Threat & Counter-threat

"The day after the war treaty is signed," East Germany's Communist Vice Premier Walter Ulbricht had warned, "Berlin will know the consequences." Puppet Ulbricht proved as good as his word.

The first Communist move was to cut telephone connections between allied West Berlin and the Soviet zone. Meanwhile, on the edges of West Berlin, an army of axmen and ditchdiggers fell to work digging trenches, rearing up piles of dirt and felling trees to seal off the roads leading out of the city. Soviet guards barred U.S. and British military police patrols from the highways connecting isolated West Berlin and West Germany--but did not stop the vital supply traffic itself on the Autobahn. "On June 1," came an official East German announcement, "travel in the German Democratic [i.e., Communist] Republic will be permitted only to those who have personal identification issued by the German Democratic Republic."

The Barrier. All up & down the long border separating East & West in Germany, Communist Volkspolizei were busy clearing out an "isolation belt" three miles wide. Farmers and their families were ordered from their homes and moved eastward, bag & baggage. In the Harz Mountain village of Hoetensleben, some 2,000 inhabitants were ordered to pack up and get out within four hours. A farmer near Huenfeld, ordered to cut down his orchard, burn his house and move east, loaded his wife & children on a farm wagon, tied his cows on behind and fled to the West. The police had orders to shoot on sight anyone found in the first eleven yards of the isolation belt. Life in the bordering belts was hedged with a strict curfew from dusk to dawn.

On the Communist side of the belt, at a rally in Leipzig of 100,000 members of the Free German Youth, blue-shirted German youngsters gathered beneath the strident flags and posters of Communism to cheer the "glorious Soviet army" and sing their newest song: Get Your Gluts, Comrades. East Germany, the Russians were assured, is doing everything possible "to develop the military qualifications of our youth." Meanwhile "police" recruiting was stepped up. East German factories were ordered to stop hiring men under 25. These were encouraged to join the police.

The Guaranty. These signs were ominous enough, but for all of their menacing gestures the Russians stopped just short of the real provocation: shutting off all traffic to the 2,000,000 West Berliners, who occupy an island of freedom 100 miles beyond the Western frontier. Perhaps, by a sort of creeping blockade, they hoped to choke off Berlin inch by inch, in such a way that the West would have a hard time finding the crucial point to make a stand. At any rate, beneath the bluster, there was a canny control at work too--as if the Russians hoped to achieve the maximum of mischief short of war.

It was a dangerous game, in which both sides recognized the stake. In a gesture as gallant as it was spectacular, Britain's Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden flew in to blockaded Berlin to address the city government. "Threats," he told them, "are the stock in trade of those who lack confidence. Calm and resolution are the mark of those who seek peace. We know that you Berliners have the right to be free and that we have the right to be with you here." The allied Foreign Ministers, Eden added pointedly, had-just reaffirmed in Paris that "any attack against Berlin from any quarter will be treated as an attack upon themselves." No other city in the free world is so specifically protected.

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