Ulbricht: Ten Years After Stalin
SHANOR, DONALD R.
A TALE OF SURVIVAL Ulbricht: Ten Years After Stalin By Donald R. Shanor "A lot of gossip," Nikita Khrushchev said, preceded his arrival in East Berlin in January for the Sixth Congress of...
...gutted the opposition Christian Democratic and Liberal Democratic parties through leadership purges, vote rigging and police terror...
...Sealed behind the concrete and barbed wire of the Berlin wall, encircled by mine fields, machine-gun posts and watchtowers, Ulbricht's 17 million subjects know they can be shot if they are caught trying to escape, or imprisoned if they are caught planning to...
...Moscow cannot afford the risk of a German Tito—a leader who will not put Moscow's requirements before the welfare of his nation...
...He generally does not like to acknowledge this...
...These actions were part of Khrushchev's second campaign against the legacy of Stalin, which began at the 22nd Soviet Congress in October 1961 and, in January of this year, still showed no sign of easing off...
...The orders were to go slow at the start...
...Ulbricht is a cabinetmaker and I am a mechanic by trade...
...Privately, Ulbricht gave his Gruppe another explanation, according to one of its members now in the West, Wolfgang Leonhard...
...Walter Ulbricht joined the Communist party of Germany in 1919, a few months after its founding...
...It would be wrong to force the Soviet system on Germany," the Party said in its founding proclamation in 1945...
...In wiping out Trotskyism, they also eliminated the last traces of dissent or independence in the Party, and made it easy to impose whatever pattern the Soviets chose for postwar East Germany...
...Ulbricht managed to escape to Paris, and once there began outdistancing the remaining competition...
...Thus there was good reason for the gossip Khrushchev mentioned, "about our aims toward the German party, about our relations with Comrade Ulbricht...
...Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck helped Stalin Bolshevize the Party, ending its feuds but also most of its independence...
...He will have no one to turn to if Khrushchev finally decides that Ulbricht is, after all, a Stalinist...
...In any open competition for power, he was a poor bet...
...After 1933, when the Nazis smashed the Party and scattered its leadership in exile and prison, it became easier for Moscow to push Ulbricht ahead...
...Russia was weak from the War, Western intentions were unclear, and the Communists were going to need the help of the middle classes in Germany...
...He was also showing that, because it suits him now, he can put off Ulbricht's reckoning with de-Stalinization...
...But the rumors proved to be false, at least for the present...
...He praised him, and even managed to link their stout frames in embrace...
...It's quite clear," he told them, "it's got to look democratic, but we must have everything under our control" (Child of the Revolution, Chicago, 1958...
...A Socialist and trade unionist during his prewar career as a woodworker, he became a Communist during the war, deserted from the army, and joined a revolutionary soldiers' council...
...Stalin found more useful work for the National Committee as the end of the War approached...
...Logically, the next in line for demotion was Ulbricht, the goateed former cabinetmaker and Party bureaucrat who, with Rumania's Gheorghi Gheorghiu-Dej, is the last of the men Stalin had put in power in Eastern Europe...
...Ours is a common path...
...Ulbricht can fill the jails and seal the borders, but he cannot order morale to rise or legislate production-line efficiency...
...Ulbricht next went to Spain, not to fight but to purge Trotskyites from the ranks of the Communist volunteers...
...Ulbricht and I are friends...
...Khrushchev was showing he has the right to say, as Hermann Goering is supposed to have said about Jews he wanted to make use of: "I decide who the Stalinists are...
...Paunchy, whispy-haired, with large nostrils, a squint, and a weak chin that was not hidden in those days by his imitation Lenin beard, he charmed no crowds, defied no tyrants...
...His path to the top was the same as Stalin's: through the labyrinth of the Party organization...
...These names and addresses fell into the hands of the Gestapo...
...In rapid succession, the Communist party swallowed up the Social Democrats, forming the Socialist Unity party through forced fusion...
...In fact, he was the first satellite leader to denounce Stalin after Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956...
...He has the shrill voice and pedantic manner of an old-fashioned schoolteacher...
...and last summer it resulted in the expulsion of Hungary's two chief Stalinists, Matyas Rakosi and Erno Gero, from the Party...
...Khrushchev's second reason for letting Ulbricht stay on is the danger of experimenting with liberalization in East Germany, particularly now that the Berlin wall has shut off the safety valve for discontent, reducing escapes from thousands a week to a handful...
...He has two good reasons for doing so at this time...
