Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth
PENGUIN BOOKS
Foreword by General Brent Scowcroft
Introduction: The World’s Most Dangerous Place
Berlin 1961 Map
PART I. THE PLAYERS
1. Khrushchev: Communist in a Hurry
Marta Hillers’s Story of Rape
2. Khrushchev: The Berlin Crisis Unfolds
3. Kennedy: A President’s Education
The “Sniper” Comes In from the Cold
4. Kennedy: A First Mistake
5. Ulbricht and Adenauer: Unruly Alliances
The Failed Flight of Friedrich Brandt
6. Ulbricht and Adenauer: The Tail Wags the Bear
PART II. THE GATHERING STORM
7. Springtime for Khrushchev
8. Amateur Hour
Jörn Donner Discovers the City
9. Perilous Diplomacy
10. Vienna: Little Boy Blue Meets Al Capone
11. Vienna: The Threat of War
12. Angry Summer
Marlene Schmidt, the
Universe’s Most Beautiful Refugee
PART III. THE SHOWDOWN
13. “The Great Testing Place”
Ulbricht and Kurt Wismach Lock Horns
14. The Wall: Setting the Trap
15. The Wall: Desperate Days
Eberhard Bolle Lands in Prison
16. A Hero’s Homecoming
17. Nuclear Poker
18. Showdown at Checkpoint Charlie
Epilogue: Aftershocks
Plate Section
Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgments
My association with Berlin began in the womb.
My mother, Johanna Schumann Kempe, was born on January 30, 1919, in the Pankow district of what would later become communist East Berlin. She immigrated with her family to America in 1930, three years before the beginning of the Third Reich. She often told me how she, as a teenager, returned to Berlin in 1936 to watch Adolf Hitler host the Olympic Games, where his “master race” won the most medals but was upstaged by black U.S. athlete Jesse Owens, whose four golds were so enthusiastically cheered by Berliners. My mother brought back a souvenir photograph book, which still stands in my bookcase as a reminder of Berlin’s many dramas.
Like most Berliners, my mother was extraordinarily proud of her origins. Berliners consider themselves a breed apart from their fellow Germans. My mother insisted Berliners were more free-spirited and flexible than other Germans, and more witty and worldly.
Given my father’s more provincial German pedigree, he suffered under my mother’s notions about Berliners’ exceptionality. Born on May 21, 1909, in the provincial Saxon village of Leubsdorf, he grew up in Kleinzschachwitz near Dresden before immigrating to the United States in 1928. What unified my mother, a schoolteacher, and my father, a baker, was that they were both raised in parts of Germany that would fall under Soviet occupation after World War II. The rise of the Berlin Wall in 1961 severed our extended family; I remember my parents sending large Christmas packages every year to relatives in East Germany, filled with goods they couldn’t buy themselves. One of my great regrets is that my parents would both die a year before they could see the Berlin Wall collapse of its own oppressive weight in 1989.
So, first and foremost, I am indebted to my mother and father, without whom this book would never have been written. I learned from them about Berlin’s significance as the dividing line between the free and unfree worlds. It was my parents who instilled in me an indignation both toward those who imposed and those who tolerated the oppressive system that encased seventeen million of their fellow Germans (and, by association, tens of millions of other East Europeans) behind Berlin’s concrete walls, barbed wire, watchtowers, and armed guards.
There is also plenty of other thanks to go around. My gratitude again goes to Neil Nyren, my four-time editor at Putnam, who was crucial at every stage of this project, from the development of the concept to the final tweaks. His deft touch and creative eye much improved this manuscript’s narrative. Thanks also to one of the world’s most gifted agents, Esther Newberg, who along with Neil quite properly steered me away from less promising projects and toward this one.
Thanks go as well to the enormously creative Ivan Held, president of Putnam; Marilyn Ducksworth and her publicity team; and the remarkable group under Meredith Dros, including Sara Minnich, who put together the enhanced e-book. Special thanks go to John Makinson, dear friend of so many years, and Penguin visionary. His advice was always wise.
