June 17, 1953
Each man wishes to be acquitted of his complicity – everyone does so, then lies back down to sleep with a calm, clear conscience. But he may not acquit himself. Everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty!
From 1953 through 1990, yesterday would have been a national holiday in Germany. Day of German Unity. A national day of remembrance. Although after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, October 3 replaced it on the official calendar, the legislation proclaiming June 17 as a national day of remembrance stayed on the books.
June 17, 1953 was a painful day in postwar Germany. What am I saying? For Germans in the Eastern Zone under Soviet control, almost every day had been painful since the end of World War II. No Marshall Plan to assist in reconstruction. No booming economy. No rubble being cleared.
And very little food. A British lieutenant stationed in Berlin at the end of the war and following reported that butcher shops in the Eastern Zone were selling human flesh. Almost certainly a legend, but believable to millions in what was not yet the DDR (GDR) in the mid-1940s.
Americans, British, and French tried a new approach to victory – helping the vanquished rebuild. But Stalin and the Soviets were out for revenge, and for expanding the borders of the USSR. Stalin had absorbed Albania, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Romania into the Soviet Union in 1945; Poland in 1947; and, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1948. Each time, Soviets set up a puppet government that answered to the USSR. (Ukraine and Belarus had voluntarily joined the USSR prior to World War II.)
In East Germany, that person would be Walter Ulbricht, General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (in German SED: Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands). Whatever Stalin said to do, Ulbricht would double. Ulbricht called his version of Soviet rule Constructing Socialism. What little money East Germany – the misnamed German Democratic Republic or GDR – had in its coffers, it poured into remilitarization, into buildup of the Stasi or secret police, into government-owned factories, into propaganda campaigns against private industry, into agricultural collectives.
Everything Ulbricht did caused misery for workers in the GDR. With little food and horrible working conditions, workers voted with their feet, heading West. The more people headed West, the harsher Ulbricht made living conditions for those who remained.
After Stalin’s death in early 1953, leaders of the Soviet Union took a hard look at the numbers coming out of the GDR. Instead of that satellite being the jewel of the USSR, its low productivity and brain drain exemplified the very worst of Soviet policy. The GDR had turned into an unmitigated disaster.
Ulbricht was summoned to Moscow and ordered to go easy on his Constructing Socialism program.
It’s unclear whether Ulbricht intended to obey orders, but it did not matter. News of the Soviet decree leaked to GDR journalists. They published the information, leading to the expectation that workers’ quotas would be lowered and living standards improved.
East German workers wanted change, and they wanted it now. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in open protest. Demonstrations turned violent. Protesters attacked police, looted stores, and rioted.
Politicians in the West publicly admonished citizens in the GDR to stop the violence. Allies and the now-democratic Bundesrepublik Deutschland (West Germany) still held out for a peaceful reunification of divided Germany. Stalin’s 1952 proposal had been laughed off as absurd, but Western leaders hoped the new, post-Stalin Soviet regime would be more amenable to peace.
East Germans would not be denied. The violence escalated, and organizers called for a massive protest the morning of June 17, 1953. The Soviet Union declared martial law, and on June 17, 1953, tanks rolled in to Berlin and other big cities like Leipzig where protesters were most vocal. And aggressive. On June 17, 1953, the USSR established a modus operandi that they would use again and again: When people protested and Soviets were in danger of losing control, they employed the full force of the Soviet military to suppress the uprising.
It did not end well for those East Germans, those hundreds of thousands of East Germans who thought they would see the end of religious oppression, unbearable labor conditions, and hard scrabble poverty. Ulbricht stayed in power.
In July 1953, Dwight Eisenhower complicated Ulbricht’s life with considerable shipments of food to West Berlin, where East Berliners could simply go pick it up. Eisenhower operated under the “hearts and minds” philosophy of diplomacy.
Within a few months, Ulbricht’s government had blocked access to American food deliveries by cutting off rail and bus traffic from East to West Berlin.
This is an impossibly short summary – and clearly written from an American viewpoint – of an era and event that we know little about in 2024.
The story was reported extensively by the New York Times. In 1953. Their journalists wrote detailed articles on unrest in Berlin, the protests and riots, Soviet military intervention, Eisenhower’s aid program, and the fallout from all of the above.
Marshall Dill’s Germany covers the June 17, 1953 uprising in two pages, noting that in 1961, there was a memorial commemorating “the Russian officers and men who were shot because they refused to fire on the East Berliners on June 17.” (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1961.)
