Free The Berlin Wall by Frederick Taylor

Commission into an Allied government for the whole of the country, and at first discouraged German self-government. France continued to lay claim to the German-speaking Saar industrial area, as well as to control of the Rhineland and the mighty Ruhr industrial basin. Fiercely opposed, for patriotic reasons, to Soviet interference in their sector, they were unprepared to join the Anglo-Americans in standing up for the rights of Berliners in the face of increasingly blatant power-plays by the East and its agents. 20
    For the meantime, anyway, many Westerners persuaded themselves that these excesses were oversights, the result of Soviet inexperience in running a modern city.
    Political life began to revive in the Soviet Zone. Ulbricht hoped that the SPD’s erstwhile supporters would flock to the KPD, attracted by its dynamism and its closeness to the Soviet occupiers. 21 He was wrong. The SPD re-formed very quickly and within weeks had branches all over the Soviet Zone. Many on the left of the SPD had become so excited by the heady atmosphere of liberation that they started campaigning for the ‘reunification’ of the German workers’ movement. In the 1930s, it was the split on the Left that had handed power to the Nazis. Never again!

    Ulbricht’s team dutifully followed Stalin’s orders and kept its distance. To retain an element of control, however, Ulbricht proposed joint policy committees in which they would discuss how best to rebuild Germany in a democratic, socialist fashion. The SPD agreed.
    The middle-class parties were also encouraged to re-form. They would be invited to join the KPD in a post-war ‘block’. In the case of the Liberal Party (LDPD), the ‘bourgeois democrats’ were slow to get going. ‘Walter, what can I do?’ complained Richard Gyptner, the apparatchik charged with co-ordinating this. ‘They talk a lot, but don’t seem that keen on founding a party.’ ‘Well, Richard, just give them a good talking to,’ Ulbricht replied sternly. On 5 July 1945, the Liberal Democratic Party was founded in Berlin, following the establishment of the centre-right Christian Democrat Union (CDU) on 25 June.
    On 14 July, the ‘Unity Front of the Anti-Fascist Democratic Parties’ was announced. It comprised five representatives each from KPD, CDU, SPD and LDPD. Ulbricht’s pseudo-democratic edifice stood in place. Two years later, the finishing touch was added by the creation of the National Democratic Party (NDPD), a home for repentant small-fish ex-Nazis and ex-militarists who wanted their sins forgiven and a role in the ‘building of socialism’. 22
    The trick was that, although the KPD would appear to be just one party among equals, it was in fact the only political group within the ‘Unity Front’ that had the ear of the all-powerful SMA. Ulbricht met with senior Soviet officials every day. Without these officials—and therefore without him—nothing happened in the Soviet Zone.
    This was the situation the Western Allies faced: a ‘block’ of superficially independent parties, a Berlin city administration fronted by democratic and/or bourgeois figures, but with shadowy, Soviet-controlled groups in the background.
    In November, elections were held in Hungary and Austria, where similar ‘blocks’ existed under Soviet auspices. Local Communists did badly and the bourgeois and moderate-left parties very well. The hope that Soviet nominees would sweep all before them as part of a natural historical process was seen to be mistaken. A worried Soviet official told Ulbricht that if they wanted to avoid the ‘Austrian danger’, they would need to take a more forceful attitude towards non-Communists. 23

    Soon came a policy change. In late January 1946, Ulbricht again flew to Moscow. Stalin now told him that a merger between KPD and SPD must be achieved at all costs. The process was to be completed by the symbolic date of 1 May 1946.
    Leftist Social Democrats such as Otto Grotewohl were in favour, and