The East German uprising of 1953

The price of “building socialism”: the crisis of 1952–1953

In May 1952 West Germany rejected the “Stalin Note”, which had offered a neutral, reunified Germany, and signed the European Defence Community treaty instead. Walter Ulbricht, General Secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), read this as a green light to accelerate the building of socialism in East Germany. At the SED’s Second Party Conference, held in the Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle in East Berlin from 9 to 12 July, Ulbricht proclaimed on the final day the “planned construction of the foundations of socialism”. The conference resolved on sweeping changes to the economy, administration and judiciary, collectivisation and rearmament among them. The five Länder were replaced by fourteen districts (Bezirke), with East Berlin as a fifteenth unit, and the Barracked People’s Police, then being built up, was to become a “people’s army”. How the East German state came into being is told in East Germany: from Soviet military administration to the German Democratic Republic. 1 2 3

The cost soon came home. Building up the Barracked People’s Police drove military spending in 1952 to 3.3 billion marks, 8.4 per cent of the budget, and armaments together with the burdens left by the war — occupation costs and reparations — absorbed 22 per cent of the 1952 budget and more than 18 per cent in 1953. Investment flowed into heavy industry, for which East Germany had almost no base, and household electricity was cut off at dusk to meet industrial peak demand. The autumn harvest of 1952 was well below average, leaving people with half the pre-war quantity of meat and fat. In the state HO shops, where goods could be bought without ration coupons, prices were far above West German levels: a bar of chocolate that cost 50 pfennigs in the West cost eight marks in the East. From November 1952 there were sporadic food riots and industrial unrest in Chemnitz, Dresden, Leipzig, Halle and Suhl. 2 1

Farmers and the middle strata felt the pressure more directly. Independent farmers, artisans and shopkeepers faced higher delivery quotas and taxes and were excluded from the ration system for food, clothing and fuel. The number of agricultural production co-operatives (LPGs) rose from 493 in September 1952 to 2,787 in March 1953, yet in that March alone 2,641 farmers abandoned their farms. The churches were a target too. The regime branded the Protestant youth organisation, the Junge Gemeinde, an “illegal organisation”, jailed student chaplains and youth leaders, handed church retreat houses to the Free German Youth, and sometimes expelled pupils who professed their faith just before their final school examinations. In May 1953 Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl called the Junge Gemeinde “a cover organisation of US imperialism that must be fought”. 2 4 5 6

Many chose to leave. Although the border was by then mostly sealed, 122,000 people went west in the first four months of 1953 alone. In March 1953 the West registered a record 58,605 refugees from the GDR. Nevertheless the SED Central Committee decided on 13–14 May to raise work norms in all state-owned enterprises by ten per cent by 30 June, Ulbricht’s sixtieth birthday, and the Council of Ministers confirmed this on 28 May. It was issued as a “recommendation”, but in effect it ordered ten per cent more work for the same pay — a wage cut. The exodus was also the starting point of the problem that later led to The Building of the Berlin Wall. 1 5 2

Moscow’s orders and the “New Course”

After Stalin died on 5 March 1953, the new collective leadership in Moscow took a fresh look at East Germany. In early April the Soviet Control Commission sent a detailed report on the dire state of the East German economy, and on 5 May the Presidium of the Soviet Council of Ministers discussed the GDR for the first time and charged Foreign Minister Molotov with drafting a paper on the German question. On 2 June the Council of Ministers adopted the “Measures to improve the health of the political situation in the GDR” and handed them to Ulbricht, Grotewohl and Fred Oelssner, who arrived in Moscow that day. The decree sharply criticised the accelerated construction of socialism and warned that mass flight was a serious threat to the GDR’s political stability. Forced collectivisation and the war on private enterprise were to end, investment was to shift from heavy industry to consumer goods, and coercion of the Protestant Church was to stop; Ulbricht’s “cold exercise of power” was rebuked as well. Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov warned that without change there would be a catastrophe. Yet the decree made no explicit demand to revoke the higher work norms. The power struggle in the Kremlin after Stalin’s death is covered in The Fall of Beria. 1 6 7

