The Coffinmaker

(See cover)

Among the hundreds of German and Austrian Communists who went to Spain in the '30s to fight in the civil war, the man to fear most was a taciturn, cold-eyed German named Walter Ulbricht. In Albacete, far behind the Republican lines, Special Agent Ulbricht set up a German section of the OGPU and, on Moscow's orders, proceeded to rid the Communist ranks of Trotskyites. For those special cases which did not respond to the lash, the pliers, the hot wires and the other accepted tools of his craft, Ulbricht fashioned a tiny cell of granite blocks in which a prisoner could neither stand nor sit. Those who lived to tell called it Ulbricht's "stone coffin."

Walter Ulbricht moved on to bigger things. With mortar made in Moscow, he built a stone coffin for a land of 18 million people and called it the German Democratic Republic.

But killing individual Trotskyites and killing a nation are not the same. For eight years, the people of Soviet Germany crouched in the crypt that Soviet might and Walter Ulbricht's Communist regime built for them, unable to sit in comfort or stand in freedom. Then they rose up, and Walter Ulbricht's masterpiece began to show cracks.

Symbol of Failure. One day last week, the coffinmaker stood before a crowd in Potsdam's Platz der Nationen. At 60, he is a sturdy, thick-bodied man, with thinning brown hair and dark eyes that dart busily above pouches of crow's feet. A mustache shades his upper lip, and a goatee bobs from the point of his chin in disarming capriciousness. It is much like Lenin's goatee--a comparison Walter Ulbricht has long encouraged, for most of his life he has dreamed of becoming Germany's Lenin, the triumphant father and leader of a Communist Germany.

Instead, he is the most hated man in Germany.

The crowd before him was sullen and restless; several thousand had been dragooned from their homes and jobs by Communist Vertrauensleute (trusties) and herded into the square. Around the flanks hovered armed, blue-uniformed men of the Communist Volkspolizei; just out of sight, their guns ready for any signs of trouble, were soldiers of the Soviet army. The man who wanted to be Lenin spoke, not in triumph but in apology.

"Measures to improve the living conditions of our people . . . will ... be carried out," said Ulbricht in harsh Saxony German. "... We know we can improve the living standards of the people only by a permanent increase of working productivity, by better organization ... by making up production lost by the unrest."

They were the words of failure, and the man who spoke them a symbol of failure. Communism has been forced into ideological retreat inside its own empire. Eight years of striving to Bolshevize East Germany in the Soviet image failed in the uprising of June 17. In the westernmost, and in many ways the most strategic, outpost of the Kremlin orbit, people rose up, without arms or organization or leaders, against the whole strength of a totalitarian regime and the Soviet army of occupation. They were suppressed, and not one inch of ground was wrenched from beneath the Red flag. But in their audacity, the East Germans 1) exposed their bosses as scarecrows propped up only by Soviet guns, 2) obliged the Kremlin to promise a reversal of years of ruthless economic and political communization, and 3) punctured a myth which much of the West had come to believe--that Communist tyranny, once installed, is too efficient and too rocklike to be fissured by revolt.

Saddle for a Cow. The prospect before Ulbricht is not at all the way Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Ulbricht had planned it. Before World War II ended, the Soviet master plan for Germany was drawn up and working. Roughly, it was laid out in three stages. Stage One: milk the occupation zone of Germany of all the industrial plants, tools, raw materials, foodstuffs and talent (i.e., top scientists and technicians) that could be transferred to war-damaged Russia. Stage Two: Bolshevize all means of material existence, and force-build agricultural East Germany into a workshop for Russia and the East European satellite states. Stage Three: through ruthless discipline and indoctrination, build a Communist cadre so strong and reliable that it could serve in either of the two eventualities the Kremlin had to plan for--permanent division of Germany, with East Germany a Communist satellite, or a unified Germany, in which the Red core would be strong enough at least to neutralize Germany in the cold war.