I owe much to the many chroniclers who preceded me in capturing portions of this history. I have provided a comprehensive bibliography for the reader that lists the many texts I studied over more than six years of research and reporting. But it is nonetheless appropriate to list those who influenced my understanding most: Hope Harrison and Mario Frank, on Walter Ulbricht and his relationship with Khrushchev; Hans Peter Schwartz and Charles Williams, on Adenauer; Strobe Talbott and his remarkable work on Khrushchev’s memoirs; and Michael Beschloss, Robert Dallek, Christopher Hilton, Fred Kaplan, Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko, Robert Slusser, Jean Edward Smith, W. M. Smyser, Frederick Taylor, Theodore Sorensen, and Peter Wyden, who all have contributed important work. Two books that focus squarely on August 1961, by Norman Gelb and Curtis Cate, are of particular merit, as they were written by witnesses with great proximity to events of the time.
Despite all that good work, it still struck me that none of these books had put together all the pieces that had contributed to the historic occurrences around Berlin 1961. My goal was to produce a readable, authoritative narrative for both the expert and the general reader that would investigate all the available historical accounts and combine those with more recently declassified materials in the United States, Germany, and Russia.
To take on that challenge, my thanks go above all to the talented and resourceful Nicholas Siegel, my research assistant during the most crucial period of this project. Thanks also to Roman Kilisek, whose careful, thorough, painstaking work in the later stages was invaluable. I am deeply grateful to Natascha Braumann and Alexia Huffman, my personal assistants, who contributed richly to the book itself while also brilliantly managing the executive office of the Atlantic Council. A tip of the hat is also due many others who provided valuable research along the way: Milena Brechenmacher, Bryan Hart, Petra Krischok, Maria Panina, and Dieter Wulf. Susan Hormuth’s expert photo research helped unearth unique material for the book and its various electronic incarnations—and Natascha again played a crucial role in making sense of mountains of material. Thanks as well to Maryrose Grossman and Michelle DeMartino at the John F. Kennedy Library, and to William Burr at the National Security Archive.
I owe much to colleagues at my former employer, the Wall Street Journal, and at the Atlantic Council of the United States, where I now work. Thanks in particular go to my former Wall Street Journal boss, Paul Steiger, and to Jim Pensiero, who made it possible for me to write this book. At the Atlantic Council, our always wise Chairman Emeritus Henry Catto and then President Jan Lodal encouraged me to continue this project. I owe a particular thanks to General Brent Scowcroft, one of America’s most extraordinary individuals, and to Virginia Mulberger, a woman of unique judgment and character, for their friendship, inspiration, and support. Throughout this project, I have benefited from the wise counsel of Richard Steele.
I have had the remarkable luck to serve as Atlantic Council President and CEO under two chairmen who are among this country’s finest leaders and mentors: Senator Chuck Hagel and General Jim Jones. Senator Hagel, our current chairman, embodies the consistent, principled, bipartisan leadership the United States so badly needs. All Americans have profited from forty-two years of General Jones’s remarkable public service, most recently as President Obama’s national security advisor.
Special thanks to Walter Isaacson for his early encouragement of this project. Thanks to the many Americans and Berliners who shared their stories, and to David Acheson for providing access to his father’s correspondence. I’m grateful to Vern Pike for sharing his still-unpublished manuscript about his days in Berlin.
No project of this sort happens without friends and family. Pete and Maria Bagley provided kindness and support that can never be repaid. My dear friends Pete and Alex Motyl offered crucial organizational and editing suggestions that improved the manuscript significantly.
In adulthood as in childhood, I rely for ballast on my sisters Jeanie, Patty, and Teresa, and I thank them for their encouragement and understanding when this project took time that might have been spent with them. We are bound by a common heritage as first-generation Americans.
This book is quite properly dedicated to my wife, Pam, who has been my extraordinary friend, partner, editor, and counselor through every early-morning hour, every weekend day, and every vacation week spent on this project. Throughout it all, our remarkable daughter, Johanna Natalie (aka “Jo-Jo”), named for the Berliner who brought me into this world, sustains our happiness with her infectious joy and boundless curiosity. I can’t wait to show her Berlin.
We have thirty nuclear weapons earmarked for France, more than enough to destroy that country. We are reserving fifty each for West Germany and Britain.
Premier Khrushchev to U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr., January 1, 1960
No matter how good the old year has been, the New Year will be better still. … I think no one will reproach me if I say that we attach great importance to improving our relations with the USA. … We hope that the new U.S. president will be like a fresh wind blowing away the stale air between the USA and the USSR.