The new Soviet High Commissioner, Vladimir Semyonov, pressed for speed. When SED leaders asked for a more cautious and gradual change of course, he replied: “In fourteen days you may no longer have a state.” On 9 June the Politburo, with Semyonov present, adopted sixteen measures covering schools, finance, the churches, food supply, agriculture, flight from the republic, the border regime and prisoners, and charged Rudolf Herrnstadt, editor-in-chief of the party newspaper Neues Deutschland, with writing a communiqué. Published on 11 June, it admitted that “a series of errors were committed in the past” and that, because the interests of independent farmers, retailers, artisans, the intelligentsia and the Church had been neglected, “numerous persons have left the republic”. The same day the Council of Ministers lifted restrictions on ration cards, cut prices, offered to return confiscated businesses and farms, and restored full civic rights to returning refugees. The campaign against the Junge Gemeinde was halted; pastors were released and expelled pupils readmitted. 2 8 9 10

But the norm increase, the measure that mattered most to workers, stayed. The New Course benefited farmers and the remaining bourgeois middle strata while leaving out the workers, which shook the legitimacy of a state that claimed to represent them. Party members felt betrayed when the policies they had enforced on the ground were suddenly declared “errors”, and the wider population saw the change as a sign of the regime’s weakness. Newspapers carrying the communiqué sold out within hours. Already on 9 June some 2,000 workers at the Hennigsdorf steel and rolling mill had struck against the norm increase, and on 12 June about 5,000 people gathered outside the prison in Brandenburg an der Havel demanding the release of inmates; crowds also formed outside prisons in Halle, Neuruppin, Güstrow and Stralsund. That same year Imre Nagy became prime minister of Hungary and pursued a “New Course” there too (Hungary’s New Course). 1 2 9 10 11 12

16 June: the building workers of the Stalinallee

The spark came from East Berlin’s showcase building sites. On 14 June Neues Deutschland ran an article, “It is time to put the mallet aside”, criticising how the higher norms were being imposed in construction, without questioning the increase itself. The next morning workers downed tools at the new Friedrichshain hospital and at Block 40 of the Stalinallee (today’s Karl-Marx-Allee), among other sites, and sent resolutions to Prime Minister Grotewohl demanding that the increase be withdrawn and an answer given by noon on the 16th. Grotewohl ignored them. On the morning of 16 June the trade union paper Tribüne printed an article by the deputy chairman of the trade union federation declaring that the ten per cent increase was “entirely correct”. 2 1 13 14

On the morning of the 16th a column of a few hundred set out from the two sites, passed the headquarters of the Free German Trade Union Federation and headed for the government seat on Leipziger Strasse, the House of Ministries, swelling to several thousand on the way to the chant “Colleagues, join in — we want to be free people!” The crowd called for Ulbricht and Grotewohl, but only Heavy Industry Minister Fritz Selbmann and Robert Havemann, president of the GDR Peace Council, came out, and they were shouted down. After hours of indecision the Politburo withdrew the norm increase around midday, calling the decision “completely wrong”; but by the time the news reached the crowd outside the ministries, the demands had widened to the government’s resignation and free elections. Using a captured loudspeaker van, the workers proclaimed a general strike and called for a rally at Strausberger Platz at seven the next morning. 1 2 14

It was RIAS, the radio station of the American sector of West Berlin, that carried the news across East Germany. RIAS reported the strikes from the evening of the 15th and covered the demonstrations in detail on the 16th. Strike delegates came to the station asking it to call a general strike, but editor-in-chief Egon Bahr and political director Gordon Ewing refused, fearing that acting as the uprising’s mouthpiece could start a war. Instead RIAS repeated the workers’ demands and the time and place of the next day’s rally throughout the night, and from 5.36 a.m. on the 17th it broadcast four times an appeal by Ernst Scharnowski, chairman of the West Berlin trade union federation (DGB). Forbidden to call a general strike, he urged East Germans to seek out “their Strausberger Platz everywhere”. Meanwhile, on the evening of the 16th, Semyonov informed the SED leadership that Soviet troops would be brought into Berlin. 1 2 15

