A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
far sharper, with echoes of fateful events in 1919, 1933, 1938, 1939, and 1945 resounding in almost every street we trod. “Which side are you on?” was not just a good union song but an almost daily decision. Until the Wall was built in August 1961, that other side was only one stop away on the subway, one step away on unchecked street borders. Many sought to evade a choice in some agreeable, unpolitical niche. But for a “political animal” like myself, this was never an option. And how in hell could I ever accept the rule of an Adenauer, Globke, Krupp, or Thyssen?
Yet how should I look upon this alternative Germany? How was it developing? What doubts and burning problems were present?
From the start, all cards were stacked against little East Germany. About the size of Ohio or Virginia, far smaller than the three zones forming the Federal Republic, close to California in size, it had neither the iron and steel industry of its Ruhr Valley nor endless tons of high-quality coal under its surface, but had to start off with one steel plant, hardly any natural resources except potassium salt mines, a little copper, and huge amounts of low-quality, damp, stinky lignite coal, its weak basis for electricity, fuel, and chemicals. Yet it was saddled with almost 95 percent of reparation costs. France, Britain, and the Benelux countries soon absolved West Germany from most payments. But Poland and the USSR, immensely demolished, desperately needed their share of reparations, which came almost exclusively from the Soviet-occupied zone. Whole factory complexes, machinery, rail tracks, and a good share of emerging new production were removed. To make matters worse, most industries in the East, like machine tools or textiles, depended on raw materials from West Germany, supplied in varying quantities or not supplied, depending on how much pressure Bonn wished to exert in a changing political situation. Meanwhile, after 1947, West Germany was getting big investments through the Marshall Plan, a key factor in its “economic miracle.”
There was another serious drawback. Large numbers of engineering and managerial personnel, those most strongly infected with the Nazi bacillus and fearful of punishment under Soviet occupation or left-wing rule, and hating nationalization with its ousting of their beloved industry leaders, disappeared westward, before the Red Army arrived if possible but also, in later years, often at crucial moments. Many took plans, patents, and documents with them plus their know-how on running factories. Their change of address involved no new language to learn and no risk. Their former employers, soon an integral part of the “economic miracle,” were glad to offer them far higher pay than in the poorer, more egalitarian East. The young GDR economy thus faced not only wreckage, reparations (until 1953), and a cutoff from former resources but also had to rely on the thin ranks of engineers and managers willing to remain plus a new generation being trained in colleges that lacked professors and researchers who, having eagerly supported the Nazis, also had moved westward. Such luring of experts, including newly trained ones, was assiduously maintained through the years, even after the Wall made it far more difficult to “disappear.” A former manager of a big GDR shipyard told me how half of his pre-1961 class of skilled machinist apprentices were regularly lured away by West German companies, but only after they had completed their expensive training. That meant big losses in the East and big savings in West German costs.
And yet, despite myriad difficulties and highly skeptical, even cynical sectors of the population, the economy had started up again, and here and there with genuine, new enthusiasm.
19—Volunteers to Cool a Steel Mill
In the first years after war’s end, East Germany had to rely fully for its urgent reconstruction on the one single iron and steel plant with an indispensable rolling mill. In this Max-Hütte south of Weimar, named for one-time Bavarian King Maximilian and part of Friedrich Flick’s immense empire, a thousand forced laborers toiled for military production. Twenty-six of their bodies, four of them girls, were found at one site after the war, fettered and shot in the head; another fifteen, also murdered, were found in a mass grave. Flick’s title was annulled in June 1946. East Germany and the USSR shared ownership until July 1948 when it was nationalized, becoming a “people’s owned enterprise,” a VEB.
At this one available steel plant a fourth blast furnace was desperately needed. That required more cooling water; the one possible source, the river Saale, was six kilometers away—a craggy, hilly six kilometers. In 1949, there was little free manpower in this distant corner, so the Free German Youth organization (FDJ) called for volunteers for three summer months, with a slogan: “Max needs water!” Mostly college students responded, 2,700 of them, male and female. They moved into converted freight cars, received boots and padded jackets, and were soon loading or unloading sand and cement or hacking at the hard earth with pick and shovel. Some high school seniors joined up; one group voted at its new school Party group to resist their principal’s objections, so fifteen boys and two girls moved in with college students from the philosophy, social science, and pharmacy departments, braving the heavy labor and primitive conditions but enjoying a cooperative spirit they never forgot. When the job was completed within the ninety-day plan, the volunteers celebrated with a big party featuring the GDR’s best dance orchestra. Some of those volunteers joined in a nostalgic reunion party in 2014 to mark the job’s 65th anniversary.
In 1955, the big plant, with a peak of 7,000 employees, opened its own “cultural palace,” with fancy Greek columns outside and, inside, a theater with 700 seats, another with 200, a dance hall, rehearsal rooms, a library, meeting rooms, a restaurant, and a café. This soon became typical for large plants, but after 1990, like nearly all such palaces, it was closed down. The plant was purchased in 1992 by a Luxembourg company. In 2006, the remaining 650 employees worked for an Indian owner, in 2007 a Spanish group, and in 2012 a Brazilian corporation. Friedrich Flick, quickly amnestied after a postwar conviction, had become the richest, most powerful man in West Germany and was buried with the highest honors in 1972.
20—Rocks for Our Rostock
Here is another example from the early years on my side of the German dividing line.
Before the war, what was now East Germany had 200 miles of Baltic seacoast but few ports. Compared with Hamburg or Bremerhaven in the west, even its largest seaport, Rostock, was insignificant. Its five or six puny shipyards were almost completely destroyed. One yacht shipyard, where many of the city’s allotment of 14,000 forced laborers and war prisoners and 2,000 concentration camp inmates had toiled, was wrecked by heavy bombing. The Kröger brothers who owned it, with close ties to the Nazi apparatus and the Gestapo, made a quick run for the West at war’s end.
In the first months of Soviet occupation, some of the remains were demolished or removed as compensation. But by the end of 1945 it was realized how useful the shipyard might be and thus the first forty-eight workers began repairing Soviet fish cutters. Ownership was transferred to the city of Rostock. But in June 1946 voters in Saxony, East Germany’s major industrial province, voted, with a majority of 77.56 percent, to dispossess war criminals and large-scale landowners. Their decision was extended to all of East Germany, and the shipyard was nationalized, becoming a “people’s owned enterprise” (VEB) producing new cutters for the USSR. When one Kröger brother returned to reclaim the enterprise, a vote was taken in the shipyard. One man voted to give it back, fourteen abstained; 145 voted against him.
By 1953 all Soviet reparation claims had been fulfilled and total earnings now went to the GDR. A giant cable crane structure was erected, visible for miles around, which permitted construction of 10,000-ton ships. But a big problem emerged: Rostock’s harbor wasn’t deep enough. Weighty exports and imports had to be transferred at great cost to Polish Szczecin or West German Hamburg. Enlarging the harbor required a long protective breakwater, built quickly, if possible, so as not to lose another costly year.
In April 1957, an appeal for helpers and for stones brought in over 2,000 volunteer workers to join in hammering piles into the muddy bottom and to place 50,000 tons of rocks that had been collected all over the country “For Our Rostock.” Within three months, new quays, an office building, storage halls, motor repair works, and a fish cannery finally provided the GDR with a modern deep-sea port connected with all the world. Before long the shipyard was one of the largest and most modern in Europe, busy making ships for the new GDR merchant marine and for export, especially to the USSR and the Eastern Bloc but also to neutral countries like Indonesia. Fifteen ships a year were exported by 1971, including