regimentation of everyday life must be the principal reason for flight, coupled with the unpromising, limited economic opportunities of East Germany as contrasted with West Germany. No Western observer who has witnessed the dreary marching and Nazi-type behavior of the Free German Youth movement, or glanced at the depressing Humboldt University in East Berlin can doubt the sincerity and determination of youth to improve its living conditions and search for a freer and more pleasant atmosphere elsewhere. Leaving their families behind, groups of young men and women escapees line up daily at the reception centers maintained for refugees in West Berlin.
While industrial workers have never appeared en masse among the refugees, the 1960 agricultural collectivization drive and the threatened collectivization of the independent artisan class led to a sudden spurt in the flight of artisans, farmers, farm laborers, and apprentices in state production co-operatives. Some 1,150 farmers left their farms in March and April 1960, compared with 332 in January and February of that year. In a period of one week in May, more than 16,500 East Germans fled to West Berlin, while for the comparable period the 1959 figure was merely 8,100. On the whole, these disastrous attempts of East German authorities to communize the land as well as the people’s major economic activities along with it, are not likely to accelerate the pace of reconstruction. On the contrary, as a result of this recent mass exodus, the Communist Party has already been forced to stage a tactical retreat. To allay the workers’ justifiable fears, Herr Ulbricht, Secretary-General of the party, declared in June 1960 that reports about compulsory collectivization of artisans were merely another example of the “lying press of the West.”
In view of Ulbricht’s extremist policies, this retreat is only a temporary halt in the process of 100 per cent collectivization. Once the number of refugees falls off, the Party’s “march to triumphant and complete socialism” will continue. The end result seems to be pre-determined and inevitable. Some 200,000 small businesses, employing 600,000 people, will be compressed gradually into the collectivized mold of what will then be the most Communistic state in Europe outside the Soviet Union.
The problem of redefectors, refugees from the Soviet zone deciding to return to the East, has concerned both the West and East German governments. Statistics on this sensitive issue are particularly exaggerated and frequently misleading. The East Berlin regime claims that one out of every four defectors actually redefects to East Germany, while the Federal Republic figures refer to one out of ten “returnees.” Of the two, the latter statistic seems to be far more acceptable. Difficulties in locating jobs, loneliness, and homesickness seem to be the primary reasons motivating the redefectors. After all, most of the 3.5 million who have left East Germany through the years have personal and family ties to the East, and they are constantly renewing these connections through correspondence and occasional visits. A recent visitor to East Germany observed: “Each holiday, each family festivity, is a reminder that an artificial barrier divides them. There is some tendency to drift apart, of course, and sometimes angry ruptures. But the greater tendency is to remember.”
West Berlin operators of mass-media communications, particularly officials of RIAS— Radio in the American Sector—have repeatedly stressed to this author that a fair percentage of the redefectors is directly involved in espionage for East Germany, and indirectly for Soviet authorities. The story of many redefectors merely camouflages a West German expulsion order after the originally bona fide refugee has been caught gathering intelligence materials in the West. West Berlin is not only a showcase of democracy, but a primary battleground in the current cold war. Thus it is saturated by agents and operators of all types from behind the Iron Curtain. It seems rather logical that a number of these would pose as legitimate political refugees, would be flown out of Berlin to Frankfurt or Munich at West German expense, and having accomplished their espionage mission, would then request return transportation to the East, claiming this time to be genuine reemigrants. Unhappily, not even the strictest and most thorough political checks or de- Communization proceedings in West Berlin can prevent or eradicate this pattern of spy- infiltration behind the valuable ramparts and forward bastions of the Free World.
There are also defectors from the West who choose to settle down in East Germany. Many of these return later, disgusted by life in the Soviet Zone. Undoubtedly the West German Federal Republic has its agents scattered from East Berlin to the Polish-Soviet border, and we can assume that some of these would also “redefect” after their mission had been accomplished. The author did not discuss this sensitive point with any of his hospitable West German informants.