17 June: a rising in some 700 places

On the morning of the 17th workers began marching all over East Berlin. The regular and Barracked People’s Police, apparently without instructions, did not intervene at first. The marchers demanded the old norms, lower prices, the release of colleagues arrested the day before, an end to the barriers between East and West and free all-German elections, under slogans such as “Down with the government!” and “Butter, not guns”. By 9 a.m. 25,000 people had gathered in front of the House of Ministries. Soviet tanks were by then entering the city, and the SED leadership took refuge at the Soviet headquarters in Karlshorst. Around 1 p.m. the military commandant of the Soviet sector, Major General Pyotr Dibrova, declared a state of emergency in East Berlin, which was not lifted until 11 July. The state department store Columbushaus and the Haus Vaterland on Potsdamer Platz went up in flames. 1 2 15

The rising was not confined to Berlin. Western media at the time, and probably most of the protesters themselves, did not grasp its national scale, but that morning early shifts in factories across East Germany stopped work and marched into town centres. The number of participants cannot be fixed precisely; estimates range from 400,000 to 1.5 million, and more than a million is commonly cited. Insurgents occupied 11 district council buildings, 14 mayors’ offices, seven SED district offices and one regional party headquarters, and stormed nine prisons and two Ministry for State Security buildings. The centres were Berlin, the “chemical triangle” around Halle, and regional capitals such as Magdeburg, Leipzig and Dresden. In the countryside, from 12 June villagers in more than 300 communities of under 2,000 inhabitants burned flags and drove out mayors and party officials. The Soviet authorities declared a state of emergency in 167 of the GDR’s 217 districts. 2 16

In the provinces the rising was sometimes better organised than in Berlin. In Halle 90,000 to 100,000 people took to the streets; demonstrators freed 248 women and three men from the prison on Kleine Steinstrasse, but an assault on the “Red Ox” prison failed and four or five people were killed. The central strike committee of Bitterfeld district telegraphed the government a programme demanding its resignation, a provisional government of workers, free, secret and direct elections within four months, the release of all political prisoners, the abolition of the zonal border and the immediate disbanding of the “so-called people’s army”. In the border town of Görlitz 30,000 people wrecked the party headquarters, the secret police offices and the prison, and in the districts of Görlitz and Niesky SED rule vanished for a few hours. In Magdeburg the party headquarters and the prison were set on fire. In Leipzig the regional party secretary Paul Fröhlich ordered police and Stasi to open fire between 1 and 2 p.m., before the state of emergency had been declared, and 19-year-old Dieter Teich and 64-year-old pensioner Elisabeth Bröcker were shot dead. 2 1

Most strike leaders were not party members, though many were former SED members who had been expelled, often ex-Social Democrats. Older workers and technical or clerical staff who had experience of political and trade union struggle before 1933 frequently took the lead, and, contrary to later regime propaganda, the share of former Nazi party members among them was very small. The committees tried to prevent damage to property and violence against people, and they avoided anti-Soviet slogans, knowing that nothing could be changed in the GDR against the Soviet Union. In many places workers demanded the re-founding of the Social Democratic Party, and Grotewohl, the former Social Democratic leader who had led the 1946 merger with the Communists, was reviled as a traitor. But the rising had no national leadership and no plan beyond the day. At 2 p.m. Grotewohl confirmed on the radio that the norm increase had been withdrawn, while calling the uprising “the work of provocateurs and fascist agents of foreign powers”. 2 1

