(See cover)
Among the hundreds of German and Austrian Communists who went to Spain in the '30s to fight in the civil war, the man to fear most was a taciturn, cold-eyed German named Walter Ulbricht. In Albacete, far behind the Republican lines, Special Agent Ulbricht set up a German section of the OGPU and, on Moscow's orders, proceeded to rid the Communist ranks of Trotskyites. For those special cases which did not respond to the lash, the pliers, the hot wires and the other accepted tools of his craft, Ulbricht fashioned a tiny cell of granite blocks in which a prisoner could neither stand nor sit. Those who lived to tell called it Ulbricht's "stone coffin."
Walter Ulbricht moved on to bigger things. With mortar made in Moscow, he built a stone coffin for a land of 18 million people and called it the German Democratic Republic.
But killing individual Trotskyites and killing a nation are not the same. For eight years, the people of Soviet Germany crouched in the crypt that Soviet might and Walter Ulbricht's Communist regime built for them, unable to sit in comfort or stand in freedom. Then they rose up, and Walter Ulbricht's masterpiece began to show cracks.
Symbol of Failure. One day last week, the coffinmaker stood before a crowd in Potsdam's Platz der Nationen. At 60, he is a sturdy, thick-bodied man, with thinning brown hair and dark eyes that dart busily above pouches of crow's feet. A mustache shades his upper lip, and a goatee bobs from the point of his chin in disarming capriciousness. It is much like Lenin's goatee—a comparison Walter Ulbricht has long encouraged, for most of his life he has dreamed of becoming Germany's Lenin, the triumphant father and leader of a Communist Germany.
Instead, he is the most hated man in Germany.
The crowd before him was sullen and restless; several thousand had been dragooned from their homes and jobs by Communist Vertrauensleute (trusties) and herded into the square. Around the flanks hovered armed, blue-uniformed men of the Communist Volkspolizei; just out of sight, their guns ready for any signs of trouble, were soldiers of the Soviet army. The man who wanted to be Lenin spoke, not in triumph but in apology.
"Measures to improve the living conditions of our people . . . will ... be carried out," said Ulbricht in harsh Saxony German. "... We know we can improve the living standards of the people only by a permanent increase of working productivity, by better organization ... by making up production lost by the unrest."