Soviet Satrap in East Germany
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
A Profile of WALTER ULBRICHT Soviet Satrap in EAST Germany By Richard C. Hottelet ON THE MORNING of June 17, 1953, the people of East Berlin poured into the streets, filled the dead...
...Others were fooled by appeals to the unity of the working class...
...It called for Premier Otto Grotewohl and especially for Ulbricht...
...But he once did say that he had "never had the honor...
...His sovereign gestures at mass meetings, his endless speeches and his short temper are not comic only because everyone, ally or adversary, knows he represents Soviet power...
...In collaboration with other nationalist groups, they engineered a demand for a popular initiative to compel the deposition of the Prussian Government...
...Tauroggen, etc...
...He is widely, and probably correctly, considered to be a Soviet citizen, having come back to Germany with the assimilated rank of colonel in the Red Army...
...When the KPD was torn by another internal struggle in 1931, Ulbricht sided with neither faction...
...It is no accident that Nikita Khrushchev has established a special relationship with Ulbricht and the German satellite...
...He applauded Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party, which demoted Stalin, and claimed the support of the liberal factions in the SED until the propitious moment came to purge them, too...
...After a long stay in Moscow, he declared that the Western powers no longer had any right to be in Berlin...
...To avoid appearing ambitious for himself, he supported a paternal looking windbag, Wilhelm Pieck, as leader...
...Walter Ulbricht holds East Germany for the Kremlin...
...Special squads were formed to derail trolley cars and terrorize the employees...
...Limited, dogmatic and suspicious in his outlook, still the intriguer at the center of an organizational net...
...They had fought the French together in the Ruhr...
...There also is reliable evidence that, barring release, the Communists themselves had a workable scheme to rescue Thaelmann from Moabit prison...
...In the successive riots, putsches, small civil wars and paramilitary campaigns that racked the Weimar Republic in its first five years, other men argued conflicting points of doctrine, led strikes and manned the barricades...
...The Soviets know whom they are trusting...
...When they do...
...A few hours later, the Russians took over...
...Ulbricht did not commit himself...
...Meanwhile, however, the West must reckon with Ulbricht as the European cornerstone of the Soviet bloc and as the springboard for the Kremlin's political offensive...
...20 abreast, chanting: "Wir fordern freie Wahlen" (We demand free elections...
...Walter Karl Ernst Ulbricht, born in Leipzig on June 30, 1893...
...Any doubt of this has been removed by his latest trip to Moscow with Grotewohl and 16 East German Party and Government officials...
...He has more than once been handed the starter's pistol...
...The goatee is the distinguishing external feature of Walter Ulbricht, Moscow's man in Germany...
...But Ulbricht was undismayed and made his next move toward personal power...
...Neither appeared...
...Soviet leaders have always relied on full control rather than confidence...
...In the past 13 years Walter Ulbricht, now First Secretary of the SED and boss of East Germany under the nominal President, Wilhelm Pieck, has spent much of his time weeding out those who have become disillusioned...
...By its side stood a counterfeit Christian Democratic Union, a Liberal Democratic party, a dim peasant party and the National Democratic party, which appealed especially to former Nazis and nationalists...
...In the Soviet Committee for Economic Cooperation, which coordinates the satellite economies in terms of Soviet needs...
...brought together the main characteristics of his political career—the people's hatred, his position of strength behind the scenes, his absolute dependence on the Soviets and their reliance upon him to do their work...
...All of Berlin comes under the sovereignty of the German Democratic Republic...
...A year later, he openly called upon the German workers to support Hitler's war against Britain and France: "The revolutionary workers and the progressive forces in Germany do not want to exchange their present regime for a national and social repression through British imperialism and through the British-oriented circles of German big capital...
...Turning south through the Gate, this group joined the sea of furious humanity outside Goering's old Air Ministry, now the cabinet offices of the Soviet Zone regime...
...His receding chin is filled out by a Lenin-type goatee, and his rather fleshy lips curve only infrequently in an almost semicircular smile...
...And he was not noticed until 1924...
...From that time on, he was one of the annointed...