One year later, Khrushchev’s New Year’s toast, January 1, 1961
It was just minutes before midnight, and Nikita Khrushchev had reason to be relieved that 1960 was nearly over. He had even greater cause for concern about the year ahead as he surveyed his two thousand New Year’s guests under the towering, vaulted ceiling of St. George’s Hall at the Kremlin. As the storm outside deposited a thick layer of snow on Red Square and the mausoleum containing his embalmed predecessors, Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev recognized that Soviet standing in the world, his place in history, and—more to the point—his political survival could depend on how he managed his own blizzard of challenges.
At home, Khrushchev was suffering his second straight failed harvest. Just two years earlier and with considerable flourish, he had launched a crash program to overtake U.S. living standards by 1970, but he wasn’t even meeting his people’s basic needs. On an inspection tour of the country, he had seen shortages almost everywhere of housing, butter, meat, milk, and eggs. His advisers were telling him the chances of a workers’ revolt were growing, not unlike the one in Hungary that he had been forced to crush with Soviet tanks in 1956.
Abroad, Khrushchev’s foreign policy of peaceful coexistence with the West, a controversial break with Stalin’s notion of inevitable confrontation, had crash-landed when a Soviet rocket brought down an American Lockheed U-2 spy plane the previous May. A few days later, Khrushchev triggered the collapse of the Paris Summit with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wartime Allies after failing to win a public U.S. apology for the intrusion into Soviet airspace. Pointing to the incident as evidence of Khrushchev’s leadership failure, Stalinist remnants in the Soviet Communist Party and China’s Mao Tse-tung were sharpening their knives against the Soviet leader in preparation for the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Having used just such gatherings himself to purge adversaries, all Khrushchev’s plans for 1961 were designed to head off a catastrophe at that meeting.
With all that as the backdrop, nothing threatened Khrushchev more than the deteriorating situation in divided Berlin. His critics complained that he was allowing the communist world’s most perilous wound to fester. East Berlin was hemorrhaging refugees to the West at an alarming rate. They were a self-selecting population of the country’s most motivated and capable industrialists, intellectuals, farmers, doctors, and teachers. Khrushchev was fond of calling Berlin the testicles of the West, a tender place where he could squeeze when he wanted to make the U.S. wince. However, a more accurate metaphor was that it had become his and the Soviet bloc’s Achilles’ heel, the place where communism lay most vulnerable.
Yet Khrushchev betrayed none of those concerns as he worked a New Year’s crowd that included cosmonauts, ballerinas, artists, apparatchiks, and ambassadors, all bathed in the light of the hall’s six massive bronze chandeliers and three thousand electric lamps. For them, an invitation to the Soviet leader’s party was itself confirmation of status. However, they buzzed with even greater than usual anticipation, for John F. Kennedy would take office in less than three weeks. They knew the Soviet leader’s traditional New Year’s toast would set the tone for U.S.–Soviet relations thereafter.
As the Kuranty clock of the sixteenth-century Spasskaya Tower ticked over Red Square toward its thunderous midnight chime, Khrushchev generated his own heat inside St. George’s Hall. He hand-clasped some guests and bear-hugged others, nearly bursting from his baggy gray suit. It was the same energy that had carried him to power from his peasant birth in the Russian village of Kalinovka near the Ukrainian border, through revolution, civil war, Stalin’s paranoid purges, world war, and the leadership battle following Stalin’s death. The communist takeover had provided many Russians of humble beginnings with new opportunities, but none had survived as skillfully nor risen as far as Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.
Given Khrushchev’s increased capability to launch nuclear-tipped missiles at the West, it had become a consuming occupation of U.S. intelligence agencies to fathom Khrushchev’s psychological makeup. In 1960, the CIA had assembled some twenty experts—internists, psychiatrists, and psychologists—to scrutinize the Soviet leader through films, intelligence files, and personal accounts. The group went so far as to inspect photo close-ups of Khrushchev’s arteries to assess rumors of their hardening and his high blood pressure. They concluded in a highly classified report—which later would reach President Kennedy—that despite Khrushchev’s mood swings, depressions, and drinking bouts (which they reported he had recently brought under greater control), the Soviet leader exhibited the consistent behavior of what they called a “chronic optimistic opportunist.” Their conclusion was that he was more of an ebullient activist than, as many had believed until then, a Machiavellian communist in Stalin’s mold.
Another top-secret personality sketch prepared by the CIA for the incoming administration noted Khrushchev’s “resourcefulness, audacity, a good sense of political timing and showmanship, and a touch of the gambler’s instinct.” It warned the newly elected Kennedy that behind the often buffoonish manner of this short, squat man lay a “shrewd native intelligence, an agile mind, drive, ambition and ruthlessness.”