Politics on the Home Front
Complete subservience to Moscow and a welter of conflicting ideological postures are two of the basic ingredients of the German “Democratic Republic’s” domestic policy. Not surprisingly, at a special conference in June 1960, the party’s high leadership was criticized by several provincial functionaries for “ideological lack of clarity” and for political confusion. Indeed, rigid strategic subservience to the foreign occupation power is so skillfully balanced by tactical domestic cleverness and flexibility that both the captive East German population and foreign observers are bewildered by this “Now you see me, now you don’t” spectacle.
In terms of intra-Communist bloc relationships, East Germany is in many ways Moscow’s most reliable satellite. Popular reluctance and the average East German’s deep- seated dissatisfaction with the regime may be important operational factors on the level of mass public opinion, but the Ulbricht group, truculently non-deviationist, keeps vociferously re-echoing its “Master’s Voice.” Thus the incredible ups and downs, the manifold gyrations and peculiar convolutions of the Soviet political line are at all times clearly mirrored in East German domestic developments. In turn, the principal role assumed by the Khrushchev regime appears to be one of buttressing and reinforcing the shaky foundations of a puppet government frequently described as the most hated and least popular in all of Iron-Curtain Europe.
The two most significant political milestones in East Germany have been the uprising of 17 June 1953, and the impact of the Hungarian revolt of October, 1956. Experts agree that the events of June 1953, served as a watershed in Soviet zone politics. Carefully absorbing the “rejection” indicated by this angry popular explosion, the Ulbricht regime has never dared to return since to the open brutality and ubiquitous violence of the darkest days of Stalinism, the October 1949 to March 1953 period. Both economic and political conditions improved after 17 June and the New Course made a measurable impact on East Germany in terms of an increasing availability of consumer goods, higher wages, and a general relaxation of the atmosphere.
The abortive Hungarian rebellion and the shocking bloodbath in Budapest brought forth a campaign of ideological and political belt-tightening; suddenly Soviet interest quickened in their vulnerable and reluctant, but colonially speaking, valuable satellite. Khrushchev paid two formal visits to East Berlin in 1957 and enthusiastically endorsed the Stalin-type one-man authority of Walter Ulbricht, even while denouncing the evils of the “cult of personality” everywhere else. Ulbricht, in turn, took immediate advantage of his absolute role and engaged in lengthy party purges ridding the Communist Party of his critics and antagonists. By the summer of 1958, most of the economic experts had been fired and the puppet government re-staffed with obedient sycophants.
Generally speaking, stark ideological contrasts characterize East Germany’s internal politics. The vast propaganda apparatus of East Germany ceaselessly thunders at Hitler- type adventurers, Nazi thugs, and right-wing reactionaries, and contemptuously equates Adenauer’s Federal Republic with the Nazis’ Third Reich. At the same time, however, it has flexibly and quietly absorbed an endless number of former National Socialist officials, both military and civilian, provided they were willing to trade their previous loyalty oath to Hitler for a new one to Karl Marx and the Soviet-installed “Democratic Republic.” According to recent British statistics, of 30 ranking generals in the present People’s Army, 17 were either colonels or generals under Hitler; of 65 senior colonels, 45 were officers in Hitler’s army, and of these, 22 had been promoted to colonel during World War II. Of 1,500 senior officers in the present army, 450 had been trained during the Hitler era. Thus official denunciations of National Socialism are seldom translated into actual practice. On the contrary, in a heavily militarized, totalitarian police state the problem of people with Nazi backgrounds seems to have been flexibly and opportunistically handled: if their military or bureaucratic experience was useful to the state, they had no trouble in making the transition from high-ranking Third Reich to high-ranking East German officials.
The para-military character of the East German government is, in fact, painfully obvious. It has a fully Soviet-equipped and trained People’s Army of 110,000 men, a People’s Police of some 80,000, a workers’ militia composed of some 250,000 “volunteers,” and a 550,000-member National Association for Sports receiving regular military training.