Questions on German History, a photograph-filled history of Germany published by the German Bundestag in 1984 (prior to the fall of the Wall), devotes exactly one sentence to the June 17, 1953 uprising. “After the death of Stalin in March 1953 there was a thaw in the international situation. However, all hopes of a change of attitude by the Russians, with regard to their Deutschlandspolitik, proved unfounded following the People’s uprising in East Berlin on 17th June 1953, which was put down with the help of Soviet tanks.” Emphasis mine. (Bonn: German Bundestag Press and Information Centre, 1984.)
In other words, it’s not unknown, but coverage – for the average reader – is sparse. To its credit, in 2003 the New York Times ran an article on the uprising and its aftermath, admitting that it was “an event that has been largely forgotten outside of Germany. It has been obscured by subsequent heroic actions, like the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland of the 1980’s, which led, ultimately, to the fall of Communism all over Eastern Europe.”
Publishing interviews of people who were there, the article entitled “In Eastern Germany, 1953 Uprising Is Remembered” (gift article, no paywall) tells the stories of East Germans who fought against Soviet Communism. It’s an illuminating read.
I can hear you ask, What does all of the above have to do with White Rose resistance? Why should I care about a bunch of Germans who suffered and who had nothing to eat in 1953, after all they did during the war, after their genocide?
Fair questions. Two responses.
First, June 17, 1953 discredits the nonsense that there was so little resistance during the Third Reich, because Germans are so dutiful, because Germans do what they are told, because oppression was too great, because Germans do what they are told, because, well, the Gestapo!
Bull hockey.
During the Shoah, German women took to the streets of Berlin between February 27, and March 6, 1943 to protest the incarceration of their Jewish husbands. Although some of the men were later shipped off to concentration camps, the NSDAP did not arrest the women who protested, and the men were released, at least for a while. Nathan Stoltzfus is the expert on this topic. His book Resistance of the Heart (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996) would be worthwhile if you want to know more.
On January 13, 1943 when students in Munich took to the streets after the Gauleiter said that if female students were too ugly to get a man, he’d lend them one of his lieutenants… none of the protesters was arrested.
When Bavarians burned Hitler’s portrait after Gauleiter Giesler decreed they had to replace crucifixes in school classrooms with that portrait, Hitler overruled the Gauleiter and crucifixes were reinstated. No arrests.
Apparently, Bavarians were also allowed to grouse about the Nazis’ watered-down beer. Without going to jail for their complaint.
Along comes June 17, 1953, barely eight years after war’s end, and East Germans were more than willing to protest curtailment of personal freedom and scarcity of food. Many were imprisoned, but the cause was so great, they did not care.
Which begs the very large question: Why wasn’t the disappearance and subsequent cold-blooded murder of millions of Jews, the harsh treatment of forced laborers who were in their faces daily, the public firing squads and hangings for Communists and Socialists and other dissidents – why wasn’t that enough to cause the same loud, raucous, insistent protest that led to the June 17, 1953 suppression of free speech?
Alexander Schmorell was right when he proclaimed in Leaflet II:
But why are we bothering to tell you all this, since you know everything anyway? If you are not aware of these specific crimes, then surely you are aware of equally heinous crimes committed by these terrible subhumans? Because this touches on a question that affects all of us deeply, a question that must make us all stop and think: Why is the German nation behaving so apathetically in the face of all these most abominable, most degrading crimes?
Hardly anyone even gives them a second thought. The facts are accepted as just that and filed away. And one more time, the German nation slumbers on in its indifferent and foolish sleep and gives these fascist criminals courage and opportunity to rage on – which of course they do.
Is this a sign that the Germans have become brutalized in their most primitive human emotions? That no chord shrieks [in horror] in the face of such deeds? That they have fallen into such a fatal sleep out of which they will not awake, never, ever? It appears so. And it must be so if the German does not finally rise up from his numbness, if he does not protest wherever he possibly can against this clique of criminals, if he does not have pity on these hundreds of thousands who have been sacrificed.
And he must not merely feel pity – no, much more: He must share in the guilt. It is his apathetic conduct that gives these sinister people the possibility to carry out their deeds. He tolerates this “government” that has incurred such infinite guilt. Yes, he is even guilty himself that this government come could into existence!
Each man wishes to be acquitted of his complicity – everyone does so, then lies back down to sleep with a calm, clear conscience. But he may not acquit himself. Everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty! [Bold face in original.]
