The Communist Objective

What is behind Khruschev's determination to force the Western powers out of Berlin, even, it has seemed, at the risk of war? There are of course many considerations but it is clear that Krushchev's overall purpose is to consolidate Soviet control of East Germany and all of Eastern Europe, which cannot be done as long as West Berlin remains "an outpost of the free world." A major source of Communist dissatisfaction has centred on the city's function as an escape hatch to freedom for East German refugees. Since the war more than four million East Germans have fled to West Germany, primarily by way of West Berlin. Most of them are professional people — doctors, lawyers, professors, students, and technicians. Fifty per cent, are under 25 years of age. They represent the repudiation, by the most educated and valuable elements in the East German population, of all the grandiose claims of communism for its superior and more "humane" system. Purely as man power, they are a serious material loss to the East German economy, and, by extension, to the economy of the Soviet Union itself, for which East Germany is the chief supplier of machines and industrial equipment, particularly chemical equipment.

On August 13. the Communists took the drastic, and shaming, step of sealing off the border between East and West Berlin. East German troops were brought up along the border. They put up barbed wire barriers; then began building a wall of cement blocks through the middle of Berlin. Other East German troops, backed by a ring of troops from three Soviet divisions, were deployed on the edges of the city. On August 17 the Fdj (Freie Deutsche Jugend) the official East German Communist youth organisation, summoned its entire membership for "voluntary" military service in case fighting broke out over Berlin. These military measures were obviously intended to prevent a popular revolt such as occurred in East Berlin and East Germany in 1953, and which the Communists knew they were risking again by this attempt to literally "wall in" the people of East Berlin and East Germany. The so-called Warsaw Pact states — the Soviet Union's East European satellites — announced (September 10) measures to increase their "combat readiness" through a call-up of reserve troops and accelerated combat training programs. Meanwhile, East Germans continue to defy their Communist jailers by jumping, swimming, crawling, and crashing their way through the physical barriers in East Berlin.