What the CIA didn’t report was that Khrushchev took personal responsibility for Kennedy’s election and was now seeking the payoff. He boasted to comrades that he had cast the deciding vote in one of America’s closest presidential elections ever by refusing Republican entreaties that he release three captured American airmen—the downed U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and two crew members of an RB-47 reconnaissance plane shot down by the Soviets over the Barents Sea two months later—during the height of the election campaign. Now he was working impatiently through multiple channels to land an early summit meeting with Kennedy in hopes it would solve his Berlin problem.
During the campaign, the Soviet leader’s instructions to his top officials had been clear, regarding both his desire for a Kennedy win and his distaste for Richard Nixon, who as Eisenhower’s anticommunist vice president had humiliated him in Moscow during their so-called Kitchen Debate over the relative advantages of their two systems. “We can also influence the American presidential election!” he had told his comrades then. “We would never give Nixon such a present.”
After the election, Khrushchev had crowed that by refusing to release the airmen he had personally cost Nixon the few hundred thousand votes he would have required for his victory. Just a ten-minute walk from his Kremlin New Year’s party, the American captives languished as a reminder of Khrushchev’s electoral manipulation inside the KGB’s Lubyanka Prison, where the Soviet leader was keeping them as political pawns to be traded at some future moment for some other gain.
As the countdown to his New Year’s toast continued, Khrushchev bathed in the crowd more like a populist politician than a communist dictator. Though still vigorously youthful, he had aged with the accelerated speed of so many other Russians, having already turned gray at age twenty-two after a serious illness. As he bantered with comrades, he often threw back his nearly bald head and exploded in mirth at one of his own stories, unself-consciously showing bad teeth with a center gap and two golden bicuspids. Closely cropped gray hair framed a round, animated face with three large warts, a slit scar under his pug nose, red cheeks with deep laughter lines, and dark, piercing eyes. He waved his hands and spoke short, staccato sentences in a loud, high-pitched, nasal voice.
He recognized many faces and asked after comrades’ children by name: “How is little Tatyana? How is tiny Ivan?”
Given his purpose that evening, Khrushchev was disappointed not to find among the crowd Moscow’s most important American, Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, with whom he had remained close despite the decline of the U.S.–Soviet relationship. Thompson’s wife, Jane, apologized to Khrushchev that her husband was home nursing ulcers. It was also true that the ambassador was still smarting from his encounter with the Soviet leader at the previous New Year’s gathering, when an inebriated Khrushchev had nearly declared World War III over Berlin.
It had been two in the morning when Khrushchev, in an alcoholic haze, escorted Thompson, his wife, the French ambassador, and Italy’s Communist Party leader into a newly built anteroom of St. George’s Hall, curiously decorated with a running fountain filled with colored plastic rocks. Khrushchev spat at Thompson that he would make the West pay if it didn’t satisfy his demands for a Berlin agreement that would include Allied troop withdrawal. “We have thirty nuclear weapons earmarked for France, more than enough to destroy that country,” he said, tilting his head toward the French ambassador. He added for good measure that he was reserving fifty each for West Germany and Britain.
In an awkward attempt to restore a lighter mood, Jane Thompson had asked how many rockets Khrushchev had earmarked for Uncle Sam.
“That’s a secret,” Khrushchev had said with a wicked smile.
In an attempt to reverse the degenerating tone, Thompson had offered a toast to the upcoming Paris Summit with Eisenhower and its potential for improved relations. The Soviet leader, however, only escalated his threats, discarding his commitment to Eisenhower that he would refrain from any unilateral disruptions over Berlin until after the Paris meeting. Thompson was able to end the vodka-soaked session only at six in the morning, when he walked away knowing superpower relations would depend on Khrushchev’s inability the next morning to recall anything he had said that night.
Thompson had dispatched a damage-control cable to President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Christian Herter that same morning, relating Khrushchev’s remarks while at the same time declaring they should not be “taken literally,” given the Soviet leader’s intoxicated condition. He offered that the Soviet merely wished “to impress upon us the seriousness” of the Berlin situation.
A year later, and with Thompson safely at home, Khrushchev was in a more sober and generous spirit as the clock struck twelve. Following the bells welcoming the arrival of 1961, and the lighting of the forty-foot New Year’s tree inside St. George’s Hall, Khrushchev raised his glass and offered a toast that would be taken as doctrinal direction by party leaders and repeated in diplomatic cables around the world.