...In the light of the Communists' normal conspiratorial procedure, this was, at very least, criminal negligence...
...But the Social Democrats of Berlin and West Germany refused to be either bribed or duped into joining a suicidal Socialist Unity Party (SED) with the Communists...
...Later he told a New York Times correspondent: "The Western allies have no lines of communication through the territory of the German Democratic Republic...
...On that day, Ulbricht had sent Kattner to Thaelmann, who was hiding out from the Gestapo, with a batch of party mail...
...He joined the Social Democratic party and broke away from it with the Communists after World War I. By then he was a professional revolutionary, a diligent worker in the paper bowels of the apparat...
...There is just as little doubt about the present Foreign Minister, Lothar Bolz, who was long resident in the USSR...
...the eyes seldom go along and the spectacle suggests a man-eating shark...
...He was never arrested, never persecuted, never embroiled in the multifarious illegal doings that were properly part of his life's work...
...apprenticed as a carpenter but practiced his trade for only a few years...
...These were decisive years for Germany...
...Gaining a place on the victory delegation to Moscow was no problem and as part of this group he had his first meeting with Stalin, a conference in the latter's study...
...After Hitler's victory on January 30, 1933, Ulbricht rationalized the debacle in the following slogan: "The important thing is the revolutionary mass in the SA (storm troops) and not social democracy...
...The depression was at its height...
...If we want to travel or fly to Washington, we must secure the permission of those states whose territory we cross...
...Another campaign was the notorious Berlin wildcat transport strike in 1932...
...Communists and nationalists had joined hands before in opposing the American plans for German economic rehabilitation...
...There are traffic routes through the German Democratic Republic which have hitherto been used by the Western allies and which could be used under certain conditions to be agreed upon with the Government of the DDR...
...Even Thaelmann was against it...
...Both the Nazis and the Communists were grasping for power...
...Once again, it seeks to stimulate an "East-orientation" in terms of the common German-Russian fight against Napoleon, Rapallo...
...By 1950 the SED had emerged as a "party of the new type": a party that is rigidly organized and centrally controlled, following the Soviet model...
...But in all his twisting and turning with the party line, Ulbricht has shown himself to be a hard-core, reactionary Communist...
...The Nazis' sour experience with Georgi Dimitrov and the Reichstag fire show trial left them with no great appetite for more of the same...
...On March 3, the Gestapo arrested Ernst Thaelmann in Berlin, betrayed by an agent named Kattner who was a KPD member...
...While the Western powers were striving for military victory and the defeat of every vestige of German aggressive nationalism, Walter Ulbricht was the guiding light of the Soviet-sponsored National Free Germany Committee and the League of German Officers, who proclaimed at their founding conference, "An honorable peace for a people can only mean that its armed forces are not destroyed...
...He himself fled to Prague...
...By 1946, the revived KPD swallowed up the Social Democrats in East Germany...
...But Ulbricht and his territory have a political role to play as well...
...One after another, Ulbricht's competitors were picked up...
...But Ulbricht vetoed it because Thaelmann was worth more to him and the party as a martyr than in exile...
...Manuilsky sent him to work in the Organizational Division of the Comintern in Moscow...
...I saw one great contingent swinging down Unter den Linden toward the Brandenburg Gate...
...With Thaelmann in prison, a struggle for succession began in the Communist underground...
...But Ulbricht's brand of German nationalism is only one of various means to an end which he has never lost sight of...
...The execution of Soviet strategy in the next active phase of the Berlin crisis will be in his hands...
...But Stalin, reaffirming that the Communists' main enemy was not the Nazis but the Social Democrats, ordered the KPD to support the initiative...
...He relies in the last analysis only on the realities of physical power...
...Some men, like Otto Grotewohl, were bought with prestige and privilege...
...the other is West-oriented and is headed by Thyssen...
...Red or brown, the action collapsed when a disgusted electorate refused to be roped in...
...In a time which was tumultuous to the point of insanity, when Germany was the chief ideological battleground of crusading Communism, Ulbricht was an expert at organization...
...And, of course, behind the scenes, practical cooperation between the Red Army and the Reichswehr was an old story...
