EAST German guards, their tommy guns swinging jauntily at their hips, last week pulled a striped red and white barrier across the autobahn checkpoint at Helmstedt on the border between East and West Germany. Two hours later, after cars and trucks had piled up for nearly a mile, the East Germans reopened the road and the traffic flowed once more between West Berlin and West Germany. It was a chilling reminder of West Berlin's vulnerability and a portent of what may come.
Under the guise of a military maneuver, powerful East German and Soviet forces moved into positions from which they could, if the order came, immediately choke off the ten road, rail and canal routes that link West Berlin to its markets and sources of supplies in West Germany. Columns of tanks rumbled alongside the autobahn routes to West Berlin. The long snouts of artillery poked above clumps of East German woods. Into Berlin flew Soviet Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, the Warsaw Pact commander, to assume direction of some 500,000 Communist troops engaged in the exercise.
Perfect Pretext. Against the backdrop of military preparedness, the Soviets began an ominous propaganda campaign that seemed aimed at crippling West Berlin's economy. The Soviet government announced that it had requested the East Germans to use whatever measures were necessary to halt what it claimed was the flow of military products from West Berlin to West Germany. That announcement was followed up by a Pravda article that listed a large number of Berlin-made products, chiefly optical and electrical equipment, that the Soviets claimed were used by the West German armed forces.
While patently contrived, the Soviet charges provided the perfect pretext for interfering with freight traffic between West Berlin and West Germany. Since the products on the Pravda list include West Berlin's major exports, a ban on their transport through East Germany would strike a severe, perhaps debilitating blow at the West Berlin economy. In another charge, the Soviets accused the West Germans of breaking four-power agreements by recruiting West Berliners for the Bundeswehr. Nor did the Western allies escape Russian blasts. In an obvious threat to the allied air rights into the city, the Soviets charged that Western allies were abetting the schemes of the West Berlin industrialists by flying war materiel across East Germany to West Germany.
Britain, France and the U.S., who are the ultimate guarantors of West Berlin's security, strongly rejected the accusations of the Soviets, whom the allies hold responsible for ensuring freedom of access to West Berlin. In a last-minute effort to avert a crisis, West German Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger summoned Soviet Ambassador Semyon Tsarapkin for an extraordinary 2½-hour session at the Palais Schaumburg, but failed to find a solution. After an emergency session of the West Berlin Senate, Mayor Klaus Schütz appealed to West Berliners to remain calm. They were bracing for what many of them expected might develop into the severest threat to the city's economic viability since 1961, when former Premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened to turn over the responsibility for West Berlin's access routes to the East Germans.