Stalin did not underestimate the difficulties. "Communism," he once remarked to a diplomat, "fits Germans the way a saddle fits a cow." The job required an agent as cold and slippery as a block of ice, an unregenerate Dr. Faustus, to whom all East Germany would be a Margarete. Walter Ulbricht was ready. For 25 years the tailor's son from Leipzig had pursued the dark alchemy of Communist intrigue in preparation for the call.

His parents named him Ernst Paul Walter Ulbricht when he was born in 1893, but in later years he got to be known by many aliases--Comrade Cell, Comrade Motor, Sorenson, Urvich, Leo (and, behind his back, Billy Goat). At 15, he joined a workers' youth organization, at 17, the German Woodworkers' Union. At 19, he joined the Social Democratic Party, where he got acquainted with Das Kapital. When a renegade bloc of Socialists merged with Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartakusbund in 1920 to form the German Communist Party, Walter Ulbricht was there as a charter member. He was an enthusiastic organizer and well-crammed encyclopedia of the dictums and ambiguities of his idol, Lenin. But his prime talent was treachery.

When Thuringian workers were being egged on to revolt against the Weimar Republic in 1923, Walter Ulbricht was one of two Reds who doomed them by persuading Moscow that they needed no arms, "because every Thuringian worker already has a rifle behind his stove." When untrue rumors began to drift to Moscow in the '20s about the intelligentsia, which had assumed command of the German party, Zinoviev, the boss of the Comintern, went to the files, found that all the adverse reports had been signed by Comrade Ulbricht. When Moscow decided in 1925 that the German party must be atomized so that it would be utterly obedient to the Kremlin, it was Ulbricht, under the pseudonym Zelle (Cell), who proceeded to chop it into a confusion of small cells. Ulbricht plotted with the Nazis in the 1932 transport strike, which ruined the democratic Social Democrats and helped propel Hitler to power. He was among the first to flee Nazi Germany (although he tampered with his biography later to suggest that he had stayed for a while in Berlin to fight in the underground). He was the man to eliminate any comrades in Spain who had begun to doubt Stalin. In the Stockholm underground in 1940, he methodically turned over to the Gestapo any comrades in hiding who expressed dismay over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. West Berlin police still hold a yellowed warrant for Ulbricht's arrest for the murder of two policemen in 1931.

Even in the company of men whose lives and works have been devoted to evil, Walter Ulbricht stands out as a man without warmth or sentiment, humor or mercy. "In Ulbricht," wrote a commentator who found some redeeming features in other German Communists, is "only the worst." Another once described him thus: "Ulbricht is the kind of man who wants to enter a house which is guarded by a policeman at the front door, then decides it is easier to go in by the back door. He first begs a slice of bread, then seduces the maid, cleans out the refrigerator, works his way into the master bedroom, steals the owner's clothes, and then strides through the house to the front door and tells the policeman to go away."

Compared to shrewder and more flexible Reds like Yugoslavia's Tito or Italy's Togliatti, Ulbricht is a small and limited man. But by the beginning of World War II, years of internal fratricide, Russian purges and Nazi scythe-swinging had cleaned German Communism of its commanding figures, and left only what Nikolai Bukharin once called a band of "obedient dunces." To Moscow, Walter Ulbricht seemed the safest choice. He was ordered to Moscow for most of the war years to prepare for the day when the Red flag would be raised over Berlin.

Ulbricht took up Soviet citizenship, helped organize German P.W.s and captured officers (among them, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus) into the pro-Communist shock corps that was supposed to go home and paint Germany Red after V-day. The propaganda barrage laid down on the encircled Wehrmacht armies at Stalingrad was written by Ulbricht and delivered in his guttural German over front-line loudspeakers. In Moscow, where he rubbed elbows with Red princelings from all over Europe, e.g., Tito, Togliatti, Thorez, he shared quarters in the Lux Hotel with a plain, buxom German emigree named Lotte Kuehn (years later, in 1951, he made Lotte an honest woman).