...When he returned to Germany on a short trip and persuaded the German Communist party (KPD) to switch to the cell system, he endeared himself to Moscow...
...He waited things out for a year, until it was clear that Thaelmann had won, then he sided with the winner...
...He had an explanation for the non-aggression pact as he had for everything else: "Within the German bourgeoisie there are two wings: one is East-oriented and is headed by Goering...
...A Profile of WALTER ULBRICHT Soviet Satrap in EAST Germany By Richard C. Hottelet ON THE MORNING of June 17, 1953, the people of East Berlin poured into the streets, filled the dead formalism of the new Stalinallee with shouting, angry life and set out in tens of thousands for the seat of the Communist Government...
...The KGB, the Committee for State Security, has in its hands the dossier that the Comintern began compiling 35 years ago on the man it knows as Walter Adolfevich Ulbricht...
...He is the satrap, carrying out orders from on high, but supreme in his province...
...This is Communist supremacy in Central and Western Europe, in which he shall be a major instrument...
...There, and later in Paris where he ran the KPD's headquarters in exile, he played his cards with customary caution...
...His voice is high-pitched, and, colored with the accent of his native Saxony, his speech tickles the average German as thick Brooklynese amuses us...
...At the opening ceremony, Ulbricht entered the hall in second place, behind Communist China's Premier Chou En-lai...
...he turned his undeniable talents to removing all those who stood in the way of greater prominence...
...There is no doubt that, despite these and other singular marks of favor, the KGB dossier on Walter Adolfevich Ulbricht is being expanded with material that is other than complimentary...
...As the most highly industrialized member of the bloc, together with Czechoslovakia, this program is of special interest...
...Ulbricht refused...
...Thus Ulbricht survived a day which RICHARD C. HOTTELET, Columbia Broadcasting System commentator, reported from Germany for many years...
...In 1931 the Nazis launched their offensive against the last bulwark of democracy in Germany, the Social Democratic State Government of Prussia...
...The brand of nationalism which Ulbricht and Bolz utilize appeals to old German ambitions in an almost quaint fashion...
...The convulsions that followed Stalin's death, the 17th of June, the uprisings in Poznan and Hungary, the bloodless revolution in Poland and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's seesaw struggle for supremacy have never found him at a loss...
...Ulbricht knew who belonged to what faction and had recorded every useful fact about the leading members' strengths and weaknesses...
...Only for appearance sake were other political parties allowed to form in the Soviet Zone...
...At first, he disclaimed his real intention...
...Old Wehrmacht generals have helped to build up the new Workers and Peasants Army of Communist East Germany: the Administration is full of former Nazis who have found it easier to switch from the brown to the red dictatorship than to make their way with a handicap in a free society...
...But Ulbricht continued his united-front policy with the Nazis...
...Hitler, of course, suppressed the KPD and sent its leaders to prison or into hiding...
...And when he returned to Germany before V-E Day, at the head of a group of specialists who were to communize the Soviet occupation zone, Ulbricht brought a full measure of nationalist appeals with him...
...Proof that Walter Ulbricht spoke for the Kremlin, as he has done so many times in the past 30 years on German affairs, is the reception accorded him last January at the 21st Congress of the Soviet Communist party...
...He stands where he does not upon brilliance of theory or courage in action but as the servant of the Communist party...
...But he also made certain that Thaelmann would never reappear to upset his calculations...
...There were indications that the Nazis were ready to let him go, provided the Paris KPD headquarters stopped propagandizing his imminent trial...
...Walter Ulbricht has been more than a spectator in this political tug of war...
...He joined Stalin in the anti-Tito campaign after 1948 and used the witch hunt that followed the Rudolf Slan-sky trial to purge some of his own adversaries...
...Stalin's order provoked serious debate in the KPD Politburo...
...Their tanks crushed the uprising in Berlin and in the remainder of East Germany, to which it had spread...
...The Nazis and Communists even formed a secret combined command in their assault on the Social Democratic city administration through the municipal transit system...