There is also significant confusion concerning the primacy of economic or political objectives within the framework of a state system rapidly progressing toward full Communism. A recent Khrushchev-Ulbricht controversy might well highlight this point. Speaking in 1958 to a large gathering of East German factory workers, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party emphatically stated: “We don’t care whether you are Communists or not, good or bad Communists—all we want is good workers and producers!” Directly conflicting with the local party line, this statement was omitted by the East German press although Pravda featured it with its customary alacrity. Ulbricht’s embarrassment must have been obvious: for years his regime hammered away at the dominant theme that while peasants and factory workers must be good producers, they must first of all be reliable and ardent Communists.
Political soul-searching, uncertainty of motivation and open self-criticism are steadily recurrent themes. “What is our biggest single obstacle?” queried despairingly the party secretary for the city of Magdeburg at a recent Communist Party conference. “It is the great ideological confusion over the very foundations of our policies,” he answered himself. The Party, he stated, failed to satisfy politically even its own membership and functionaries. Sectarianism, reactionary bourgeois ideologies, groping toward some undesirable “third force” solution, these were other indictments proferred by the membership against its own leaders. More significantly, the recurring theme admits a failure on the part of the Party to publicize its policies and have them accepted by a majority of the people. The Party, so run endless and gloomy statements, has no organic internal connections with the masses—indeed a deep and widening abyss separates the two. Workers, peasants, and intellectuals perform their daily functions without interest, apathetically and with a minimal sense of participation in the political shenanigans of a complex, but to them unintelligible and supremely uninteresting, Communist state system.2 In the long run, then, the regime feels forced to heed Khrushchev’s warning. It reluctantly reshuffles its priority listing and, underplaying its own irrational politics, gives artificially encouraged primacy to such “concrete achievements” as progress in industrial production, agriculture, science and culture.
Trends in Foreign Policy
East Germany is ruled today by the Ulbricht-Grotewohl clique. Wilhelm Pieck was President of the People’s Republic until his death in September 1960, while Ulbricht is still First Secretary of the Communist Party and Otto Grotewohl Prime Minister of the government. Ulbricht is a veteran Comintern agent of 30 years’ standing. Grotewohl was a Socialist trade union leader before he joined the Party and became a Communist mouthpiece. The London Economist liked to refer to East Germany as Pieckistan (the land of Pieck).
In the field of foreign relations, this clique is primarily anxious to win recognition abroad and to achieve a status of relative respectability in world politics. The desire to appear universally acceptable permeates most of the speeches and diplomatic moves of these three men; they seem to be driven forward relentlessly by the rejection of their own people and by the nakedness of their illegally usurped power-position at home. The search for respectability is a Janus-faced proposition—one of its two sides is political, the other economic. While politically the record of the first 11 years has not been impressive, in economic competition the East Germans have operated with great shrewdness and with such remarkable energy that by the end of 1959 they had taken up trade relations with approximately 70 nations from all major areas of the world.
In terms of legal recognition, the non- Communist world has so far presented a solid phalanx against East Germany. As of the spring of 1961, only the Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, Communist China, and Yugoslavia had extended recognition to East Germany. Guinea at first appeared to go through the recognition procedure, but quickly withdrew when faced with the obvious sanction of losing its diplomatic and commercial ties with West Germany. All the newly emergent African states have so far assumed diplomatic relationships with the Federal Republic, and pointedly ignored the extended hand of Herr Ulbricht. West Germany, on the other hand, has solidified its earlier practice of promptly severing ties with any country which has extended recognition to East Germany. Indeed, this pattern of retaliatory action has been raised to the level of a diplomatic principle and is described as the von Brentano doctrine (bearing the -name of West Germany’s Foreign Minister).
In its desperate struggle for respectability, East Germany will take advantage of the slightest straw in the wind, the most minuscule break in world affairs. Under steady Soviet pressure the East German delegation was finally admitted in a purely advisory capacity to the Geneva disarmament conference of the summer of 1959. This was the first formal and simultaneous participation of the two Germanies in a major postwar conference on important international issues and listening to Ulbricht’s noisy pronouncements, one would have imagined that East Germany had just been admitted to the Security Council of the United Nations. “The Deutsche Demokratische Republik has finally asserted itself, and it will assert itself even more in the future!” . . . “Now that the first step has been accomplished, the second must soon follow: the representatives of the two German states must begin to negotiate directly,” he triumphantly declared in a Spandau speech in mid-August 1959.
