The Puppet Boss

Everybody from movie stars to dictators can use front men. In the threatened Berlin crisis, Khrushchev's front man is Walter Ulbricht, 68, the grim, goateed boss of East Germany. When Khrushchev tries reassurances, Ulbricht offsets them with threats. When Khrushchev assures the West that he has no thought of a Berlin blockade, Ulbricht growls that supplies to the U.S., British and French garrisons will be blocked and their planes shot down.

Chief of the East German Communists for 15 years, Ulbricht is a cynical master of duplicity who fought his way to the top by years of sycophantic loyalty to Moscow. Today, Ulbricht is thoroughly detested even in his own circle. No one can forget that he made no protest as Stalin purged dozens of his fellow German Communists in the World War II days, when much of the party fled to Moscow for asylum from Hitler. Ulbricht was apparently happy to see his political rivals disposed of. In May 1945, it was Ulbricht who led the little ten-man convoy of Communist leaders into war-torn Berlin to start the regime that today holds East Germany in a grip of iron.

With the satisfying presence of some 20 Soviet divisions at his elbow, Ulbricht runs his puppet nation from an opulent, chandeliered office in Niederschonhausen Palace, onetime residence of the wife of Frederick the Great, in the Pankow section of Berlin. There he puffs black cigars and barks orders in a guttural Saxonian accent that is the butt of gibes among his unwilling subjects. At day's end he retires to a sumptuous fieldstone house in the residential enclave for Communist bigwigs near Liepnitz Lake, where he, his Communist wife Lotte and a 17-year-old daughter share the comforts of a movie house, ballroom, restaurant, swimming pool, massage parlor and nuclear bomb shelter with the other top 20 families of East Germany.

In his capacity as front man, Ulbricht was providing a foretaste of harassments to come if the West refused to knuckle under. Among his chosen victims: Germany's Evangelical Church, which had arranged to hold their traditional annual Kirchentag this year in Berlin. Ulbricht's men denied transit for twelve special trains the church had chartered to bring delegates to West Berlin. A Communist official stopped East German Bishop Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher, refused to let him proceed to Berlin. Church officials planned to hold part of the rally in East Berlin; Ulbricht vetoed it.

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