Fight in Germany is nationwide

Submitted by Matthew on 24 June, 2013 - 6:40 Author: Hal Draper

While the sharpest struggles in East Berlin have been lulled, resistance action in the whole of the East German zone, which followed hard in the wake of the Berlin rising, is still continuing with at least sporadic strikes and riots.

The Russian occupation authorities have formally executed 22 so far.

The first was a West Berliner, Willi Goettling; the twenty-second was the CP mayor of Doebernitz, in Saxony-Anhalt, H W Hartmami, who was accused of knocking down a Volkspolizei cop who had fired or was about to fire into a crowd of demonstrators.

Beginning Saturday, completely authenticated details became scarcer as the Russian forces tried to wall off East Berlin and the rest of the country. But admissions in the Stalinist press itself verified reports of spreading action throughout the zone.

Neues Deutschland conceded that work stoppages and “disorders” had reached the furthest corners of the country, as it attempted to explain why Russian troops had had to intervene. (“Of course, it would have been better if the German workers had repelled the provocations themselves in time,” it said, “but the workers did not have the necessary high sense of responsibility.”)

All over East Germany, cities were under Russian martial law, including Potsdam, the headquarters of the Russian army, up to Magdeburg on the Elbe, up to the Polish frontier, up to the uranium mine region bordering Czechoslovakia. By Thursday 18th rail transportation through East Germany was at a standstill.

After a special meeting of the central committee of the Stalinist party (SED), official admissions came out on the extent of the movement. It admitted that the resistance “had the character of an uprising,” citing “attacks on food warehouses,” etc., as well as “murderous assaults on functionaries of the party, of mass organisations [front organisations] and of the state apparatus.” “A large number of provocateurs have been arrested,” it stated. “The remaining part does not dare to appear. But quiet has by no means been fully assured. The enemy continues his insidious agitation.”

Very significant was its admission of widespread implication of CP members in the movement.

“Tens of thousands of them sit in their offices, write some papers or other and simply wait. The whole party must be mobilised.” East Berlin was still paralysed by the general strike.

There has been no definite word since if or to what extent the Russian forces have succeeded in breaking it.
At Magdeburg (West German truck drivers reported) there was a pitched battle between a thousands-strong mass of workers and the police. According to this report, 13,000 workers mainly from the Thaelmann heavy machinery works were involved; they stormed the jail, containing political prisoners, and 22 were shot, after which Russian tanks rolled in under martial law.

According to the AP on the 22nd, the regime admitted “sabotage” — i.e., strikes, riots and demonstrations — in the Russian-managed uranium mines of Saxony.

Other cities reported as caught up by the revolt were Dresden, Chemnitz, Dessau, Brandenburg, Leipzig, Luckenwalde, Halle, Erfurt.

The West Berlin press declared that the movement had spread to the peasants of the countryside in many areas — a very significant development. The sections pointed to were around Mecklenburg, Luckenwalde, Forst, Juterborf and Ludwigsfelde. The AP had it that peasants were withholding their produce from the state’s collection stations and supplying food to distressed workers’ areas.

Side by side with its brutal display of violence and armed terror, the Stalinist regime, backed by its Moscow masters, moved to meet the crisis with further announcements of concessions, directed specifically to woo the working class.

It is important to note that the concessions of June 10, easing up certain aspects of the regime, had had not a single item of special interest to the workers. In this announcement, the week before the outbreak of the revolt, the peasants had been promised easier crop quotas; private enterprise had been promised loans; refugees — restoration of property; the churches — letting up on anti-religious drives; plus a lightening of the penal code. At the same time the regime imposed on the workers the decree for heavier work norms which was the immediate cause of the outburst.

What did it mean? Seeking to strengthen its popular support, the government had turned to wooing the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements. Either it felt that the workers were “in the bag” and did not need sops — which can be believed only with difficulty, in view of what happened and indeed of previous evidences of discontent, although incredible pieces of stupidity are always possible — or else the government felt that it needed more support or at least toleration from the “former people” precisely in view of waning working-class support.

Using both the carrot and the club, the Stalinists hope to recoup. Rallies of “loyalist” workers have been called, the first one in Berlin being held in the Comic Opera House.