...Ulbricht told his Berlin audiences, which must have been more interested in food rations, that they were "completing the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution of 1848" by supporting a mixed Communistdemocratic regime...
...the majority of them fell victim to the great purge...
...Where other satellite leaders have purged their secret police, Ulbricht has made few changes...
...In turn, Stalin helped them become its leaders...
...Buber-Neumann writes...
...about the same time, it forced faint promises of reform from the Czech Communist party Congress...
...His highest Party post before Hitler was district leader of Berlin-Brandenburg...
...One of the leading figures of the exile Party, Margarete Buber-Neumann, whose husband Heinz was a purge victim, has charged Ulbricht used both the Soviet GPU and the Nazi Gestapo to speed his rise to the top...
...And Khrushchev has had enough experience recently with another maverick Communist in Cuba to appreciate Ulbricht's qualities as a Communist Organization Man...
...With such strong opposition, Ulbricht had slow going...
...Their last such attempt, in the weeks after Stalin's death, only sharpened the East Germans' appetites for more freedom, and they poured into the streets in the hot June days of 1953 to hurl stones at Soviet tanks, burn Party offices and rip down pictures of Ulbricht...
...We are together against exploiters, joined for the unity of the working class...
...That was the moment Ulbricht had waited for," Mrs...
...Whatever Ulbricht's part in the purges, Khrushchev must realize that the liquidation of the German leadership was not altogether a bad thing for Stalin and his successors...
...I never saw him on a barricade in Saxony...
...With Ulbricht beaming at his side, the Soviet leader said the rumors were "not worth speculating about...
...1948), Ruth Fischer, a former German Party leader, charges that in his drive for doctrinal purity in the trenches political commissar Ulbricht sent many veteran Communists to prison and torture...
...According to Mrs...
...gained economic control through a free-swinging definition of "Nazi war criminals," whose property was confiscated...
...So it was that on April 30, 1945, when the 10-member Gruppe Ulbricht flew in a Soviet military plane to Bruckmuhle, Red Army political headquarters east of Berlin, it was on orders to establish a "bourgeois-democratic," and not a Communist, government...
...Always in the background was the Red Army, supplying a note of unreality to the political process...
...But here the radical phase of his career ended...
...But the Communist leaders know it is hard to make concessions and keep control...
...Remarkably, they almost all were Communists who did not stand on Ulbricht's side," she writes...
...Ulbricht prefers to think of himself as a fighter in the Communist uprisings of the period, and his official biographer, the late poet Johannes R. Becher, says he was at the barricades, "as a picture still shows today...
...The Soviet Premier's first reason is that he still needs Ulbricht as his faithful agent in Berlin...
...He produced his own documents and exposed his rivals as liars...
...The tanks crushed the revolt, the few concessions that Ulbricht handed out soon disappeared, and today, 10 years afterward...
...They provided not only the protection for this great transformation, but also gave help and guidance for the solution of all complicated political, economic, cultural and organizational problems...
...and steadily pushed out the last independent officials in the administration and courts...
...Of course, Ulbricht has long since stopped referring to Stalin as "our wise teacher, our leader of genius...
...Ulbricht's bourgeois phase did not last long...
...Stalin picked out Ulbricht in 1924 or 1925, at a time when Moscow was seeking to impose stability on the quarrelling, faction-ridden German Party...
...But East Germany's economic stagnation remains a crucial problem for Khrushchev's program of overwhelming the West through the industrial expansion of the Communist world...
...At the same time, though, he has gone on running his nation as though Stalin had never died...
...When Khrushchev unveiled his plans to overtake the United States in farm and industrial production, Ulbricht quickly declared that his State would overtake West Germany...
...And Ulbricht is so thoroughly identified with Stalin, from the 1920s to the present, that it is difficult to see how any genuine program of de-Stalinization could stop short of him...
...We were supported in our hard struggle by the officers of the Soviet Army with all their power," Ulbricht wrote...
...As a Communist functionary in his native Leipzig, Ulbricht became a part of the Party bureaucracy, which at the time extended in a chain, by way of Berlin, to Moscow...
...Ulbricht spent most of World War II far behind the lines in Russia, enlisting prisoners of war in the National Committee for a Free Germany, a propaganda group of genuine anti-Nazis, opportunists and Communists which served as a laboratory model for the later occupation Government...
...He was also sent to the Stalingrad front, in the ear-flapped hat and bulky overcoat of the Soviet Army, to man the propaganda loudspeakers aimed at the German lines and appeal to the soldiers to desert...
