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Cold War: German political mileau 1945-48 German people
Cold War: Early German Political Mileau--Doviet Policy and Propaganda (1945-53)
Figure 1.--Here we see a Communist controlled demonstartion in Berlin (August 1950). The press caption read, "Communist Youth Rally Kindergarten crowd joins in Berlin Red Rally: East Berlin youngsters, barely out of Kindergarten, join workers in the huge Communist rally staged in the Lustgarten on August 26 [1950], some 50, 000 Communists gathered for the opening of the Comminist organized 'National Congress'. The parade was reviewed by East Germamy's Communist President Wilhelm Pieck and members of his cabinet. Anong the signs carried by these youthful marchers are thoise reading 'Ami (Anerican) Go Home' and 'Truman Wants War, We Want Peace'. The Congress opened with the reading of a master plan fir subversive action against Western Alklies in Germany. The Fighting Program' included strikes and recruiting of Ex Nazis; mass demonstrations in West Germany cities in defiance of legal regulations and reneweed efforts to persuade West German industrialists to collaborate with the Soviet Zone."
Stalin did not assist the German Communists other than forcing the captive East German populatiin to accept them. The Soviets demanded massive reparations from the Germans, both from the Western and Eastern occupation zones. A German reader writes, "Factories in the West were largely damaged if not obliterated by the Allied Strategic Bombing Campaign. In the East there was less industry and what existed was less damaged by the bombing. What was still operable was seized and shipped to the Soviet Union as reparations, but much of what was transported was not operable because of a combination of damage and missing know-how." Of course he could only force compliance in the the eastern Soviet zone. This is something the Western Allies did not do. The Soviets dismantled factories in their occupation zones and shipped the machinery back to the Soviet Union to replace factories destroyed by the Germans. Thus Stalin undermined the economic viability of East Germany from the very beginning. The NKVD, however, set up a police state denying basic civil rights and trained the Stasi to do to the same on their own. We are not entirely sure just how important this was. Economic developments may have been more important. But even before major economic differences developed, the Berlin and German resistance toward Soviet attempts to seize power (Berlin 1948) suggest that economics was not the entire story. There is no way of knowing what East Germans thought because free expression could get you arrested.
The 1st Communist Party Congress (Vereinigungsparteitag) was the Unification Congress (April 1946). It created the Gedrman Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED). ThisSED Congress elected two co-chairmen to lead the party: Wilhelm Pieck, former leader of the eastern KPD, and Otto Grotewohl, former leader of the eastern SPD. The Union was intended for all of occupied Germany. The Union was rejected in each of the three western occupation zones where both parties remained independent. The union of the two Communist parties was effective only in the Soviet zone. The SED was of course modeled after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The 3rd Party Congress convened (July 12959). It is associated with the demonstration seen here (figure 1). It emphasized industrial efforts. progress. Soviet and German Commi=unists as well as other European Comminisdts still believed that the 'scientific effecicencues' of socialism wold create an industrial economy tht would generate prosperity that capitalist economonies could not match. The SED authorities contginued the nationalization of private concerns, creating 'people's enterprises' (Volkseigener Betrieb, VEB). The SED completed its transformation into an more orthodox Soviet-style party with the election of Walter Ulbricht as the party's General Secretary.
Stalin did not dare submit all of this to the East Germn people in free elections. In contrast we know know precisely what Germans in the West were thinking. Stalin's efforts to seize Berlin did not help the Communists. Stalin had assumed that after the War, people would actually vot for Communists in democratic elections. The actual results in Eastern Europe surprised him. In the actual free electionm held in West Germany, the Communists polled only 5 percent of the vote (1949). And this was before the German Economic Miracle had begun to kick in materially. Soviet propagannda was heavilly leveredged to attack Americans with slogans like 'Amrrican Go Home'. In West Germany this actually was detrimehntal. Germans in the West were now looking at the Ameriuvans against Sioviet oppressioin. It is only later that caputalism and American would be associated with prosperity in contrat to Communist economuc failure in East Germany.
