September 1961
In the first month following the construction of the Wall, 14,821 refugees from the GDR are registered in West Berlin and West Germany (August 1961: 47,433 refugees).
1 September: In the night from August 31 to September 1, a 17-year-old youth hides for many hours in the reeds on the Havel in the north of Berlin before daring to escape to West Berlin. Even though border guards spot him and pursue him into West Berlin territory, he makes it to the western part of the city unharmed. In a RIAS interview, he talks about the pressure put on young men to join the army and about measures to prevent the reception of Western television stations.
In East Berlin, the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov is awarded the "Karl Marx Medal" by SED leader Walter Ulbricht. At a mass rally, his space flight is celebrated as a new proof of the global supremacy of the Soviet Union and socialism.
While the GDR media are still broadcasting the Soviet announcement of the resumption of atomic weapons tests, the Soviet Union already sets off a hydrogen bomb above ground. The United States reacts by resuming its underground atomic tests.
4 September: A report by the GDR People’s Police states that, in the first three weeks following the sealing-off of the border, 6,041 people have been arrested for making critical comments on the building of the Wall.
With its action "Blitz on NATO Broadcasters" ("Action Ox-Head"), the Free German Youth (FDJ) calls for people to fight against the reception of Western television: "Are you ready for the big blitz on ox-heads and mental border-crossing?" It notes that the direction in which radio and TV antennas on roofs are pointing reveals where "mental border-crossers" are living. People who do not voluntarily give up Western television in the next few weeks are to have their antennas sawn off or turned by force "towards socialism and peace".
5 September: CPSU leader Nikita Khrushchev informally conveys his interest in resolving the Berlin crisis to US President Kennedy.
9 September: Many West Berlin businesses and factories are in difficulties owing to the loss of around 60,000 employees from East Berlin and the environs of Berlin, the so-called "Grenzgänger" ("cross-border commuters"). In addition, 1,700 West Berliners are leaving the divided city every week, fearing further harassment by the GDR and the Soviet Union. The West German government pledges comprehensive support for West Berlin: direct financial help for the Berlin state budget as well as tax concessions and measures to promote investment. Many cities and municipalities in West Germany also provide fast and selfless aid. For example, the suburban public transport services of Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Munich and Kiel send personnel and vehicles to West Berlin to help cope with the problems caused by the truncation of bus and underground routes and the boycott of suburban train services.
12 September: In an evaluation of its operations on 13 August 1961, the People’s Police Inspectorate of Berlin’s Mitte district expressly praises the support given to the construction of the Wall by GDR authors and artists: "Many artists offered to perform for the fighters. (…) Extraordinary willingness was displayed by Mathilde Dannecker, who gave several recitations at the construction; Ludwig Thurek, Karl Mundstock, Peter Minetti, Bruno Apitz, Stefan Hermlin, Bodo Uhse and Wolfgang Neuhaus, among others, also visited Combat Group units at the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdam Square, Köpenicker Strasse, Brunnenstrasse and in this way also received significant inspiration for their own work. They expressed regret that they hadn’t already been there on 13.8.1961."
12 September: The board of the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB) promotes the so-called production commitment: all "working people" should commit themselves "to produce more in the same time for the same money".
13 September: US President Kennedy announces that the American Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, will speak with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, about Germany, Berlin and other problems at the 16th United Nations Assembly held at the end of September in New York.
Leading British politicians and intellectuals, moved by "passionate concern about the future of liberty in Berlin", tell the people of West Berlin "that we support your civil rights and democratic institutions as well as your endeavours not to become the victims of aggressive power politics and of attempts to implement reforms that curtail freedom."
14 September: Two Bundeswehr fighter-bombers enter GDR airspace during a training flight. The planes land at Tegel Airport in West Berlin. The incident is blamed on human and technical error, but it exacerbates an already tense situation.
The commander-in-chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in the GDR, Marshal Konev, makes suggestions to the minister for national defence, Army General Hoffmann, for strengthening security on the inner-German border. These suggestions include plans to lay mines along the border. The order 85/61 of 19.10.61 issued by the defence minister implements the measures suggested by Konev.
