Spitzbart in Trouble

Throughout all the maneuvers over Berlin, one thing has not changed: Walter Ulbricht's nasty little regime in East Germany is in serious trouble. Last week Ulbricht wasadmitting it.

The end of 1961 had once been the deadline for the signing of a peace treaty between Russia and East Germany; Khrushchev quietly dropped that deadline weeks ago, in his New Year's message did not even mention it. While West Germany continued to enjoy its brightly lit prosperity, the eastern half of the divided country was in gloomy want. As the weather turned colder, there were official warnings against the use of electric heaters because of East Germany's power shortage. Shops were short of shoes. Butter, milk and meat were hard to find in many cities. The papers kept reporting arrests of "economic criminals"; one 69-year-old woman in Dresden drew 15 months for hoarding food, and in Frankfurt-on-Oder a man who burned down two barns full of corn was sentenced to death for what the court called "hatred against the state."

Nasty Recruiters. On TV, Ulbricht tried to explain that East Germany's food problem was the result of "a smaller harvest than in 1960 due to particularly unfavorable weather conditions." But this excuse hardly convinced many East Germans who knew that neighboring Poland, with similar weather, produced record crops in 1961. The real difference: Poland had soft-pedaled collectivization, permitted the farmers to till their own land; Ulbricht's regime, on the other hand, was still trying to force an unwilling peasantry to work in a harsh collective farm system.

By failing to produce, the peasants in effect were voting against Ulbricht with their plows, just as the masses of escaping East Germans (3,500,000, or 20% of the population since 1945) had voted against him with their feet. The Berlin Wall has sharply curbed but not entirely halted the exodus from East Germany; about 1,500 a month still manage to flee. Ulbricht publicly admitted last week that the purpose of the Wall had been to halt the flight and its debilitating effects on the East German economy. In a revealing year-end article in Moscow's Pravda, he tried to put all the blame on Western intrigue. "There were considerable difficulties in the education of young intelligentsia from the ranks of the working class," he wrote. "West German firms deliberately recruited such specialists...Some citizens thought crossing the border between the German Democratic Republic and West Germany was just like going from one Germany to another. But in fact they were escaping from the socialist camp to the imperialist camp. It cost us more than 30 billion marks...almost 40% of the national income for 1961."

Ulbricht claimed a 1961 increase of industrial production of 6.2%, but West German economists refused to believe the figure, were sure that East Germany at best had held its own.

This Way Out. The state of East Germany's morale could not be expressed in statistics, but there was one particularly grim set of figures: in the last week of 1961, an average of 47 East Berliners committed suicide each day, against the September rate of 25 to 30 and the average of only one a day before the Wall went up.

According to hopeful rumors and guesses, the Russians were about ready to abandon old Spitzbart (pointed beard), who is hated for his brutal methods and slavish subservience to Moscow, and replace him with someone more palatable. Runs the argument: now that the Wall is up to prevent major population leakage, Moscow might well be prepared to strengthen its satellite by trying a softer approach with the stubborn, restive East German people. Ulbricht's party organ, Neues Deutschland, noted the rumors of a Khrushchev-Ulbricht rift by elaborately denying it.

Meanwhile, a Western intelligence officer summarized: "All the characteristics for a general uprising are present in East Germany--just as much as they were there in 1953. But there isn't going to be an uprising because of the presence of Soviet troops, because of the fact that 1953 failed, and because East Germans know that the West, which did nothing about Hungary or the Wall, cannot help them."

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