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Under the steel hand of the Soviet army, the workers' uprising against Communist oppression came to a bloody end. West Berlin alone counted seven dead and 119 wounded East Berliners in its hospitals; how many men were dead or injured in the Soviet sector no one knew. When night came, East Berlin lay gloomily quiet, its disheveled squares and streets guarded by dug-in machine-gunners of the People's Police, its border to the West ringed with fully manned Soviet tanks. (U.S. military officials in West Berlin estimated that 25,000 Soviet troops and 300 tanks were on guard by nightfall.)
That night, the Soviet occupiers began to round up rioters and ringleaders—or those they accused of being one or the other. Before dawn, a Soviet firing squad marched on to a field not far from the Brandenburg Gate and shot down the first of them, an unemployed West Berlin truck driver named Willi Goettling. His wife swore he had nothing to do with the uprising.
For the moment at least, the workers had been crushed—just as the workers of Russia had been put down on "Bloody Sunday" in 1905 by the troops of the Czar. "But the Russians can't keep their Panzers here forever," said a young East Berliner lying wounded in a West Berlin hospital. "When they leave, we will fight again until they change the government." On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the world heard with a thrill of East Berlin's rebellion in the rain. Until Wednesday, the 17th of June, the world had come increasingly to believe that inside a modern mechanized tyranny, it is hopeless to resist. Now hope was possible.