15 September: The around 40,000-strong units of the German Border Police that have until now answered to the GDR Interior Ministry are integrated into the GDR Defence Ministry as "Border Troops of the GDR". This means the border troops are de facto a part of the armed forces of the National People’s Army (NVA). – Exceptions are what was formerly the 5th Border Brigade (Gross Glienicke) and the "security commando" from the Berlin People’s Police headquarters (in Karlshorst), which were re-formed into the 1st and 2nd Border Brigades by order of the GDR interior minister on 6th September 1961 and which are still under the commander of the riot squad of the GDR interior ministry. These East Berlin units are not integrated into the National People’s Army until August 1962.
16 September: SED leader Walter Ulbricht reports to Nikita Khrushchev on the construction of the Wall: "The implementation of the resolution to close the border around West Berlin has been carried out according to plan. Now work is under way on securing the border further. The tactic of carrying out the measures step by step has made it hard for the enemy to assess the extent of our measures." In his written response at the end of September, the Kremlin leader expressly calls on Ulbrich not to provoke any worsening of the situation on the border, particularly in Berlin: "Under the present conditions, since the measures to secure and control the borders of the GDR with West Berlin have been successfully carried out, and since the Western Powers favour negotiations and contact has already been taken up between the USSR and USA in New York, any steps that could cause the situation to escalate, especially in Berlin, should be avoided."
17 September: In the elections for the 4th German Bundestag, the CDU misses out on the absolute majority, winning 45.3 percent of the vote. The SPD improves its position, gaining 4.4 percent to reach 36.2 percent. The election winner is the FDP, which sees gains of 5.1 percent, bringing it to 12.8 percent. After weeks of laborious negotiations, CDU, CSU and FDP join to form a governing coalition.
In the GDR, local elections take place; they have been prepared by weeks of massive propaganda announcing a "peace election". The "Candidates of the National Front" are elected with 99.96 percent.
19 September: The special envoy of US President Kennedy, General Lucius Clay, lands at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin in the late afternoon. A hundred thousand West Berliners cheer his arrival. The US diplomats and high-ranking officers view his mission with some scepticism, however, as his status does not accord with the rules of diplomatic and military hierarchies.
20 September: Since 13 August 1961, the GDR authorities have recorded 216 forced breakthroughs at the border, involving altogether 417 people. During a meeting of the "Central Team" for the construction of the Wall, its leader, Erich Honecker, states that "a complete evacuation or more rapid evacuation of unreliable elements" must take place in the streets of East Berlin and the environs of Berlin adjacent to West Berlin where the border line runs alongside house properties and people could still climb out of apartments using ropes. Honecker goes on to say: "Firearms are to be used against traitors and border violators. Measures are to be taken to allow criminals to be caught in the 100-metre restricted area. Space for observation and shooting is to be created in the restricted area. Managers of collective farms must be informed that only low-standing crops are to be planted in the 100-metre restricted area. The evacuation of hostile and unreliable elements is to be stepped up."
20 September: Along the Berlin sector border, residents are evicted from houses that are directly next to the border and offer good chances for escape. On this day alone, for example, around 250 families are evicted from twenty rented houses on Harzer Strasse between the Berlin districts of Treptow and Neukölln.
The GDR Volkskammer (parliament) passes a "law on the defence of the GDR" (Defence Law). With this law, the SED leadership gives itself almost unlimited emergency powers: "The State Council of the Republic, in accordance with its rights as laid down in Article 106 of the constitution, can, for the duration of the state of defence, regulate the rights of the citizens and the administration of justice according to the defence needs of the Republic in a manner deviating from the constitution."
22 September: The Leipzig philosopher Ernst Bloch, who has already been living in West Germany before the construction of the Wall, announces that he wants to stay in West Germany: "After the events of 13 August, which lead one to expect that there is absolutely no room for independent thinkers to live or work, I no longer have the desire to expose my work and myself to unworthy conditions and the threat that alone maintains these conditions. At the age of 76 I have decided not to return to Leipzig."
25 September: The evictions on Bernauer Strasse, which have been going on for days, take on a dramatic note. Some residents escape by jumping from the window of their apartments onto West Berlin territory.
