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In a sense, the West has speeded him on his way by tacit acceptance of Berlin's border closure. For, in effect. East Berlin is now no longer under four-power military control (basic to all Western rights in Berlin), but is a part of East Germany itself. Now Walter Ulbricht can press with even greater effect his argument that the West's presence in West Berlin no longer can be guaranteed by the rights of "ancient" armed conquest. Sign a new agreement with the German Democratic Republic, he will soon suggest, and you can have your access to West Berlin. It this request is successful, de facto recognition will automatically have occurred and Ulbricht will have scored a singular triumph.
As the week's events began to unfold, a nightmarish vision flashed momentarily across the minds of thousands of West Berliners—a vision that they too might one day be forced to live under Walter Ulbricht's ugly system. After the long years of tension during which the city—and the West—stood up to Russian threats, freedom seemed at last to be slipping away. But at week's end, when U.S. troops began moving up the Autobahn, crossing Communist territory to reinforce the West Berlin garrison, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson flew in to add the weight of his prestige, most West Berliners knew that it was far too early for them to give up hope.
* In Rome, the Vatican took the occasion to test the Communists' intentions further by appointing an East German as new Roman Catholic Bishop of Berlin. He is Monsignor Alfred Bengsch, 39, who probably will find it difficult indeed to travel from his East Berlin home to visit the western half of his diocese.
* Herself an up and coming agitprop leader who later was highly commended in the Communist press for denning a new sin: "practicism," the "neglect of Communist ideology through everyday worries and overwork.' Ll-bricht finally married Lotte in 1951—Or about the rape of his country's women. At one of the first party meetings in Berlin, some Communists urged that abortion be legalized for German girls made pregnant by rampaging Russian soldiers. "There can be no question of it," Ulbricht snapped. "It is quite impossible. People who get so worked up about such things today should have got worked up when Hitler began the war." -Ulbricht holds the Volkskammer in such contempt that he did not even show up at the session when the chamber was invited to approve the decision to seal off the Berlin sector frontier.