“Happy New Year, comrades, Happy New Year! No matter how good the old year has been, the New Year will be better still!”
The room exploded in cheers, embraces, and kisses.
Khrushchev ritually toasted the working people, the peasants, the intellectuals, Marxist-Leninist concepts, and peaceful coexistence among the world’s peoples. In a conciliatory tone he said, “We consider the socialist system to be superior, but we never try to impose it on other states.”
The hall grew silent as he turned his words to Kennedy.
“Dear Comrades! Friends! Gentlemen!” said Khrushchev. “The Soviet Union makes every effort to have friendly ties with all peoples. But I think no one will reproach me if I say that we attach great importance to improving our relations with the USA because this relationship greatly molds others. We would like to believe that the USA strives for the same outcome. We hope that the new U.S. president will be like a fresh wind blowing away the stale air between the USA and the USSR.”
The man who a year earlier had counted the atomic bombs he would drop on the West was striking a peacemaker’s pose. “During the election campaign,” Khrushchev told the crowd, “Mr. Kennedy said if he had been president he would have expressed regret to the Soviet Union” about sending spy planes over its territory. Khrushchev said he as well wanted to put “this lamentable episode in the past and not go back to it. … We believe that by voting for Mr. Kennedy and against Mr. Nixon, the American people have disapproved of the policy of Cold War and worsening international relationships.”
Khrushchev raised his refilled glass. “To peaceful coexistence among nations!”
Cheers.
“To friendship and peaceful coexistence among all peoples!”
Thunderous cheers. More embraces.
Khrushchev’s choice of language was calculated. The repetitive use of the term “peaceful coexistence” was at the same time a declaration of intent toward Kennedy and a message of determination to his communist rivals. Recognizing Soviet economic limits and new nuclear threats, Khrushchev, in his famous secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, had introduced the new thinking that communist states could peacefully coexist and compete with capitalist states. His opponents, however, favored a return to Stalin’s more aggressive notions of world revolution and more active preparations for war.
As 1961 opened, the ghosts of Stalin endangered Khrushchev far more than any threat from the West. After his death in 1953, Stalin’s bequest to Khrushchev had been a dysfunctional Soviet Union of 209 million people and dozens of nationalities stretching over one-sixth of the world’s landmass. World War II’s battles had depleted a third of the Soviet Union’s wealth and had left some 27 million dead while destroying 17,000 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages. That didn’t count the millions Stalin had killed previously through man-made famine and his paranoid purges.
Khrushchev blamed Stalin for then launching an unnecessary and costly Cold War before the Soviet Union had been able to recover from its previous devastation. In particular, he condemned Stalin for the botched Berlin blockade of 1948, when the dictator had underestimated American resolve and overestimated Soviet capabilities at a time when the U.S. still retained its nuclear monopoly. The result had been the West’s breaking of the embargo, then the 1949 creation of NATO and the founding in the same year of a separate West Germany. What accompanied that was an American commitment to dig into Europe for a longer stay. The Soviet Union had paid a high price because Stalin, in Khrushchev’s view, “didn’t think it through properly.”
Having extended the olive branch to Kennedy through his New Year’s toast, a still-sober Khrushchev at two a.m. took aside West German Ambassador Hans Kroll for a private talk. For Khrushchev, the sixty-two-year-old German was the second most important Western ambassador after the absent Thompson. However, the two men were far closer personally than Khrushchev was to the American envoy, connected both by Kroll’s Russian fluency and his conviction, not unusual for Germans of his generation, that his country was more closely connected culturally, historically, and potentially also politically to Moscow than to the U.S.
Accompanied by Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and Presidium member Alexei Kosygin, Khrushchev and Kroll retreated to the same odd anteroom where the Soviet leader had threatened Thompson one year earlier. That year as well, Kroll had stormed out of the New Year’s celebration in protest after the Soviet leader used his toast to condemn West Germany as “revanchist and militaristic.”
This time, however, Khrushchev was in a seductive mood, and he summoned a waiter to pour Kroll Crimean champagne. While nursing a light Armenian red wine, the Soviet leader explained to Kroll that under doctor’s orders he was not drinking vodka or other hard drinks. Kroll savored such personal exchanges with Khrushchev, and it was his practice at such moments to draw him near physically and speak in hushed tones to underscore their closeness.