The 77-year-old Frieda Schulz is held back by members of the Combat Groups. West Berliners climb up the ledge of her house and free her, enabling her to fall into a safety sheet of the West Berlin fire brigade.
The 80-year-old Olga Segler from Bernauer Strasse 34 makes her jump with fatal consequences: the next day, she succumbs to the internal injuries she suffered. An internal report by the First Secretary of the SED district administration for Berlin’s Mitte district, Kurt Thieme, says that fifteen people were "recovered" during the operation. Thieme also proposes that "after our assessment, we must move towards resettling all the renters in Bernauer Strasse, Luckauer Strasse and Liesenstrasse. Otherwise border breakthroughs will continue unabated in this area."
The central organ of the SED, "Neues Deutschland", reports on the evictions two days later under the headline "Peaceful Living Conditions after Move": "Last Sunday, 140 families moved from Bernauer Strasse. The constant provocation by incited hooligans and commissioned cameramen under the protection of the drawn revolvers of the frontline-city police had made it impossible for them to live in this location on our national border."
26 September: In a speech to the United Nations, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Gromyko, praises the GDR and condemns West Germany. The history of the GDR, he says, has been "a history of the struggle to promote the victory of the ideas of friendship and cooperation between states". He says that, behind the democratic façade of the Federal Republic of Germany, the powers are at work that "once bred fascism", that were to blame for the outbreak of the Second World War and that today are only waiting "to take revenge for the lost war". He suggests that the only way out of this situation and to avoid the danger of war breaking out over the situation in Germany is to sign a German peace treaty. He adds that "the self-determination of the Germans" is an "imperialist jurisdiction" that has nothing to do with the "true national interests of the German people". During his confidential talks with US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, however, Gromyko intimates that for Moscow, the topic of a peace treaty with the GDR is no longer the focus of Soviet interests.
28 September: During a council meeting in the district of Wedding, Mayor Matthes reads out a letter written to a classmate by an East Berlin schoolgirl, who had attended a West Berlin school up to 13 August 1961. The girl calls on her classmates not to simply accept the situation created by the construction of the Wall.
Several hundred border police and Pioneers level out a 100-metre-wide strip in an allotment area on the Berlin sector border in the district of Johannisthal. Even the winterproof summer houses have to make way for the "death strip" and are razed to the ground.
29 September: For days, residents in houses on the German-German border have been evicted in the same way as has been done on the sector border of West Berlin in order to broaden the "death strip". But the really big operation is still to come for thousands of GDR residents on the border to West Germany; this will take place on 3 October 1961. RIAS reports on the demolition of houses in the village of Rottenbach in the Thuringian municipality of Judenbach, and speaks with eyewitnesses.
Eastern press comments
In the East Berlin newspaper "Sonntag" of 17.9.1961, Bernt F. Kügelken writes that "a whole people has worked on building the Wall". "Along Bernauer Strasse – to give one example – it is the joint work of historians, philologists, economists and doctors from the Academy of Sciences, of filmmaker from DEFA and pavers from a state-owned road-building company, of journalists and export merchants. As members of the Combat Groups, they learnt in a kind of crash course how to use stone and lime and placed the ashlars one on the other. Even the journalists at ‘Sonntag’ helped build the Wall there."
"What is the humanistic task and challenge at the present time?" asks Kurt Hager, the Central Committee Secretary in charge of science, adult education and culture, and SED Politburo candidate. Writing in the organ of the SED district administration in Berlin, the "Berliner Zeitung", on 17.9.1961, he goes on to say: "Heinrich Mann once wrote: ‘Humanists are only then of any use when they also take action instead of just talking.’ On 13 August, the worker-and-peasant state acted on the advice of this great humanist and wrecked the plans of the West German warmongers. The 13th of August was a clearing storm. It made it evident once and for all (…) that there is no chance, neither today nor tomorrow nor in future, of re-establishing the rule of capitalism in the GDR. Socialism is stronger and unshakeable. The 13th of August showed that there is a new balance of power in Germany. (…) Of course, the measures that were and are being taken to secure peace call on people’s intelligence for a real assessment of the situation and understanding of the new state of affairs. They demand a reassessment of many beliefs that have turned out to be illusory. They demand from many wanderers between two worlds or historical onlookers a reorientation towards honestly working to promote the establishment of socialism."