The big call came on May 8, 1945. Walter Ulbricht rode into Berlin wearing his Moscow-groomed goatee and a Red army colonel's uniform. With a tight-lipped smile of triumph, he stood beside conquering Marshal Zhukov as Nazi Field Marshal Keitel performed the melancholy rite of surrender. As far as is known, Ulbricht never divested himself of his Soviet citizenship. But he did divest himself of the uniform, and, taking advantage of the anarchy of the hour, expropriated from a Berlin haberdasher a more fitting uniform--an expensive, double-breasted blue suit. In a dismal Berlin building formerly occupied by the carpenters' guild, he began work on the stone coffin.

Two Separate Germanys. The Soviet occupiers methodically harvested immense reparations from East Germany:

P: If An estimated $2 billion a year in plants, tools and food.

P: 100,000 scientists and technicians (including the bulk of Germany's best atomic scientists, jet-engine and submarine men).

P: Expropriation of vast holdings left in Germany.

P: Rights to the ore in Saxony's uranium fields.

As they did so, Ulbricht and a picked cluster of trusted German Reds labored to erect a fac,ade of legality and consent.

By 1947, when the mockery of four-power occupation in Germany was replaced by the reality of two separate Germanys, Ulbricht had put the eastern half in a Communist-style coalition (i.e., a partnership between one hungry shark and several slow-swimming mackerel) called the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The Social Democratic Party, by far the biggest in postwar East Germany, was drawn in and digested with the help of fawning, ambitious Otto Grotewohl of Braunschweig, onetime printer and longtime Socialist. Grotewohl sold out after such resolutely anti-Communist Socialists as Kurt Schumacher and Berlin's Ernst Reuter had refused to have anything to do with Ulbricht. Grotewohl's price was the premiership for himself and secondary cabinet jobs for other Social Democrats. ("Eventually," explained a secret party memo, "the more active Communists will take over their positions.") The "bourgeois" parties swam obediently into the big fish's belly--the Christian Democrats, who got 2,400,000 votes in 1946, now number 90,000; the National Democrats, mostly former Nazis and Wehrmacht officers; the Democratic Peasants, a front group to help the Reds control farmers.

As frontman and President of the German Democratic Republic, out of his wartime Moscow sanctuary waddled old Wilhelm ("Papa") Pieck, a broad-bellied Communist of the old school who, like Ulbricht, went from carpentry to Communism. The nearest Communist equivalent of a baby-kissing politician, he lost his stamina for tough tasks and took to snoring through long speeches. Once a possible threat to Ulbricht, he is now, at 77, in Moscow for medical treatment.

For himself, Ulbricht reserved only a deputy premiership, one of six in the "Presidium," which rules East Germany on behalf of a rubber-stamp Parliament. But in reality the SED runs the government (always subject to word from Moscow), and Walter Ulbricht runs the SED. He became the party's secretary general (the job on which Stalin built his power in Russia), as well as a member of its eight-man Politburo and its Central Committee. He whipped it into an organization of 1,300,000 members and bestowed on it a constitution which said baldly: "The party of Lenin and Stalin, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, is to enjoy among members and especially functionaries of our party absolute authority . . ." From Moscow to Soviet occupation headquarters in East Berlin to the squat SED House of Unity in Karl Liebknecht Platz, where the proconsul established quarters more fitting than a shabby carpenters' hall, flowed the mandates which sealed 18 million East Germans into the stone coffin.

Kindergarten & Up. From bedroom to locomotive cab, kindergarten to rocking chair, the plain German was jerked and jacked into the service of the state.