These irresponsible expectations did not affect the Adenauer government, nor did they modify the unwavering line of West German policy vis-a-vis the “Soviet zone.” On the contrary, instead of heightened prestige and improved good will for East Germany, the Western powers left Geneva highly irritated by the antics of the East German delegation and its leader, that self-styled “world statesman,” Foreign Minister Dr. Lothar Bolz. Some months later an eminent West German diplomat, Wilhelm G. Grewe, offered a cool summary of this highly touted Geneva incident: “Although participation in the conference may have won some psychological and propaganda gains for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, it is perfectly clear that no legal recognition whatsoever was involved on anyone’s part.” (Emphasis supplied.) Thus it appears exceedingly doubtful that East Germany’s foreign affairs delegation will again be invited—even in an advisory capacity—to participate in future conferences of international import, whether in Geneva, Paris, or New York.
The economic prestige battle proved to be less hazardous and more remunerative for East Germany. Its trade delegation, usually led by Otto Grotewohl, the experienced ex-labor union official and a persuasive speaker, made sizeable inroads into West German (and other Western) foreign commerce by concluding profitable trade agreements with countries like Ghana, Ceylon, Colombia, the United Arab Republic, Iraq, Indonesia, Morocco, and many others. Again, these economic relationships did not presume legal recognition or moral approval; rather they seem to operate in a murky grey-zone or twilight- area so characteristic of a political world rent asunder by a globally conducted cold war. Although close commercial relationships usually imply recognition, in this case they are carried on in a legal vacuum or in a framework of quasi-diplomatic recognition. Iraq and the United Arab Republic, for example, maintain Consulate Generals in East Berlin headed by officials with the rank of minister. These diplomats are allowed to fly their nation’s flag on the consulate buildings and can even act upon certain types of political problems or developments. The interesting question arises: how close can two nations get to full diplomatic intercourse without assuming a state of mutual legal recognition?
While East Germany is not likely to be accepted into the membership of the United Nations, it has already managed to break into two UNESCO commissions as a full member. It is quite possible that it will slowly work its way into other technical agencies since each admission is a stepping stone toward ultimate success in its anxious search for a modicum of international prestige and acceptance.
Agitprop Begins at Home
We have noted earlier the immense abyss which so conspicuously separates the leaders of East Germany from the masses, and often from the rank-and-file of the party itself. In a truly totalitarian society of such sharp black and white divisions the role of propaganda (or agitation-propaganda, customarily abbreviated in Communist jargon to agitprop) can be defined readily. Its principal function consists of a mobilization of the regime’s resources, both intellectual and political, to bridge the gap between Communist management and labor, in short, to “reassert the primacy” and “leading role” of the party among the dispirited masses of the people.
How successful has East German propaganda been along these lines? In order to get a balanced picture, one must draw a line between foreign and domestic propaganda operations since major qualitative differences appear between these two. If the agitprop purpose of the Ulbricht clique was to create and maintain the illusion abroad that East Germany was a veritable proletarian Garden of Eden freely flowing with milk and honey, then East German propaganda has failed abysmally. Even the most stridently exuberant propaganda machine is incapable of portraying Utopia when, in reality, a poverty- stricken people dispiritedly goes through the minimal motions prescribed by an alien regime. The proud exhibits and annual displays of Communist strength and progress, such as the Leipzig International Fair, widely heralded in the Western press, have met with frequent criticism and aroused the mixed reactions of foreign visitors. Khrushchev, for example, loudly criticized the shoddy plastic goods and mediocre food-product exhibits at Leipzig, to the consternation of East German dignitaries accompanying him and to the acute embarrassment of host Ulbricht.