Not least interesting among the consequences of the East German workers’ mobilisation has been the outbreak of jitters among the Allies in Western Berlin. At the same time that the Allied commandants sent a note calling on the Stalinist regime to restore free travel in Berlin, the Western powers themselves indicated they considered the Berlin situation to have dangerous potentialities. They advised Dr. Ernst Reuter, West Berlin mayor, that no public meetings were to be held without the authority of the Allied Kommandatura.
Western officials had expressed fears lest the action in the East spill over, across the sector lines. They could have in mind only a possible effect of the anti-Stalinist revolt in stimulating also West German sentiment for national unity and independence.

Instead of reacting with unalloyed rejoicing at the events, the Allied powers on the spot, regardless of their formal statements, seem to betray the classic ruling-class reaction of fear and disconcertment before a massive self-mobilisation of a revolutionary working class independent of their control.

The New York Times (June 20) asserted that the revolt was the work of “a nameless and faceless workers’ underground organisation in East Germany” — a thesis which we would be very glad to believe, and which has been cropping up elsewhere. Its confirmation would be second only in importance to the fact of the revolt itself, and in the longer run more important.

But aside from this, in the course of his analysis, the [N. Y. Times] correspondent keeps stressing: “... the underground is indigenous to the East German working class without any middle-class affiliations... [it is] beyond the reach of the intelligence services of the Western powers and immune to the political combat organisations of the middle-class Bonn government... [it] has no connection with the West... [it] probably will continue to function as an independent organisation preferring to follow its own line in pursuit of its own aims.”

An echo of Western uneasiness before the spectacle of working-class self-movement appears in the editorial columns of the New York Times (June 18) after a hail-and-well-done to the East German people: The Stalinist police state cannot be overthrown by the people, it cautions them, fortified by all its wisdom on the nature of revolutionary power. “Such regimes can only be destroyed by conquest from the outside, as the German, Italian and Japanese, governments were in the Second World War, or by palace revolutions which may or may not pave the way for democracy.” (Our italics.) Clearly and crudely it is saying: “We hereby pat you on the head, but you’ll have to wait for the third world war when we, your American saviours, with our atom bombs, liberate you all over again.

So it was a wonderful try, but now run along and don’t make trouble...

The Times’ Arthur Krock reveals that “When the disorders broke out in Pilsen [Czechoslovakia] some days ago this government [the U. S.] looked at the event suspiciously....” And the point of his piece turns out to be worry lest the anti-Stalinist action of the people behind the Iron Curtain stimulate sentiment in this country to cut armaments.

This is the authentic bourgeois mind at work. But the European people, and also the militant workers under the Kremlin heel, do not want to wait for the third world war. And their heroic struggle points the way, whether they are now conscious of it or not, to the real alternative to the war: the workers’ revolution, which will not fail to disturb Western capitalism too.

Labor Action, 29 June 1953

Timeline

From early 1944: Russian forces start advancing and taking territory from the Germans; eventually control all Eastern Europe.
April-May 1945: Russian troops take Berlin
June 1945: Germany put under “Four Power Occupation”. USSR controls East Germany and East Berlin; Britain, France, and the USA, collaborating with each other, control West Germany and West Berlin. There is also an umbrella four-power “control council”.
February 1948: Stalinists consolidate control in Czechoslovakia, where until then there was some autonomous political life.
March 1948: USSR withdraws from four-power “council” overseeing Germany
April 1948: US starts “Marshall Plan” aid to bolster its allies in Europe.
May-June 1948: Open breach between USSR and Yugoslavia, where Stalinists have won power autonomously.
June 1948 to May 1949: USSR blockades Berlin. Britain and the USA airlift supplies to West Berlin.
May-October 1949: Germany de facto divided into two states, the “Federal Republic” (declared May 1949, with elections in August 1949 for a government), and the “Democratic Republic” (declared October 1949). West Berlin becomes an enclave within East Germany, closely linked to but not formally part of the Federal Republic. However, movement between East and West Berlin was still relatively fluid in 1953, and until the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. (East Germany built a barrier along its main border with West Germany in May 1952).
1949-52: Tightening of Stalinist control in Eastern Europe. Show trials of Stalinist party leaders deemed unreliable, such as Slansky in Czechoslovakia and Rajk in Hungary.
1950-53: Height of “McCarthyite” witch-hunting in the USA
June 1950: Start of Korean war. The war reaches stalemate in mid-51, and then armistice in July 1953.
March 1953: Death of Stalin. This is followed, eventually, by a slow and limited “thaw” — though also by the military suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956.

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