Kroll had been born four years later than Khrushchev in the then Prussian town of Deutsch Piekar, which in 1922 would be ceded to Poland. He learned his first Russian while fishing as a boy on the river that divided the German and Czarist empires. His first two years as a diplomat in Moscow had come in the 1920s when post–World War I Germany and the new communist Soviet Union, then two of the most vilified countries in the world, struck the Rapallo agreement that broke their diplomatic isolation and formed an anti-Western, anti–Versailles Treaty axis.
Kroll’s view was that European hostilities could only be calmed through an eventual accord enabling West Germany and the Soviet Union—“the two most powerful countries in Europe”—to get along better with each other. He had worked in that direction since leading the East–West trade department of the Economics Ministry in 1952, when West Germany was only three years old. His convictions had brought him into frequent conflict with the United States, which remained wary that too cozy a relationship could open the way to a neutral West Germany.
Khrushchev thanked Kroll for his help the previous autumn in getting West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to approve new economic agreements with the communist world, including the renewal of an East–West German trade accord, which had been interrupted a few months earlier. Though East Germany was the Soviet client, Khrushchev considered West Germany to be of far greater importance to the Soviet economy, due to the unique access it provided him to modern machinery, technology, and hard-currency loans.
So the Soviet leader raised his glass in a toast to what he called the Federal Republic of Germany’s remarkable postwar reconstruction. Khrushchev told Kroll that he hoped Chancellor Adenauer would use his growing economic strength and thus greater independence from the U.S. to distance himself from Washington and further improve relations with the Soviets.
Kosygin then asked Kroll for permission to raise his own toast, which the ambassador granted. “You are for us the ambassador for all the Germans,” he said, reflecting Khrushchev’s own view that the Soviet Union would be far better off if it had been the West Germans, with all of their resources, who had become their allies, rather than the burdensome East Germans with their constant economic demands and substandard goods.
Khrushchev then laced this seduction with a threat. “The German problem must be solved in 1961,” he told Kroll. The Soviet leader said he had lost his patience with the U.S. refusal to negotiate a change to Berlin’s status in a manner that would allow him to stop the refugee flow and sign a war-ending peace treaty with East Germany. Mikoyan told Kroll that “certain circles” in Moscow were increasing their pressure on Khrushchev to the point that the Soviet leader could not resist their demands much longer to act on Berlin.
Kroll assumed Mikoyan was referring to what had become known within Soviet party circles as the “Ulbricht lobby,” a group that had been greatly influenced by the East German leader’s increasingly strident complaints that Khrushchev was not defending Germany’s socialist state with sufficient vigor.
Made more agreeable by all the Soviet compliments and champagne, Kroll conceded that the Soviet leader had demonstrated remarkable patience over Berlin. He warned Khrushchev, however, that if the Soviets unilaterally upset the Berlin status quo, the result would be an international crisis, and perhaps even military conflict with the U.S. and the West.
Khrushchev disagreed. He shrugged that the West would respond with “a short period of excitement” that would quickly recede. “No one in the world will declare war over Berlin or the German question,” he told Kroll. Khrushchev, knowing Kroll would report the conversation to the Americans and his superiors, said he would prefer a negotiated agreement to taking unilateral action, but he stressed, “That will depend on Kennedy.”
At four in the morning, Khrushchev ended the meeting and then paraded Kroll, Kosygin, and Mikoyan through the still-dancing crowd, which paused and opened an aisle for them to walk through.
Even as experienced an ambassador as Kroll never knew which of Khrushchev’s frequent threats to take seriously. Yet the manner in which Khrushchev had raised the Berlin issue that evening convinced him that the year ahead would bring a confrontation over the matter. He would relay that view to Adenauer—and through him to the Americans. It was clear to Kroll that Khrushchev had concluded that the risks of inaction were growing greater than the dangers of action.
However, the way the year would play out—cooperation or confrontation—would depend on the dilemma that lay at the heart of Khrushchev’s thinking on Berlin.
On the one hand, Khrushchev remained certain that he could not afford a military competition or war with the Americans. He was committed to negotiating a peaceful coexistence with the U.S. and was reaching out to the new American president in hopes of brokering a Berlin deal.
On the other hand, Khrushchev’s meeting with West German Ambassador Kroll demonstrated the growing pressure on him to solve his Berlin problem before it became a larger threat, both to the Soviet empire and, more immediately, to his own leadership.
For that reason, Khrushchev was a communist in a hurry.