Given the over-all picture of an arbitrary and truly selective process of reconstruction, the visitor is more apt to notice the immense gaps and the endless acres of rubble in the dreary countryside than to concentrate in depth on the few visible and major accomplishments of the regime.
If the agitprop purpose is domestic intimidation and coercion, then East German authorities have succeeded in a signally effective fashion. The impact of their campaign of ideological (and physical) violence can be measured in three different directions. First of all, they have been able to restrict considerably the influence of the organized churches of East Germany, depriving them of a large slice of their membership, closing down churches, obstructing attendance at services, mistreating, arresting, and even expelling priests and ministers. In August 1960, the National Lutheran Council of the United States issued a world report on membership noting that the greatest drop anywhere in the world was revealed by Germany’s Lutheran denomination, the Church of Saxony in East Germany. Its new membership figure of 3,800,000 was 613,699 less than that of a year earlier. Membership gains elsewhere failed to offset this loss. In the conflict of Church and State, organized religion has been steadily on the defensive and losing ground against its ruthless adversary.
Secondly, the teaching profession has been badly victimized. Teachers refusing to take the loyalty oath to the new regime have been dismissed and often arrested and mistreated. Pupils are compelled to report daily on their teachers’ classroom behavior and statements. Schools have been arbitrarily closed down and many thousands of teachers were forced to flee to the West. In turn, the steady drain has had a disastrous effect on the entire educational system of East Germany. The negative propaganda impact of this relentless drive reached its climax in July 1959 when the World Organization of Teachers, meeting in Washington, D. C., unanimously condemned Communist East Germany for forcing its teachers to demand “active violation of human rights” by their pupils. Of the nearly 1,000 delegates attending the assembly from 74 countries, only the delegation from Yugoslavia abstained from voting on this report. All other delegations strongly supported it. The West, of course, has a reliable and continuous channel of information on East Germany’s deteriorating educational picture: the steady flow into West Berlin of young students and displaced teachers gives ever-tangible evidence of the all-pervasive, top-to-bottom reorganization of East German education on the pattern of the Soviet Union’s pedagogical structure.
Undeniably, the most significant of all three major propaganda campaigns has been aimed at West Berlin. Here the whole array of Communist agitprop devices and measures is systematically mobilized, ranging from kidnapping and physical violence all the way to persuasive and fairly artistic TV shows beamed from East Berlin. Communist banditry, as an excellent Berlin report in the Atlantic Monthly recently characterized it, has the clearcut objective of keeping the West Berliners’ nerves on edge and wary on the assumption that a potential victim of Communist aggression should never be allowed to forget his danger. Thus the East German press incessantly fulminates against Berlin as the “front-line city” headed by Willy Brandt, its ugly and “blustering burgomaster.” To emphasize the potency of verbal attacks there is kidnapping and assassination. Only recently were West Berliners told of the tragic death in December 1953 of Dr. Walter Linse, an eminent lawyer who was kidnapped in July 1952 by thugs of the East German Volkspolizei. Linse, a 1947 defector from East Germany, did important work for the West Berlin Free Lawyers’ Association. He was struck down in front of his apartment house one morning, wounded, and driven across the frontier into East Germany. Since then East German leaders have steadfastly denied any knowledge of him and refused to divulge information on his case. Six and a half years after his death his family was finally informed through the West German Red Cross.
Although by far the most notorious, the Linse case is by no means unique. During the author’s stay in Berlin in August 1959, another prominent lawyer and his 14-year- old daughter were kidnapped by East German border-guards on the picturesque Wannsee, right in the midst of thousands of West Berliners enjoying the lake. The border cuts across the lake and the East Germans claimed that the lawyer had illegally drifted over the border. Neither he nor his daughter has ever been returned to the West.
The purpose of all East German agitprop efforts is to silence, neutralize, and possibly paralyze West Berlin, that successful showcase of Western democracy. The press, radio, and TV attacks are on a violently vituperative level and every conceivable propaganda theme or gimmick is relentlessly exploited, furbished, and refurbished with endless daily variations on the principal theme.
Here are two or three items selected at random from recent East German press propaganda.
