September 11, 2001, Had a Paradox Meaning for the Study of the Cold
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Dissertation Cold War in Germany: The United States and East Germany, 1945-1953 Submitted to the Philosophical Faculty University of Cologne By Christian Ostermann Washington, D.C. Adviser: Prof. Dr. Norbert Finzsch 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page I Introduction 4 II “An Iron Curtain of Our Own”? The United States, the Soviet Zone, and the Division of Germany, 1945-1948 1. “Toward a Line Down the Center of Germany:” 21 Dividing Germany 2. “Western Democracy on the Elbe:” Clay’s Conception of‘ Roll-back’ in Germany 40 3. German Central Administrations: The Double-Edged Sword 53 4. “The Most Significant Event in Germany Since the Overthrow of the Nazi Regime?” The U.S. and the 1946 SPD-KPD Merger 70 5. “Trojan Horse” or “Dead Duck”? Countering the People’s Congress Movement 101 6. “Action Point Berlin” 115 7. The Soviet Zone as a “Springboard for Penetration”? 125 8. Conclusions 135 III From “Diplomatic Blockade” to Psychological Warfare: The United States and East Germany, 1948-1952 1. Moscow’s “Major Satellite”? The U.S. and the Establishment of the GDR 136 2. “Ideological Rollback:” Defining the Cold War Discourse in Germany 145 3. Preventing “Roll up:” The United States and the 1950 FDJ Deutschlandtreffen in Berlin 158 4. “Hotting Up” the Cold War 169 5. Imagining Aggressive Rollback in Germany: The Carroll-Speier Report 180 6. Target: East German Youth 199 2 7. Mobilizing East German Resistance Spirit: The U.S. Reaction to the 1952 Stalin Note in New Light 208 8. Conclusion 218 IV Economic Cold War Against the GDR 1. Beyond the Counter-Blockade: U.S. Economic Warfare 219 2. The Western Steel Embargo, 1950-1951 224 3. Designing the Industrial Cold War 244 4. Conclusion 279 V The United States and the 1953 Uprising 1. The Eisenhower Administration, Stalin’s Death and the Origins of the 1953 Crisis 286 2. “The Best Chance for Rollback?” The Eisenhower Administration and the June 1953 Unrest in the GDR 310 3. Retreat from Rollback? The Eisenhower Packages Program and the Dilemmas of Psychological Warfare 335 4. Conclusion 358 VI. Conclusion 360 VII. Archival Sources and Bibliography 366 3 I Introduction With the outbreak of widespread strikes and demonstrations in East Berlin and throughout East Germany on June 16-17, 1953, the country’s communist leaders — as well as the Soviet leadership — believed that “Day X,” the day of the long-expected Western-instigated coup d’etat against the socialist order in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had arrived. Internal GDR estimates and outward propaganda had long warned of the culmination of Western efforts to undermine the peasant-and worker state. The ruling Socialist Unity Party (best known by its German acronym SED) quickly charged that the uprising had been a “fascist provocation” hatched by American and West German “imperialist agents.” Captives of their ideological prism and predictions, Moscow quickly sought to suppress the unrest militarily and stabilize the faltering regime of East German communist party leader Walter Ulbricht. Before long, the events of 1953 would become the subject of propaganda, legends, and identity on both sides of the Cold War in Germany.1 The spontaneous strikes and demonstrations of workers, farmers, and youth against the SED regime was the first major uprising within the Soviet empire since the Kronstadt unrest in 1921. To many in the West, in particular the new administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, it seemed to demonstrate to the world that the “captive peoples” within the Soviet empire could and would oppose Stalinist rule when the opportunity arose—and that the Moscow-backed Central European communist regimes could be upheld only by military force. It seemed that the “proletariat” had risen against the “dictatorship of the proletariat;” workers and 1 See Ilse Spittmann, “Der 17. Juni im Wandel der Legenden,” Ilse Spittmann/Karl-Wilhelm Fricke, eds., Der 17 Juni 1953 (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1988), pp. 121-132; Dietmar Schiller, “Politische Gedenktage in Deutschland: Zum Verhältnis von öffentlicher Erinnerung und politischer Kultur,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B25/93 (June 1993), pp. 32-39. 17. Juni 1953: Streit um sein Wesen, ed. by Kurt Frotscher and Wolfgang Krug (Schkeuditz: GNN, 2004). 