Suppression and victims: the disputed numbers

The Soviet army bore the brunt of the suppression. Andrei Grechko, appointed commander-in-chief of Soviet forces in Germany in 1953, directed it. According to German research, some 20,000 troops of sixteen Soviet divisions and about 8,000 members of the Barracked People’s Police were deployed. Once the tanks arrived the rising mostly lost momentum quickly, and there were no major attacks on the troops. Semyonov wrote in his memoirs that at 11 a.m. on the 17th he received instructions from Moscow to open fire, set up military summary courts and “shoot twelve ringleaders”. Protests continued on the 18th, and strikes broke out again at Carl Zeiss in Jena on 10–11 July and at the Buna works in Schkopau on 16–17 July. 17 2 18

The death toll long served political ends. The GDR spoke of 25 dead; in the West a figure of 507 circulated. A project of the Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, run with the Federal Agency for Civic Education and Deutschlandradio, documented 55 deaths in the sources. Thirty-four demonstrators and bystanders were shot by People’s Police or Soviet soldiers between the 17th and 23 June; five men were executed after sentences by Soviet occupation authorities and two after sentences by GDR courts; four died as a result of inhumane prison conditions and four killed themselves in custody (in at least two cases outside involvement cannot be ruled out); and one demonstrator died of heart failure while storming a police station. Five members of the GDR security forces were also killed. Of 25 further alleged or unexplained deaths, the project established that seven were unconnected with the uprising. By contrast, a declassified report by Grechko put casualties at 209 by 18 June, and other estimates speak of at least 125 dead. 19 2 1

The scale of summary executions is also disputed. The ZZF project confirmed five Soviet executions, but other research holds that Soviet summary courts sentenced 19 insurgents to death and had them shot between 17 and 22 June, and the journalist Karl Wilhelm Fricke wrote that the number of death sentences passed by Soviet military tribunals has never been precisely established. The first execution notice named Willi Göttling, an unemployed painter from West Berlin born in 1918. He was shot without trial on the instruction of the Military Council of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany; in 2003 the Russian military prosecutor rehabilitated him, finding not a single piece of evidence of his guilt. Alfred Dartsch and Herbert Stauch in Magdeburg, and Alfred Diener, a 26-year-old car mechanic arrested in Jena and shot in Weimar, met the same fate. Reports that 41 Soviet soldiers were shot for refusing to fire have never been substantiated, and the ZZF regards them as a Cold War legend. 19 2 16 18

Arrests and trials followed. By the morning of 3 July, according to the Stasi, 10,506 people had been arrested (5,705 by the People’s Police and 4,801 by the Stasi), of whom 6,529 were released. According to the Prosecutor General’s report of March 1954, GDR courts had convicted 1,526 people by the end of January 1954. Two were sentenced to death and guillotined in Dresden: Erna Dorn, who had been freed from prison in Halle and recaptured, and Ernst Jennrich, a gardener from Magdeburg. Fricke put the number convicted by GDR courts at no fewer than 1,600, and later estimates put the number imprisoned at more than 15,000. Soviet military tribunals separately sentenced several hundred people, usually to 25 years’ forced labour, about a fifth of whom were sent to the Gulag, Vorkuta above all. Prisoners held in connection with 17 June wore a yellow “X” in jail. 20 2 16

Ulbricht survives and the state rebuilds

Immediately after the rising Ulbricht’s fall seemed only a matter of time. On 24 June Semyonov, Pavel Yudin and Vasily Sokolovsky sent Moscow a report that played down the responsibility of the Soviet authorities, stressed Ulbricht’s, and recommended abolishing his post of General Secretary in favour of collective leadership. In the East Berlin Politburo, Herrnstadt and Minister of State Security Wilhelm Zaisser pressed for a reorganisation of the party. At the Politburo session that ran through the night of 7–8 July, Herrnstadt presented proposals for collective leadership; Zaisser, Friedrich Ebert, Heinrich Rau and Elli Schmidt agreed, and only Hermann Matern and Free German Youth leader Erich Honecker sided with Ulbricht. 1 8