And that was not his only Berlin problem. The Berliners themselves despised him, resented Soviet soldiers, and were weary of their occupation. Their memories of the postwar period were only bad ones. …
Marta Hillers’s only consolation was that she had refused to put her name on the extraordinary manuscript in which she had so meticulously recounted the Soviet conquest of Berlin during the cold spring of 1945. It had been a time when her life—like that of tens of thousands of other Berlin women and girls—had become a nightmare of fear, hunger, and rape.
Published for the first time in German in 1959, the book had brought to life one of the worst military atrocities ever. According to estimates extracted from hospital records, between 90,000 and 130,000 Berlin women had been raped during the last days of the war and the first days of Soviet occupation. Tens of thousands of others had fallen victim elsewhere in the Soviet zone.
Hillers had expected the book to be welcomed by a people who wanted the world to know that they, too, had been the victims of war. However, Berliners had responded with either hostility or silence. The world still felt little sympathy for any pain inflicted on a German people who had brought the world so much suffering. Berlin women who had lived through the humiliation had no desire to recall it. And Berlin men found it too painful to be reminded of their failure to protect their wives and daughters. Early 1961 was a time of complacency and amnesia in Soviet-dominated East Germany and East Berlin, and there seemed little reason to get worked up about a history that no one had the power to change or the stomach to digest.
Perhaps the German response should have been no surprise to Hillers, given the shame she herself expressed in signing her memoirs, Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin), only as “Anonyma.” She’d published them only after marrying and safely moving to Switzerland. The book had not circulated or been reviewed in East Germany, and only a few copies had been smuggled across to the communist zone in suitcases stuffed full of Western fashion magazines and other more escapist literature. In West Berlin, Anonyma’s memoirs sold poorly, and reviews accused her either of anticommunist propaganda or of besmirching the honor of German women—something she would insist that Soviet soldiers had done just fine long before her.
One such review, buried on page 35 of West Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, bore the headline: A DISSERVICE TO BERLIN WOMEN / BEST-SELLER ABROAD—A FALSIFIED SPECIAL CASE. What irritated the reviewer, who accused the author of “shameless immorality,” was the book’s uncompromising narrative that so richly captured the cynicism of the postwar months. Judgments like that of Der Tagesspiegel prompted Hillers to remain underground and to prohibit any new editions of the book from being published during her lifetime, which ended at age ninety in 2001.
She would never know that, following her death, her book would be republished and become a best-seller in several languages, including the German edition in 2003. Nor would she ever have the satisfaction of knowing her story would be made into a major German movie in 2008 and become a favorite of feminists everywhere.
Back in 1961, Hillers was more concerned with dodging the reporters who were trying to hunt her down from the few clues in her published pages. The book revealed that she was a journalist in her thirties, had lived in the Tempelhof district, had spent sufficient time in the Soviet Union to speak some Russian, and was “a pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat.” None of that had been enough to identify her.
Still, nothing better captured the German attitude of the time toward their occupiers than the substance of Hillers’s book and Berliners’ aversion to reading it. The East German relationship to their Soviet military occupiers, who still numbered 400,000 to 500,000 by 1961, was a mixture of pity and dread, complacency, and amnesia. Most East Germans had grown resigned to their seemingly permanent cohabitation. Among those who hadn’t, many had fled as refugees.
The East German pity toward their Soviet occupiers, whom they considered inferior to them, came from what they could see with their own eyes: undernourished, unwashed teenagers in soiled uniforms who would drop to the ground to retrieve the unfinished stubs of their discarded cigarettes or trade their service medals and gasoline for any form of consumable alcohol that would help them briefly escape their miserable existence.
The pity was also stirred by the occasional alarms that accompanied desperate attempts at desertion. For the teenage soldiers, the brutality of officers, hazing by fellow soldiers, and the cold and overcrowded quarters occasionally became too much to bear.
Their barracks, built during the Third Reich or earlier, housed three times the number of soldiers that Hitler had ever bunked there. The latest escape had come after an insurrection on New Year’s Eve, when a barracks uprising in Falkenberg had resulted in the escape to West Berlin of four soldiers and the dispatch of Soviet search parties along the Berlin border. Stories circulated of Soviet troops setting alight barns and other structures where deserters had gone in hiding—burning the escapees alive alongside farm animals.
That only increased a deeply ingrained German dread of the Soviets.
