NATO – A Bridge Across Time - Newsdesk Media

Right: Guarding the border
crossing station, Teltow,
East Berlin, August 3, 1961
The Night The
Wall Went Up
Frederick Kempe, in an excerpt
from his forthcoming book, tells the
story of how the Wall came into being
Wednesday, August 9, 1961
Communist Party headquarters,
East Berlin
Like a veteran stage producer preparing
for the performance of a lifetime, Walter
Ulbricht rehearsed every scene time and
again in the last crucial hours before his
August 13 curtain call. His drama, codenamed
“Operation Rose,” would play for
one night only. He would have no second
chance to get it right.
No detail was too small for Ulbricht’s
attention or that of Erich Honecker, the
Central Committee’s chief for security
matters. At age 48, Honecker had two
unique qualities: unquestioned loyalty
and unmatched organizational talents.
Did they have sufficient barbed wire
to wrap around West Berlin’s entire,
96-mile (155km) circumference? To
avoid suspicion, Ulbricht’s team had
distributed the barbed wire orders among
a number of East German purchasers,
who in turn had negotiated with several
different manufacturers in both Great
Britain and West Germany. Despite such
unprecedented activity, Ulbricht was
satisfied that Western intelligence thus
far had failed to sound an alert.
Ulbricht’s men and their Soviet advisors
had mapped every meter of the 27 miles
(47km) of border that ran through the city
center between West and East Berlin and
the remaining 69 miles (108km) between
West Berlin and the East German
countryside. They knew precisely what
sort of peculiarity might face them on
each street and at each crossing.
Dozens of trucks already had
transported hundreds of concrete
uprights secretly from Eisenhüttenstadt,
an industrial town on the Oder River
near the Polish border, to a stockpile at
a police barracks in the Berlin district
of Pankow and several other locations.
Several hundred East German police from
outside Berlin had assembled at the vast
State Security Directorate compound at
Hohenschönhausen on Berlin’s outskirts.
Ulbricht was just as precise in his choice
of army and police units that would be
involved. Absolute loyalty was required
as their first task, beginning at 1:30 a.m.,
would be to form a human wall around
West Berlin to stop any spontaneous
escape attempts or other individual acts
of resistance until construction brigades
could put up the first physical barriers.
Thus he would use only the most trusted,
elite members of factory fighting units,
border police, reserve police, as well as
police school cadets.
Regular army soldiers would form
the second line of defense and would,
in an emergency, move up to fill in any
breaches in the forward line. The mighty,
fail-safe power of Soviet military would
stand back in a third ring, which would
only advance if allied forces disrupted
the operation. Ulbricht’s team would
distribute ammunition using the same
conceptual precision, providing sufficient
quantities to hold the line, but distributed
in a manner designed to avoid a reckless
shooting that could trigger war.
Police and military units would have
30 minutes to close the border from the
moment they received their orders at
one in the morning, at which point all
East Berlin street lights would be doused
so as to better conceal their handiwork.
Honecker’s forces would then have a
further 180 minutes to put up barriers
around the city, including the complete
36 The Atlantic Council