(1) West Berliners are deserting their part of the city and emigrating to East Germany. (Completely false.) According to Neues Volksblatt (15 August 1959) 40,000 West Germans, most of them West Berlin workers and doctors have fled to East Germany in the first half of 1959. The number of refugee engineers and scientists had allegedly doubled since 1958.
(2) West Berlin lacks health and welfare arrangements for its people; its children have no vacation places to go to in the summer. Hence the widely publicized offer of East Berlin’s mayor to invite 15,000 West Berlin children to spend the summer in choice vacation spots of East Germany. Followed up by indignant denunciations that West Berlin authorities did not even reply to this invitation. Anger expressed that West Berliners are neglecting their own children.
(3) The standing accusation that all Nazis are in the West, while East Germany is untainted. Thus West Berlin is depicted as a hotbed of top-level Nazi officials, a superextension of its status under the Third Reich. This theme, however, is always carefully coupled with East Germany’s own emphatic protestations of innocence or semi-innocence in terms of using only thoroughly brainwashed and carefully converted former National Socialists, and these only for limited duties and in presumably inferior positions.
A most illuminating illustration of this position appeared in a recent East Berlin pamphlet: West Germany, A Smouldering Volcano, published by the Committee for German Unity. “There are no convicted Nazi officers in our Army, no Speidels or Heusingers. It is impossible in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik for former fascist generals and officers who have not changed their views ... to drill young people for an attack on other countries. The few former officers of the Hitlerite Wehrmacht who are serving in the People's Army today turned against fascism during the second world war and have proved their antifascist attitude by their deeds." (Emphasis supplied.)
Most cold-war propaganda maneuvers are of a mixed nature: offensive and defensive elements usually intermingle in an intricate pattern of artificial unity. East Germany’s agitprop is heavily on the defensive against West Berlin’s RIAS, which used to be U. S.- operated, but is now an independent radio station in the combined Western sectors of Berlin. Nothing attests more to the effectiveness of RIAS than the 1,600 jammers throughout the Soviet zone aimed against its operations; in addition, innumerable propaganda attacks are being launched from the East to offset and paralyze this insistent voice of the Free World.
In summary, the East German agitation- propaganda system is effective only to the extent of mirroring abroad a curiously mixed domestic atmosphere based on real intimidation and phony exuberance. Instead of conjuring up the glowing image of a progressive Socialist country, it has barely succeeded in camouflaging a tired people behind the smoke-screen of the ravings and rantings so characteristic of contemporary practitioners of Marxism-Leninism-Khrushchevism. The stark and un-camouflaged truth is that the Ulbricht government plays the depressing role of a pawn in world politics. Unpopular, but feared at home, it is being maintained by the strength of ever-present Soviet bayonets. Leaving bitter memories behind, it is bound to disappear into the dustbin of history when the reunification of Germany—this fervently desired goal of over 70 million Germans— will eventually become a political and ideological reality.
A graduate of the University of Budapest with advanced degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, Mr. Gyorgy served in the U. S. Army during World War II. Subsequently he taught at the University of California, Yale, University of New Hampshire, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1952 to 1954, he was Research Associate at the Center for International Studies, M.I.T., and from 1958 to 1959, Chester W. Nimitz Professor at the U. S. Naval War College. Since 1952, he has been a Professor of Government at Boston University.
He is the author of three books: Geopolitics, the New German Science; Governments of Danubian Europe; and Problems in International Relations, as well as numerous articles in professional journals, and a series of lectures published by the Naval War College entitled Studies in International Politics.
1. The interested student can obtain useful data from the publications of the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims in Bonn. See Facts Concerning the Problem of the German Expellees and Refugees, 4th edition, with maps, Bonn, 1959
2. The West German press naturally abounds in detailed stock-taking of these glaring ideological weaknesses of the East German regime. For an especially illuminating account, see Gelahmte Schaffensjreude in der gone (Paralyzed Creative Pleasures in the [Soviet] Zone), Frankfurter Allgemeine geitung, 24 June I960, p. 2 et seq