That dread had grown after the events of June 17, 1953, when Soviet troops and tanks had put down a workers’ revolt after Stalin’s death that had shaken the young East German state to its fragile foundations. As many as 300 East Germans had died then, and a further 4,270 were imprisoned.
Yet the deeper roots of East German terror were found in the events that Hillers had described. There was a reason why women in East Berlin froze up whenever a Soviet soldier passed by or when East German leader Walter Ulbricht spoke on the radio of the enduring friendship with the Soviet people.
Hillers described why outsiders had so little sympathy for what German women had suffered—and why many Germans wondered whether some vengeful God had delivered this punishment of rape in retribution for their own misbehavior. “Our German calamity,” Hillers wrote during the first days of occupation, “has a bitter taste—of repulsion, sickness, insanity, unlike anything in history. The radio just broadcast another concentration camp report. The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress stuffing, soft soap, felt mats—Aeschylus never saw anything like that.”
Hillers despaired at the stupidity of Nazi leaders who had issued orders that liquor should be left behind for advancing Soviet troops on the theory that inebriated soldiers would be less dangerous adversaries. If it had not been for Soviet drunkenness, Hillers wrote, Berlin women would have suffered only half as much rape at the hands of Russians who “aren’t natural Casanovas” and thus “had to drown their inhibitions.”
With characteristic power, she described one of the many times she’d been raped and how it had driven her to seek protection.
The one shoving me is an older man with gray stubble, reeking of brandy and horses … No sound. Only an involuntary grinding of teeth when my underclothes are ripped apart. The last untorn ones I had.
Suddenly his finger is on my mouth, stinking of horse and tobacco. I open my eyes. A stranger’s hands expertly pulling apart my jaws. Eye to eye. Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth.
I’m numb. Not with disgust, only cold. My spine is frozen: icy, dizzy shivers around the back of my head. I feel myself gliding and falling, down, down through the pillows and the floorboards. So that’s what it means to sink into the ground.
Once more eye to eye. The stranger’s lips open, yellow teeth, one in front half broken off. The corners of the mouth lift, tiny wrinkles radiate from the corners of his eyes. The man is smiling.
Before leaving he fishes something out of his pants pocket, thumps it down on the nightstand, and without a word, pulls the chair aside, and slams the door shut behind him. A crumpled pack of Russian cigarettes, only a few left. My pay.
I stand up—dizzy, nauseated. My ragged clothes tumble to my feet. I stagger through the hall … into the bathroom. I throw up. My face green in the mirror, my vomit in the basin. I sit on the edge of the bathtub, without daring to flush, since I’m still gagging and there’s so little water left in the bucket.
It was at that point that Marta Hillers made her decision. She cleaned herself up a bit and went to the street to hunt for a “wolf,” a higher-ranking Soviet officer who would become her protector. She concluded it was better to be abused by just one Russian on a regular basis than by an unending string of them. Like millions of other Germans, Hillers was reaching an accommodation with an occupation she could not resist.
Only years later would researchers try to reconstruct the full horror of that time. Between the late summer and early autumn of 1945, a minimum of 110,000 women between the ages of twelve and eighty-eight had been raped. Some 40 percent of the victims were raped on multiple occasions. One in five of the rape victims became pregnant, roughly half of these gave birth, and the other half had abortions, often without anesthesia. Thousands of women killed themselves for the shame of having been raped or out of fear of being the next victims. Some 5 percent of all Berlin newborns in the following year would be “Russenbabys.” Across Germany, the number would be 150,000 to 200,000 children.
It was as these children were first becoming teenagers, in 1958, that Khrushchev would provoke what would become known as the Berlin Crisis.
West Berlin has turned into a sort of malignant tumor of fascism and revanchism. That’s why we decided to do some surgery.
Nikita Khrushchev, at his first press conference as premier, November 27, 1958
The next President in his first year is going to be confronted with a very serious question on our defense of Berlin, our commitment to Berlin. It’s going to be a test of our nerve and will. … We’re going to be face-to-face with the most serious Berlin crisis since 1949 or 1950.
Senator John F. Kennedy, in a presidential campaign debate with Vice President Richard Nixon, October 7, 1960
On an unlikely stage and before an unsuspecting audience, Nikita Khrushchev launched what the world would come to know as “the Berlin Crisis.”
Standing at the center of Moscow’s newest and grandest field house for indoor sports, the Soviet leader told a gathering of Polish communists that he planned to renounce the postwar agreements that had been the basis