Second, and something that directly and severely impacts research into events between 1933-1945 and the 10+ year period thereafter: The Communist threat was very real, was very in-your-face, for Western forces that were trying their best not to repeat the mistakes of the Treaty of Versailles, that wanted a Europe that would partner with the global community in a quest for peaceable existence.
This meant that a great deal of resistance to the Nazis “could not” be reported to the American or British or French public, because that resistance had come from Communists. Not socialists, not liberals, not progressives, but Soviet Communists. Walter Ulbricht himself had fled to Moscow during the war, to escape imprisonment and likely execution for his anti-Nazi agitation. As a Communist.
Whether or not you want to hear this, our White Rose heroes fell under that same suspicion. Hans and Sophie Scholl were on the list of Nazi suspects as Communist activists. After all, they spent a great deal of time with Richard Scheringer, an outspoken Communist in Ulm. Sophie especially liked the Scheringers. Her last trip home only a few days before the arrests, she visited her sister Elisabeth at the Scheringers’ farm. After the executions in February 1943, citizens of Ulm called Elisabeth “that Communist girl.”
Werner Scholl truly seems to have adopted Communist thinking. He resisted early on, long before his siblings protested after their personal liberties were taken away. Werner seems to have absorbed the Scheringers’ political thinking.
It’s therefore possible that censorship of Scholl archives blocks uncomfortable political viewpoints. After all, in interrogations regarding the literary soiree at Alexander Schmorell’s house in June 1942, those in attendance said that Hans Scholl seemed to represent Communist thinking, while Christoph Probst advocated a return to the monarchy and Traute Lafrenz said citizens needed to earn their freedoms and the support of their government through service.
Alexander Schmorell was also under suspicion of being a Bolshevist. Personally, I don’t think he was. But he associated with the Harnacks, who unquestionably were comfortable in Soviet circles. And he was “half-Russian,” which immediately pegged him as subhuman in the eyes of National Socialism.
It bothers me as a researcher that I face so much pushback, so tall a brick wall, when trying to obtain files from our national archives that relate to those suspected of Communist sympathies. I want those files, and I want them now. I am on my third go-round with FOIA requests for some of these people. It’s been more than six months this time, with promise of documents “in eleven or so business days” back in January 2024. Still no files, still no documents.
And yet. Remembering the events of June 17, 1953, it’s clear that the Communist threat was real. Not so much the Communist threat in terms of ideology, but rather in terms of Soviet expansionist policy. We don’t seem to be able to differentiate between political theory and government actions.
Senator Joseph McCarthy clearly was a first-class %^&&*(@. He misused reality for personal political gain. What should have remained purview of the State Department, Department of Defense, and the House and Senate, working together with President Eisenhower to ensure that Soviet expansionism was contained, and that democracy won the hearts and minds of people, evolved into blacklisting and denunciations for political differences, not espionage.
When Soviet tanks quashed a citizen uprising in June 1953, we lost the full impact of what Eisenhower, Dulles, Churchill, Eden, and Adenauer – and even Soviets who were contemplating undoing some of Stalin’s more egregious policies – were up against. The New York Times may have reported on the events of June 17, 1953. But those articles would have been lost in the shouting over the latest celebrity on McCarthy’s black list.
I still want those files from our National Archives. There’s no longer a reason to cover for OSS (later CIA) policies that enlisted Gestapo agents in the “Communist” group. There’s no longer a reason to pretend that a particular ally in 2024 was fully democratic from 1933-1945. There’s no longer a reason to hide our preference to catch Communists over the need to isolate Nazis, which was the reality of much of American rebuilding in Germany after the war.
Above all, we must understand this context. If we don’t, the current war in Ukraine makes less sense. If we don’t grasp European fear of Soviet expansionism, how will we comprehend the larger worry that current events represent another land grab, similar to 1945-1948?
It’s hard, if not impossible, for a lay person like me to wrap my head around the long and convoluted history of Eastern Europe, around the incessant wars that have taken place on that soil, on the ingrained hatred of Russians against the West, of Germans against Russians.
Let’s try starting with something simple. Let’s look at June 17, 1953 and learn what we can from this pivotal, unforgettable date.
We owe it to ourselves. Yes, this matters.
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© 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. Excerpt from Leaflet II, translation © 2002 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote. To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. Digital version of White Rose History, Volume I is available here.