In the East Berlin newspaper "Wochenpost" of 23.9.1961, under the headline "Responsibility", the GDR author Stefan Heym welcomes the resumption of Soviet atomic tests: "The great hope of humanity if it is to survive – this needs to be said openly for once - is that the B-52 bombers of the US Air Force belong in the rubbish bin, that 90 percent of its rockets can be shot down and that the Americans lag behind in the most important fields of modern weapons technology. If they sit down at the negotiating table in Geneva, it is with the idea of using this period of toing and froing to make up the shortfall in rockets and advance projects like the neutron bomb, which would be the fulfilment of the dreams of all imperialist strategies, from the chiefs-of-staff in the Pentagon right down to Mr. Franz Josef Strauss. (…) The Soviet tests, announced by Khrushchev, serve to dispel such dreams. They remind such dreamers that it will be their factories, their machines, their lovely mansions that fall prey to destruction, and that no bunker, no cave, no tunnel is deep enough to protect their highly esteemed person. (…), But, someone might object, why now? Wasn’t it possible to wait until the Americans began again with their tests? To pass them the buck? We can assume that Moscow has also thought about the timing. Perhaps we can see matters in a more correct light if we assume that it is not about "passing bucks" and if we see the statement by the Soviet government about the resumption of atom tests in connection with the wall going straight through Berlin and the seventeen orbits of the earth by Major Titov. Then the message is clear: this far and no further."
Western Press Comments
In the "New York Herald Tribune" of 19.9.1961, the American journalist Walter Lippmann calls for "new decisions" in the face of the physical division of Germany, which, he says, has become accomplished fact through the building of the Wall - which has been accepted by the entire NATO alliance. He writes that the fact of division, which the West has not yet admitted, must be recognised. "The decision confronting the West Germans is whether they wholeheartedly hold to the West – to NATO, to the Common Market, to the United Nations and to the network of political and cultural ties that make up Western society. Or whether they remain with the West, but with some mental reservations, such as wanting to negotiate a reunification with the Soviets. I don’t mean the Germans can or should abandon the idea of reunification. But they will have to wait a long time for it, and a lot will have to happen to make it finally possible."
In "Christ und die Welt" of 22.9.1961, Sebastian Haffner comments on the rupture caused by 13 August 1961: "After the space of four weeks, something that may have gone more or less unnoticed in the turbulence of daily events now strikes the eye with full force: the epochal change brought about by the catastrophe of 13 August. It was not Ulbricht’s action that was catastrophic and transformed the world: it had already been in the air, even if it had not been expected until after the peace treaty. What was catastrophic, what still echoes on hollowly, was the absolute passivity of the West, the complete perplexity, helplessness and lack of comprehension with which the Berlin protective powers, including the materially still strongest power on earth, America, let the bone be taken from their mouth like an overly tame poodle. The communiqué, na"ve to the point of virtual insanity, with which Mr. Rusk (whom I got to know ten years ago as an amiable ministerial official) calmly acknowledged this enormity on the very same evening, the almost relieved, almost pleased realisation that the measure was directed only at East Berliners and East Berlin, made it clear to the entire world that the present leaders of America not only allow their most important rights to be taken from them without offering resistance, but that they don’t even notice when they are taken. Since then, nothing has been the same as it was: we live in a world that has changed, and changed very much for the worse. (…) The West is no longer active in Berlin. At best, it reacts, and often not even that. This is a great cause for bitterness."
Under the question "Why the 13th of August Would Have Been Avoidable" in the paper "Die Zeit" of 29.9.1961, Marion Dönhoff maintains that, if the NATO foreign ministers’ conference that took place from 5-8 August 1961 in Paris had put forward a definite blueprint for East-West negotiations, as the Americans and English had originally intended, "Khrushchev would certainly not have taken the risk five days later of breaking, unilaterally and by force, the Four-Power status of Berlin – for at the time he still considered that a risk."