YOUTHS were enticed and bullied into the Free German Youth (FDJ), which now has 2,500,000 members. They were treated to blue-shirted uniforms, military training, daily Communist indoctrination and the old Nazi-Communist privilege of bullying their elders and informing on those who proved uncooperative. Example: FDJ bands raided churches at night to vandalize and cow East Germany's Strong (16.6 million) Protestant community into submission. The youth who did not join found himself ostracized, barred from athletics (all run by FDJ). The classroom, from lowest country school to the once famed University of Berlin, was taken from Euclid and Goethe and given to Marx, Lenin and Stalin. The study of Russian was made compulsory in all schools and universities. "Tnere is no education separate from politics," explained the basic text for teachers' colleges. "Education and study form philosophies in people's minds."

WOMEN were organized into the Democratic Women's Federation (1,150,000), and put to work in mills and shops on behalf of "peace and unity."

PEASANTS were coerced into the Association for Mutual Peasants' Aid by the old Communist method--nonmembers pay high prices for goods and machinery, higher interest on loans. At least 70% of all farmland is by now splintered into holdings of 50 acres or less, and much of that was later caught up in the grim jumble of forced collectivization. If his bulls and heifers refused to respect the state-decreed "cattle reproduction" quota, the farmer was liable to imprisonment for sabotage; if his fields fell below the "delivery quota," his family stood in danger.

WORKERS were forced into a trade union that robs them of the right to strike, on the ground that ". . . the state protects the rights of workers." Around 80% of East German industry was confiscated by the Russians or nationalized; from Ulbricht's state planners came decree after decree expanding East Germany's production of heavy goods and cutting down on the quantity and quality of the shoes, clothes, utensils and other consumer goods the people needed.

"The Method of Three." For the working man, life became an Orwellian nightmare of cant and slogans, pressures and penalties. He went to a job picked for him by the government. At day's end he shuffled from the plant in shoddy shoes that cost too much (about 100 hours' wages) and wore out too soon to a home where the larder was lean (a pound of butter, when it was available, cost ten hours' wages) and hope even leaner. The regime coerced him into volunteer, unpaid "peace shifts." He had to march in parades to demand more hours' work of himself for no more pay. Plant managers and party planners raced to outdo each other with new gimmicks or old variations on the Soviet Stakhanovite system: P. Bykov's "rapid-lathe-operators' movement," J. Savitch's "rapid-grinders' movement," P. Duvanov's "movement for speeded-up baking of tiles," the "method of three" for cooperative laying of bricks--one man to slap on mortar, one to pass the brick, one to set the brick. The "work norm" became the laborer's master: if bricks laid or valves ground fell below inexorably increasing quotas set by the government, his wages fell.

And there were, of course, the police--the Volkspolizei, or People's Police. Some 90,000 East Germans were recruited into the Blue Police for plain cop duty. Another 130,000 put on the Soviet-style uniforms of the Brown Police to become the German Red army. Equipped with Soviet tanks, Maxim heavy machine guns and other modern weapons, they were organized into combat teams and an army group: some were assigned to a fleet of 31 armed ships, others to flight training in Yak-17s Behind the "Vopos" rose the secret police, some 30,000 organized in NKVD style by a veteran (60) Red of the Spanish civil war and Moscow fraternity named Wilhelm Zaisser.

Organizer Ulbricht, it seemed, had saddled the cow. The more Moscow milked it, the more he tightened the cinch belts. There was a Two Year Plan, then a Five Year Plan. Steel production went up 500,000 tons above the prewar average for Eastern Junker Germany (to about 1,700,000 tons a year). Electric power output climbed 50% in two years. New hard-coal fields were opened, chemicals output went UP 30% and East Germany seemed on the way to becoming the most important industrial area in Europe after the Ruhr.

But the squeeze was too much. What cream the cow produced went to Russia and the satellites, but nothing came back in return. The agricultural program broke down, and this spring a land historically known for surpluses fell short 600,000 tons of bread grain, 100,000 tons of sugar and 125,000 tons of the indispensable potato. Restaurants took to serving boiled potatoes only to customers who traded in an equal quantity of raw ones.