4 peasants were throwing stones at the organs of a state that had been proclaimed in their name. Politically, ideologically and diplomatically, East Germans had dealt their communist rulers and their Soviet “masters” a heavy, near mortal blow. Eisenhower would note that “I am quite certain that future historians, in their analysis of the causes which will have brought about the disintegration of the Communist Empire, will single out those brave East Germans who dared to rise against the cannons of tyranny with nothing but their bare hands and their stout hearts, as a root cause.”2 For Eisenhower, as for many of his contemporaries in East and West, the widespread rebellion against the oppressive communist government in East Germany in the summer of 1953, suppressed only by a Soviet military crackdown, was a pivotal moment in the Cold War—anticipating perhaps the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire and the dawn of the post-Cold War world. In West Germany, the unanimous condemnation of the Soviet military action resulted in the adoption of an annual “Day of German Unity.” In the German Bundestag, June 17 was hailed as “the most important event in the recent history of German democracy.”3 But even as early as the summer of 1953, the events in the East were manipulated for the political purposes of the day: for Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the uprising bolstered support for his policy of integrating the Federal Republic (FRG) with the West in the hopes of negotiating with the East some day from a position of strength.4 By contrast, for many within the Social Democratic opposition in the FRG, the revolt prompted calls for further immediate steps towards German reunification. Though its 2 Draft letter from the President to Chancellor Adenauer, 20 July 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (Abilene, KS), C.D. Jackson Records, Box 3; The New York Times, 26 July 1953. 3 Deutscher Bundestag delegate Stefan Meier on 3 July 1953 in the parliamentary debate on the law; Deutscher Bundestag, ed., Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages, Stenographische Berichte, First Legislative Period, 280th Session, p. 14070, quoted in Edgar Wolfrum, “Kein Sedantag gloreicher Erinnerung: Der Tag der Deutschen Einheit in der alten Bundesrepublik,” Deutschland Archiv (1998), p. 434. See also Matthias Fritton, Die Rhetorik der Deutschlandpolitik: Eine Untersuchung deutschlandpolitischer Rhetorik der Regierungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Reden anlässlich des gedenkens an den 17. Juni 1953 (Stuttgart: M&P, 1998). 4 “The Eisenhower Administration, the Adenauer Government, and the Political Uses of East German Uprising in 1953,” Diplomatic History (1996), pp. 381-409. 5 emotional appeal would deflate over time, the interpretation of the June 17 events as a popular uprising became part of the legitimizing raison d’etre of the young Federal Republic.5 Though the events of June 1953 had nearly swept away his regime, SED leader and GDR deputy premier Walter Ulbricht, too, soon managed to turn the crisis into an advantage: Blaming the unrest on Western machinations served as an extraordinarily useful pretext for eliminating the challenge that had arisen to his own rule within the communist party leadership and any oppositional elements within East German society. In the wake of his regime’s gravest crisis, Ulbricht instrumentalized his version of the events to expand dramatically the very means of repression that had helped, in part, to generate the crisis and to stage what has been called “the second founding” of the GDR.6 Public discussion and historical research into the deeper causes of the unrest remained a taboo in East Germany for years to come.7 After Ulbricht’s death in 1973, and increasingly in the 1980s, some East German historians tried to give a more differentiated, less grossly distorted picture of what had happened. Nonetheless, the idea that “Day X” had been a U.S.-instigated plot remained the predominant interpretation. Former Soviet and SED 5 Over the years, official statements and public commemorations in West Germany on the “Day of German Unity” became a rather precise barometer of the dominant strain of Deutschlandpolitik of the day. Progressively, the memory of June 17 faded and lost its emotional appeal. Against the backdrop of détente, Ostpolitik, and the seeming permanence of Germany’s division in late 1960s and 1970s, many West Germans increasingly wondered whether to commemorate June 17 at all. At the same time, curiously, the student movement and German Left began to discover 1953 and interpret it according to their own conceptions--as a failed attempt at class struggle by East German workers against the all-German state- capitalist (East) and bourgeois (West) elites. Rudi Dutschke, “Der Kommunismus, die despotische Verfremdung desselben und der Weg der DDR zum Arbeiteraufstand vom 17. Juni 1953,” Die Sowjetunion, Solschenizyn und die westliche Linke, ed. Rudi Dutschke and Manfred Wilke, (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1975); see also Alexander Gallus, “Der 17. Juni im Deutschen Bundestag von 1954 bis 1990,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B25/93 (June 1993), pp. 12-21. 6 This is the main thesis maintained in Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, eds., Der Tag X -17: Juni 1953. Die „Innere Staatsgründung" der DDR als Ergebnis der Krise 1952/54. (Berlin: Links, 21996). 7 Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Die Historiker der DDR und der 17. Juni 1953,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 44 (1993), pp. 704-724; Ilko- Sascha Kowalczuk, Legitimation eines neuen Staates. Parteiarbeiter an der historischen Front: Geschichtswissenschaft in der SBZ/DDR 1945 bis 1961 (Berlin: Links, 1997); Alexander Fischer and Günther Heydemann, eds., Geschichtswissenschaft in der DDR, 2 vols.