...As a truck-load of bewildered patrolling Soviet troops passed, the crowd shook its collective fist at the Soviets and bellowed : "Es hat ja keinen Zweck, der Spitzbart, der muss weg...
...he is frankly contemptuous of those who spread Communism by persuasion...
...whose program of Stalinist repression had provoked this eruption...
...All of Berlin," he said, "lies in the territory of the German Democratic Republic...
...As a "People's Democracy," East Germany operated with a multiplicity of parties, but they all moved in the lock-step of Ulbricht's leadership...
...In that year, when it had become plain that the Bolshevik Revolution would not spread, the Comintern sent Dimitry Manuilsky to clean up the factional snarl in the German party and to find a new leadership that would be loyal to Moscow...
...If appearances meant anything to the men who manipulate the Soviet machine, Walter Adolfevich would not have got very far...
...For Moscow this line was quite consistent...
...Last October, two full weeks before Khrushchev made the Berlin crisis official, Ulbricht signalled its coming...
...Thaelmann could have been freed: the KPD organization was smashed and he personally was of no great account...
...Nothing about Ulbricht's person inspires respect or confidence...
...It is exactly the same for anyone travelling or flying from Washington to Berlin...
...During the period of the Nazi-Soviet alliance, significantly enough, when Moscow could have had Thaelmann released and exchanged for the asking, neither Stalin nor Ulbricht made any such move...
...The 30 Soviet divisions in East Germany are more than enough to remove him, even as they were adequate to save him in 1953...
...But in concentrating on the smallest unit, he came to know the whole of the Communist party structure...
...Today...
...Nor can he claim intellectual prestige...
...Ulbricht has survived every change and every mistake...
...The Nazis had become the second largest party after the Social Democratic party (SPD), with the Communists third...
...No, no, no, the Goatee's got to go...
...But Ul-bricht had been told by the party's security chief that Kattner was suspect...
...East Germany is to expand its chemical, petrochemical, fine machinery and shipbuilding industries...
...more the skilled and trusted artisan than the unthinking tool...
...Of medium height, with mean little eyes and mustard-colored hair that now forms a grizzled fringe around his bald head, he is not an impressive figure...
...Ulbricht, however, did not hesitate to toe the party line and cheerfully joined the Nazis in calling for a "Red Initiative...
...The drunken scene in the great Kremlin palace, when Khrushchev kissed Ulbricht after the signing of the Soviet-East German treaty in 1955, was only a somewhat maudlin index of East Germany's importance in the Soviet scheme of things...
...He found Ernst Thaelmann to be the new front man and also discovered Walter Ulbricht as someone who knew where all the strings led and how to pull them...
...We are of the opinion," he said, "that it would be wrong to force the Soviet system on Germany...
...During his stay, he was honored in distinct fashion and then sent on his way with a special farewell...
...Walter Ulbricht prided himself on having helped direct a common struggle with, as he put it, workers who wore the brown shirts of Hitler's storm troops...
...The Communist rank and file opposed the scheme...
...Ulbricht was assigned to the office of "Cell Affairs" and plunged into this dismal field with such verve that he earned the nickname of Comrade Cell...
...Ulbricht was presumably calling for the intervention of the Soviet troops...
...Meanwhile, they were emharrassed by a worldwide Communist-front campaign which even had tugs pulling barges off the beachfront at Coney Island with huge signs reading "Free Thaelmann...
...A bizarre touch is the unmistakeable Russian inflection, which turns his turgid sentences into a whining sing-song...
...the democratic system was unable to cope with it...
...It is documented by the Soviet insistence, fur the past five years or more, that the problem of German reunification could be solved only with Western acceptance of East Germany as an equal of the Western German Federal Republic...
...In the struggle between these two wings, we support the East-oriented people against the West-oriented people...
...Over the years...
...He has been engaged in the business of Communist nationalism at least since the Free Germany Committee was formed after the battle of Stalingrad and, more recently, organized the National Democratic party...
...Between 1939 and 1941, Ulbricht reverted easily to his earlier policy of collaboration with the Nazis...
...But every essential act made it clear that his mission was just this...
Vol. 42 • June 1959 • No. 25