A Bottle of Beer. To East Germans, each impersonal statistic had personal significance. Wolfgang Fritsch, 36, drove a truck at the open-face uranium pits near Gera, in Saxony. He, his wife and two young children were eating even worse than right after the war; Wolfgang (he said later in the safety of a West Berlin refugee camp) could not remember having had a bottle of beer to drink in six months. The children's clothes, of cheap cotton, were falling apart. The work was getting harder and longer, but the pay stayed the same. At the mine, there were always the "trusties" to listen for careless talk; at least a dozen of Wolfgang's friends disappeared that way.

Werner David, 40, of Wolfen, an ex-P.W. (in Britain) and a clerk in the Agfa film plant, saw a lot of the plant's accounts. There were 14,000 men working for the Russians, who owned the plant and sold the film to the satellites. The norms kept going up. For a while, a worker on the enlargement machines had to make 800 enlargements a day to earn his 1.50 East German marks (about 6-c-) an hour. Then it went up to 880, too many for a man to do if he stopped even for a moment. In his off hours, David helped his wife Gertrude on her parents' farm. Not long ago, when a drought ruined the potato crop, Gertrude drew the family money from the bank and bought potatoes on the black market to make up the fall "delivery quota." Gertrude, though already ill with TB, was sentenced to a year and a half in jail for "economic crimes."

In eight years, the team of Moscow and Ulbricht created hundreds of thousands of dissatisfied Wolfgang Fritsches and Werner Davids. Proconsul Ulbricht, with his bodyguard of Vopos, his bulletproofed Zis sedan, his ten-room stucco villa in the Berlin suburb of Pankow, was aware of them but contemptuous. Arrests multiplied, the work norms jumped higher, and the zealous workers of the party fed more and louder slogans into the town squares and public-address systems. The Fritsches were unarmed and leaderless, and Ulbricht had the Vopos and the Red army at his back. And the grumblers were Germans. Had not Lenin once sneered: "When Germans want to make a revolution and occupy a railroad station, they first buy tickets to the train platform"?

"It's Happened." All the evidence suggests that it was not the Ulbricht regime but the Russians themselves who first saw that there might be trouble from the Werners and the Wolfgangs. From the Soviet command went orders to the East Berlin regime to ease up: no more farm collectivization, more liberty for the Lutherans, more food for families. When the construction workers of Stalinallee in Berlin marched against the latest 10% boost in work norms, the increase was abolished.

Werner David went home from the Agfa plant that night to a meal of potato and carrots. Behind locked doors, he tuned his radio to West Berlin's U.S.-operated radio RIAS and heard about the Berlin protest march. It happened almost the same way at Wolfgang Fritsch's house. As he and his wife switched off the radio and went to bed, he muttered: "It's happened. It's happened." Next morning, at the Agfa plant, the uranium pits, the dockworks at Rostock, the heavy-machinery works in Magdeburg, at the center of Red Berlin, all across the country, the hatred and yearning exploded into the bloody rebellion of June 17.

For 48 hours, Walter Ulbricht's great edifice seemed about to tumble about his ears. His vaunted party, and his heavy-booted Vopos, could not put down the rebellion; the Soviet army had to do it for him. The revolters had cried for many things, but above all they cried for the downfall of Walter Ulbricht: "Down with Spitzbart [pointed beard]!" "Down with the Ulbricht regime!" In the streets of East Berlin, he was burned in effigy.

As coldly, as tenaciously as always, Walter Ulbricht held on. It was all the work of Western provocateurs, said his propaganda machines--and the Soviet firing squads shot a few workers to prove it. The Reds also, by their own official admission, jailed 50,000 people. But in a slip of the tongue, Ulbricht contradicted himself on Western responsibility for the riots. "It is only a family quarrel," said he, "of no concern to the West."

For the time being at least, Walter Ulbricht still reigned in Moscow's name. From meeting hall to city square to factory, he toured his simmering satrapy, to soothe grim-faced workers with promises and lash frightened party workers with threats. The Vopos clustered about him, and the Soviet army lay only a soft shout away. He had not changed. He was still the coffinmaker.

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