(4 of 8)
The big call came on May 8, 1945. Walter Ulbricht rode into Berlin wearing his Moscow-groomed goatee and a Red army colonel's uniform. With a tight-lipped smile of triumph, he stood beside conquering Marshal Zhukov as Nazi Field Marshal Keitel performed the melancholy rite of surrender. As far as is known, Ulbricht never divested himself of his Soviet citizenship. But he did divest himself of the uniform, and, taking advantage of the anarchy of the hour, expropriated from a Berlin haberdasher a more fitting uniform—an expensive, double-breasted blue suit. In a dismal Berlin building formerly occupied by the carpenters' guild, he began work on the stone coffin.
Two Separate Germanys. The Soviet occupiers methodically harvested immense reparations from East Germany:
¶ If An estimated $2 billion a year in plants, tools and food.
¶ 100,000 scientists and technicians (including the bulk of Germany's best atomic scientists, jet-engine and submarine men).
¶ Expropriation of vast holdings left in Germany.
¶ Rights to the ore in Saxony's uranium fields.
As they did so, Ulbricht and a picked cluster of trusted German Reds labored to erect a façade of legality and consent.
By 1947, when the mockery of four-power occupation in Germany was replaced by the reality of two separate Germanys, Ulbricht had put the eastern half in a Communist-style coalition (i.e., a partnership between one hungry shark and several slow-swimming mackerel) called the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The Social Democratic Party, by far the biggest in postwar East Germany, was drawn in and digested with the help of fawning, ambitious Otto Grotewohl of Braunschweig, onetime printer and longtime Socialist. Grotewohl sold out after such resolutely anti-Communist Socialists as Kurt Schumacher and Berlin's Ernst Reuter had refused to have anything to do with Ulbricht. Grotewohl's price was the premiership for himself and secondary cabinet jobs for other Social Democrats. ("Eventually," explained a secret party memo, "the more active Communists will take over their positions.") The "bourgeois" parties swam obediently into the big fish's belly—the Christian Democrats, who got 2,400,000 votes in 1946, now number 90,000; the National Democrats, mostly former Nazis and Wehrmacht officers; the Democratic Peasants, a front group to help the Reds control farmers.
As frontman and President of the German Democratic Republic, out of his wartime Moscow sanctuary waddled old Wilhelm ("Papa") Pieck, a broad-bellied Communist of the old school who, like Ulbricht, went from carpentry to Communism. The nearest Communist equivalent of a baby-kissing politician, he lost his stamina for tough tasks and took to snoring through long speeches. Once a possible threat to Ulbricht, he is now, at 77, in Moscow for medical treatment.