What saved Ulbricht was a coup in Moscow. Lavrentiy Beria had once called East Germany “not even a real state but one kept in being only by Soviet troops”, and other leaders suspected him of being ready to trade German reunification for American support. The uprising convinced Molotov, Malenkov and Bulganin that Beria’s policies endangered Soviet power, and Beria was arrested on 26 June. On 2 July a commission in Moscow shelved far-reaching reforms in the GDR; the Soviet leadership chose to keep an experienced and reliable, if Stalinist and unpopular, ruler. Backed by Khrushchev and Malenkov, Ulbricht used the Central Committee’s 15th plenum on 24–26 July to brand Herrnstadt and Zaisser a “faction” linked to Beria and to remove them from the Politburo and the Central Committee. 21 1 8

The purge spread downwards. Zaisser lost his post as Minister of State Security, and Herrnstadt, removed from Neues Deutschland, was expelled from the party in January 1954. Justice Minister Max Fechner, who had tried to moderate the prosecution of striking workers, was dismissed on 14 July and imprisoned; his successor Hilde Benjamin pressed for harsh sentences. Moderate members, above all former Social Democrats, were pushed out of the party, and most leading officials at regional, district and factory level were replaced. After these purges hard-liners such as Erich Mielke set the course of East German politics. The Ministry for State Security was downgraded to a State Secretariat within the Ministry of the Interior under Ernst Wollweber, and restored to ministry status in November 1955. 8 2 22

The regime drew two lessons from the rising. The first was that shop-floor discontent had to be stopped before it escalated. Factory surveillance was stepped up and the Stasi was expanded to deal swiftly with organised protest. Armed factory “Combat Groups of the Working Class” began to be formed in the second half of 1953 and were formally launched in 1954. The second was that a venture like the “accelerated construction of socialism” must never be repeated. The regime never again attempted a blanket norm increase, and the New Course’s investment in consumer goods and its subsidies raised living standards. Moscow pledged substantial economic and financial aid, agreed to end reparations by the end of the year, released more prisoners of war and raised its mission in East Berlin to an embassy. On 26 June Grotewohl told a rally outside the House of Ministries that “we must win back the trust of the working people”; yet a party report that same day noted that much of the population regarded the June events not as a fascist provocation but as “a just cause of the workers”. 1 23 24

Memory in East and West, and “The Solution”

From the outset the SED defined the rising as something staged from outside. On 21 June the Central Committee’s 14th plenum spoke of a “fascist provocation” and a long-prepared “Day X”; at the 15th plenum in July this became a “fascist putsch attempt”. A history of the GDR published by the East German Academy of Sciences in 1974 still described a “counter-revolutionary putsch attempt” and presented the Soviet intervention as an act in “the spirit of proletarian internationalism”. This remained the official reading until the state disappeared. The rising also left wounds inside the party: the fact that the People’s Police had shot at workers drove many members out, and at the Textima plant in Altenberg alone 450 SED members had left by 7 July. 16 2 1

Bertolt Brecht embodied the contradiction. On 17 June he sent Ulbricht a short letter affirming his allegiance to the party — “history will pay its respects to the revolutionary impatience of the Socialist Unity Party” — but when Neues Deutschland printed it on 21 June it omitted the second sentence, which spoke of a great discussion with the masses. After Kurt Barthel, secretary of the Writers’ Union, published a piece on 20 June, also distributed as a leaflet on the Stalinallee, asking the workers whether they were ashamed and telling them they would have to work very hard to regain lost trust, Brecht wrote the poem “Die Lösung” (“The Solution”) that summer at his country house in Buckow. The poem, which asks whether it would not be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another, was not published in his lifetime; it first appeared in 1959 in the West German newspaper Die Welt. In his work journal on 20 August he noted that the workers’ demonstrations, aimless and unorganised as they were, still showed that “here is the rising class”. 25) 26 2

