Rebellion in the Rain

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:

Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles. Uber alles in der Welt.

Stalin for Fuel. On the Soviet side of Potsdamer Platz, which abuts on to West Berlin like a huge picture window in the Iron Curtain, a group lit a bonfire and fed it with Communist banners and placards --a slogan "Forward to the Building Up of Socialism," next a huge portrait of Joseph Stalin, then a faded portrait of East German Commissar Walter Ulbricht.

By 11 a.m., small fires were burning in several squares and even in some buildings. A cordon of Soviet soldiers was thrown around the main government offices, but rioters got into the big state-run store to loot and destroy.

Then over the din came a new sound--the metallic clatter of tank treads on the cobblestones. A woman shrieked, "The tanks! The tanks are coming." Along Friedrich Strasse rolled eight field green T-34 medium tanks emblazoned with the Red Star, their 85-mm. guns ominously traversing the mob. Along other big streets came more, about 200 in all. For a while they rocked and snarled past and through the crowds. But one band of young rioters scooted close to a T-34 and jammed a log into its tracks, leaving it crippled with its crew inside. Others tossed sticks and big stones into the tracks of tanks.

At the six-columned Brandenburg Gate, on the East-West border, two men climbed to the top and to a billowing cheer tore down the Red flag and tossed it to the ground. The crowd gleefully burned it. On other squares and corners, the Red flag was ripped down, spat upon. It was past noon.

In half a dozen places at once, the machine guns and submachine guns began chattering. Witnesses in the West sector reported that the Soviet soldiers seemed to aim above the crowd; the Vopos fired point-blank at their countrymen. On the squares, the crowds broke. Hundreds threw themselves into gutters and doorways, and down subway stair wells to dodge the bullets. But not all made it. A man in Unter den Linden was crushed by a growling tank. Some demonstrators rushed out to pull his body away, then defiantly drove a crude wooden cross into the asphalt where he had died. Scores were hit by point-blank fire. At Potsdamer Platz, two West Berlin ambulances darted across the border to pick up wounded.

Curfew at 9. Near the West border, a gang of rioters pounced with a whoop of discovery on to a small grey automobile. In it, terrified, was 70-year-old Otto Nuschke, a collaborating Christian Democrat who is Deputy Premier in the East German puppet regime. The rebels pushed him across the West border. (After two days in the hands of West Berlin police, he went back to East Berlin.)

At 2 o'clock, the brand-new Berolina office building was fired. To the north, a crowd tore down overhead streetcar wires. Throughout all East Berlin, a city of 1,700,000, ordinary life was at a standstill while at the center violence went its course. More Soviet troops poured in, and so did reinforcements of the Volkspolizei. Gradually, East Berlin's rebellion guttered out in the rain. By 2:30, most of the shooting had stopped and the drenched crowds had melted away. A police sound truck circled the riot area, booming: "The Soviet commander of troops . . . has ordered a [9 p.m.] curfew . . . Prohibited is the gathering of groups of more than three . . ."

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.

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