"He Who Surrenders Berlin"

To the German capital and its people last week came the most violent and perhaps the most fateful days since Red armies three years ago blasted their way across the Tiergarten, littered with uniformed corpses. After watching the Berlin scene last week, TIME'S Bureau Chief Emmet Hughes cabled:

The whine of bullets echoed in the hollow ruins. Deep in the Russian sector, Red mob violence had finally pushed Berlin's government to the city's Western half. But on this side, the people rose some 300,000 strong to shout their defiance of the Reds in one cf the greatest voluntary mass meetings in German history.

No such show of popular force had been seen in Germany since 100 years ago, when the people of Berlin took to the same streets to fight the royal troops. In 1948 they were without revolutionary leaders, but they had one great unifying purpose--freedom from Red tyranny. Momentously, the weight and voice of the German masses was coming into play in the battle between East and West. There was enough mass power in the Berlin throng to change the fate of Europe.

Generalissimo Winter. "Even Hitler didn't get crowds like this," I heard a grey little man in shirtsleeves murmur to his friend. Indeed, it was a crowd worthy of this highest German superlative. The 300,000 blanketed the whole rubble-strewn area before the Reichstag, choked every path through the Tiergarten, stood in neat, tight ranks between rows of planted cabbages in the little garden plots. A hot sun beat on the crowd; the air was heavy with sweat and whirls of dust from the sandy earth and the odor of cheap tobacco. A seven-year-old girl whimpered against her father's shoulder. He muttered to someone near him: "Why shouldn't she be here? These are historic hours. We're going to see freedom either reborn or reburied."

That was the way the people's leaders felt this day, too. They had few original phrases to add to what had been said often before. But the words had a new and bolder meaning, and the people cheered. Said Ernst Reuter simply: "He who surrenders Berlin surrenders a world, surrenders himself." Gustav Pietch, railroad labor leader, bellowed hoarsely: "The blockade has failed, and now the Communists can only wait for the help of General Hunger and Generalissimo--" (here he paused long enough for the crowd to expect to hear "Stalin") "--Winter." Pietch concluded: "Again they will fail!" And the crowd roared its assent.

The climax came when Social Democratic Leader Franz Neumann asked the crowd's approval to carry a memorandum to the Western powers documenting the tyranny and police methods of the Soviet. The hundreds of thousands of arms went up in approval as they cried "Freiheit!" in a mighty roar. Neumann rode on the crowd's shoulders as he tightly clasped the typewritten sheets of his memorandum in one arm and a bouquet of red roses in the other. Slowly the crowd began to melt back into the ruins from which it had come. Loudspeakers blared Wagner's Overture to Tannhaeuser.

A Stamped Foot. This was the prelude to trouble. No one expected it, no one planned it. It flared in one spot, subsided, flared again blocks away, finally burned itself out in two hours.

First involved were the thousands pouring through the massive Doric columns of the Brandenburger Tor on their way to homes in the Russian sector. An open truck carrying some dozen Soviet-sector police drove towards them up Unter den Linden--apparently dispatched with the vague intent of keeping order. The crowd jeered them; rocks followed jeers and the melee began.

From the ruins of the old U.S. Embassy a rain of bricks and stones drove the first police back in retreat and pelted every Soviet-licensed car in sight. Then reinforcements sped up and the crowd fell back; pistol shots cut the air and the first man fell, pitching forward on his face. In the minutes that followed, the crowd rolled back & forth repeatedly through the columns of the Tor, as its courage alternately flared and faltered. As a whole it was not a bold crowd: one bunch that halted a Soviet car beat a hasty retreat when the officer in it jumped out, stamped his foot and waved his fists.

"The British with Their Cameras!" Unknown to the Russians, the people's attention by now had largely turned on an extraordinary drama at the Branden-burger Tor itself. A tall, dark youth had climbed the gate and was wrestling with the red flag on top. The crowd watched his progress with the hushed awe of an audience at an acrobatic show--even as pistol shots sporadically cracked out from the far side along Unter den Linden. Now the crowd cried: "Anbrennen!" (Burn it!). The first youth failed to get the flag down; two more tried, and the third finally sent it fluttering to the street.

Eagerly the crowd closed in on the flag, tore pieces from it. Suddenly the whine of a racing jeep motor sent the people scurrying. Soviet soldiers had finally looked around just in time to see the flag coming down. Their jeep roared up to the gate, swung sharply around to face the crowd from Soviet territory. Five Russian soldiers swung their Tommy guns menacingly; three shots were fired in the air.

A squad of British MPs raced to the scene, formed a cordon that easily pushed the crowd back. (One British officer came running with his camera, and a Berliner watching him snapped bitterly: "How typical! The Russians come with machine guns and the British with their cameras!") The riots ended with only one dead--a 15-year-old boy shot through the groin by Soviet-sector police.

The Distressed Butler. It must be said that Red police and troops behaved with almost commendable restraint, in the fray at Brandenburger Tor. They had no goal there: trouble was forced upon them. Their masters and the masters' stooges behaved infinitely worse, earlier in the week, at the City Hall, where they had a coldly planned objective. There they clamped a final, successful siege on the building, drove out the City Assembly, and--incidentally but treacherously--seized 46 hapless West-sector police.

I watched the third Red mob in a fortnight hammer its way into the City Hall. They were only about 1,000 strong, and of these only about 50 were determined toughs. At the glass front door six aged clerks leaned heavily: on their arms little white bands designated them as the special "defense force" promised by the acting mayor, Ferdinand Friedensburg.

Suddenly knees, feet and elbows came through the door, scattering glass before them. The invaders slowly climbed, one by one, through the empty frames in the door. I watched their leader--a blond youth of 20--walk quickly up to a grey-haired clerk leaning innocently against a desk, spin him around, swing a haymaker at the man's temple and send him sprawling across the marble floor against the wall. The man got up holding his aching head, shaking it slowly as if in disbelief. Fighting and fear spread swiftly.

Through it all, pale, ineffectual Friedensburg pattered back & forth between Allied offices and his own; he wore the disapproving and distressed look of a butler at a tea party when one of the guests has dropped an eclair on his mistress' finest carpet. In the middle of a lame press conference which he had summoned, word came that the Soviet-sector police had arrived in force, were swarming all over the building. For a while the reason was not clear; then it was learned that 46 West-sector police in plainclothes, summoned by Friedensburg, were trapped in the building, unarmed. They had contributed absolutely nothing to defending the seat of city government. Now they had taken refuge in Allied liaison offices, and the little "siege within a siege" was on.

Treachery at Dawn. It lasted for 40 hours. It ended in the way the Russians always knew they could end it: by treachery. Marshal Vassily Sokolovsky assured French officials--who made some of the most strenuous protests--of safe conduct for the Germans. Out of the darkness of their rooms, the weary prisoners came into the darkness of night, gratefully breathing the clean air of early morning.

They piled into two French army trucks and headed for freedom. Four blocks away two Soviet jeeps, bristling with Tommy guns, brought them to a halt. Almost instantly 75 Soviet-sector police swarmed from the shadows of a nearby building. As the Germans were taken, dawn was just beginning to fill the skies above the ruins.

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