...Ulbricht won Stalin's gratitude and new Comintern assignments, but at home he was called "Comrade Cell" and his direct links with Moscow were widely resented...
...They have not been produced, despite the recent promise of the Czech Party to re-examine the purge trials of the 1950s, and Khrushchev's declaration little more than a year ago that "the Central Committee . . . could not possibly take the line of concealing or hushing up past errors and distortions . . . the results would have been a cleavage between Party and people, grave violations of Soviet democracy and revolutionary legality...
...In 1935, when the Comintern summoned the Germans to find out why the anti-Hitler resistance was failing, Ulbricht let the other leaders set their own trap by reading their inflated reports...
...The gossip concerned the future of Walter Ulbricht, East German head of state and Party First Secretary, and his curious immunity from the current Soviet de-Stalinization campaign: Only weeks before the East German Congress, this cost Bulgarian Premier Anton Yugov his job...
...To be sure, all these accounts come from Ulbricht's enemies and none of them is documented...
...the second-ranking man, Johnny Schehr, was shot...
...Buber-Neumann reports, too, that when Communist agents inside Germany began to disappear with alarming frequency, an investigation showed Ulbricht had circulated blacklists of "Trotskyites" among the underground Party members...
...recently, in fact, Pankow has attempted to borrow money from the Bonn Government...
...In her book, Stalin and German Communism (Cambridge...
...To the German Communists emerging from the underground or freed from concentration camps, the triumphal entry of Soviet tanks into Berlin signified the birth of the German Soviet Republic, a goal they had fought for since 1918...
...While Khrushchev is making the nighttime knock on the door a thing of the past in the Soviet Union, Ulbricht has brought it back in the Soviet Zone...
...Party chief Ernst Thaelmann was sent to a concentration camp (where he died in 1944...
...But records that could condemn or clear him undoubtedly exist in Moscow...
...For all his firm control of the nation, he appears helpless before the problems of its seriously faltering economy...
...East Germans make no secret to visiting Westerners that, whatever features of their state they would seek to retain if given the chance for change, "the Beard must go...
...Postwar records demonstrate, in fact, that more German Communists fell victim to the Moscow and Spanish purges than to the Gestapo...
...Almost all his opponents were denied exit visas...
...Khrushchev did not demote, dismiss or disgrace Ulbricht when he arrived in East Berlin...
...This goal has been quietly dropped...
...If Moscow had not intervened, Ulbricht probably would have gotten no further than his Party desk job in Leipzig...
...But in an official study of working-class history published last fall, he admitted the help these "Soviet Communists in uniform" had given him...
...They were shocked and angry to find that Walter Ulbricht, newly returned from comfortable exile in Moscow, branded their goal a Leftist deviation and gave orders that "this must be condemned as a dangerous tendency...
...Khrushchev has shown little hesitancy in purging his own Republic premiers and Party leaders for economic failures...
...Will this mean de-Ulbrichtization...
...No matter how strong the opposition or unpopular the measure, Ulbricht had his permanent majority—22 Soviet divisions...
...East Germany is worse off than before...
...And Ulbricht, even more than GheorghiuDej, owes his rise from the lower ranks to Stalin's intervention...
...Donald R. Shanor, a new contributor,recently completed a five-year tour as UPI correspondent in Germany...
...Buber-Neumann's account in her book (Von Potsdam Nach Moskau, Stuttgart, 1958), Ulbricht maintained his own network of agents in Germany who quietly collected information on the weakness of the underground Party, while Hermann Schubert and other leaders wrote glowing reports to Moscow about the Party's strength...
...Their method was to replace the old neighborhood Party groups, where issues could be fought out in debate, with Soviet-type factory cells, designed only to carry out decisions from the top...
...Mrs...
...Ulbricht, Pieck—who by then had become a figurehead—and about 150 others began planning for the occupation...
...He has no independent support outside of Moscow...
...A TALE OF SURVIVAL Ulbricht: Ten Years After Stalin By Donald R. Shanor "A lot of gossip," Nikita Khrushchev said, preceded his arrival in East Berlin in January for the Sixth Congress of the East German Socialist Unity party...
...It is not wrong to assume Ulbricht purposely played into the hands of the Gestapo...
...But the picture is not among the many illustrating the biography, and Max Hoelz, one of the real leaders of the fighting in central Germany, once said of Ulbricht's claims: "The man is a coward and a liar...
...What helped Ulbricht then could harm him now...
Vol. 46 • March 1963 • No. 6