In West Germany 17 June became a symbol of unity. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer went to Berlin on 19 June to honour the dead, while West Berlin’s mayor Ernst Reuter, attending a conference in Vienna, asked the Americans for a military plane to fly him back at once and was refused. On 22 June the Berlin Senate renamed the Charlottenburger Chaussee west of the Brandenburg Gate “Strasse des 17. Juni”; on 3 July the Bundestag made 17 June the “Day of German Unity”, a public holiday by law of 4 August, and the same day Adenauer named free elections as the precondition of reunification. Yet, as Franz Josef Strauss recalled, Bonn could offer nothing but declarations and appeals, which brought home “the whole of German impotence”. After reunification in 1990 the national holiday moved to 3 October, and 17 June remained a day of remembrance. 2 20

The Western powers did not intervene. The United States at first suspected a Soviet ruse to bring troops into the whole of Berlin. The Eisenhower administration then announced on 10 July a programme to distribute $15 million worth of food from 35 centres in West Berlin; the “Eisenhower packages” were handed out from 27 July until early October, and more than five million parcels went to over a million East Germans. The US State Department’s Office of the Historian notes that Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sought to exploit the uprising and that, besides its humanitarian aims, the programme sought to destabilise Ulbricht’s regime, undercut the Soviet campaign for unification, and protect the European Defence Community and Adenauer. Winston Churchill, fearing for his initiative for a four-power conference, even told the Soviet government that it had been right to put the rising down. 2 27

The debate: a workers’ uprising or a popular uprising?

What to call 17 June was itself contested. In German both “popular uprising” (Volksaufstand) and “workers’ uprising” (Arbeiteraufstand) are used. The historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk criticises how, over time, West Germany shrank a nationwide popular rising into an East Berlin workers’ revolt, and a struggle for freedom and unity into a social-policy protest against work norms; only with the opening of the archives after 1990, he argues, could the rising be studied in its full breadth. Indeed, the number of documented sites of protest grew from Torsten Diedrich’s 373 in 1991 to 563 in Kowalczuk and Armin Mitter’s work of 1995, and to 701 in Kowalczuk’s later count. The 272 places officially admitted by Grotewohl at the time had been deliberately falsified. 28 16 2

Research after 1990 has tended to place the rising in the line of Germany’s revolutionary uprisings. Hubertus Knabe counted it among the great revolutionary risings in German history, and Kowalczuk and his co-authors sought to re-establish its place under the title “The suppressed revolution”. Kowalczuk, Mitter and Stefan Wolle argued that the crisis of 1952–1954 in fact produced the GDR’s “inner founding of the state”. By contrast, former SED authors and ex-Stasi generals continued after reunification to stress outside interference and to deny that it had been a workers’ uprising for unity — accounts Fricke dismissed as writing against the truth. There was also a reading from the left: on 28 June the Yugoslav Edvard Kardelj wrote that the driving force was not national but the class protest of the German worker against a state-capitalist system that called itself socialist. 2 16

Cold War historians have focused on the role of the West. Drawing on US government records, Christian Ostermann analysed the rising as revealing “the limits of rollback”: the Eisenhower administration spoke of pushing back Communism, yet when an uprising actually broke out it did not intervene and confined itself to prolonging the crisis through psychological warfare such as the food parcels. The insurgents in turn learned that if they confronted the regime openly and in large numbers they would be left to face it alone. The alternative was once again flight, and in 1961 Ulbricht finally sealed the border. 29 27 1 2

June 1953 was the first popular uprising under Stalinism, and the Soviet leaders around Khrushchev feared that its example would spread to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In an analysis of 23 June the Polish United Workers’ Party wrote that the errors of its German sister party — the excessive raising of norms and the accelerated construction of socialism — had undoubtedly provided the basis for the “provocation”. Three years later those fears came true in The Poznań Uprising and The Hungarian Revolution. The three are compared in Eastern Europe after Stalin: the crises of 1953–1956. 16 2