By 7 a.m., the streets of East Berlin were alive with workers who would not work. Barehanded, they gathered in the grey morning rain. They wore the uniforms of their trades—masons in white overalls, carpenters in traditional black corduroy smocks, day laborers and factory hands in hobnailed boots and raveled suits.
Many were youths; some were peasants from outside the city. In mumbling columns that suggested disconnected centipede legs groping for a body, they streamed from all directions toward the center of East Berlin, where the Communist proconsuls rule.
Along Stalinallee, the newly constructed showplace of the East German workers' paradise, one band of 10,000 fell into ragged cadence. "We don't want a People's Army. We want free elections," cried one man, and others took it up. The mumble became a shout. Then it suddenly stopped —at the end of the street, in front of a cordon of dark green riot trucks, stood a wall of People's Police, their grey raincoats agleam, their arms locked elbow to elbow. For a moment the front of the column hesitated and the marchers in the rear piled up in comic confusion. Then the 10,000 plunged ahead, disregarding thudding truncheons. The wall of police broke, and with a roar the marchers poured forward.
A Circus Parade. The columns and the sounds swelled. "Down with the People's Army! We want butter!" "Freedom! Freedom!" Shopkeepers" hurriedly clanged down shutters of their stores and peered through the slits. From side streets and cluttered curbs, hundreds of others drifted into the march. Other columns melted into the one from Stalinallee.
So far, everything was going much like the day before when thousands had marched through the streets in protest, and surprisingly forced Otto Grotewohl's Red government to rescind a work speedup decree. An odd, almost festive air made it even harder to believe that an unheard of thing was happening. Children on bicycles circled in front of the marchers. Even when the first Russians rolled into sight in armored cars and open infantry trucks to back up the nervous and confused People's Police (Volkspolizei or Vopos), the marchers grinned and whistled and jeered. An East German perched shakily on an idle cement mixer pointed with a sneer at a tall Vopo. "Hello, long one," he cried. "Your pants are open."
When the crowd reached the massive new Soviet embassy on Unter den Linden, a pair of Soviet reconnaissance cars wheeled to face the crowd. Soldiers somberly pointed machine guns above the heads of the marchers. Six mobile antiaircraft trucks twisted through the crowd, nose to tail, like a team of prodding sheep dogs, to press the movement past and on to other places. But at Leipziger and Friedrich Strasse, where the chief government buildings stood, the mob's suppressed feelings broke out. Anger scudded in like a rain cloud. "Freedom!" they chanted. "Freedom!" "We demand the overthrow of the government." "We want the overthrow of Ulbricht."
The first brick broke a government window, then a cascade of sticks and stones began bounding off walls, streets and skulls. Two truckloads of Soviet infantrymen, sitting impassively facing each other on benches, were hit by thrown stones. None even turned his head. Thousands began chanting the forbidden anthem: