Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [177]
The parade honoring the first anniversary of the occupation of Berlin made a public show of unity. In the beginning the Berliners looked upon the Americans as liberators and were shocked. During the first year in the Berlin Kommandatura and the Supreme German Council the Americans seemed to be doing everything possible to please the Russians.
Colonel Neal Hazzard stood in the row behind Hansen, beside his adversary, Brigadier Trepovitch. The latest tirade from the Russians was over the American formation of a sports program for German children with GI’s acting as instructors and coaches.
Trepovitch harangued that it was an attempt to encourage the rebirth of German militarism. When the Russian saw how the children flocked to the American soldiers, he attempted to institute a duplicate program in the Russian Sector.
Neal Hazzard said he knew why the Russians used the knight as their favorite chess piece. “It’s like a Russian. It can move in eight different ways ... all of them crooked.”
As Scotch pipers of a tradition-rich regiment set up a wail in the streets, Neal Hazzard wondered how far the Russians were going to push before we began to push back.
“Neal,” General Hansen said, “we are pleased with the way free elections have gone in Hesse, Bavaria, and Württemberg-Baden. I’d like to press for them in Berlin.”
“There’s a difference, sir. We don’t have Russians to contend with in the zone.”
“The Constitution is ready to be handed down. Take a crack at it in the Kommandatura.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hazzard brought the matter up, expecting a stalling act from Trepovitch.
The Russian returned at the next meeting with instructions, and, to everyone’s surprise, suggested elections at an early date in October.
Neal Hazzard was baffled. He went to O’Sullivan for advice.
“Sure the Russians want elections,” Sean said. “We both do for different reasons. We want them to dispose of our responsibility. They want them to entrench themselves.”
“How do they figure they can win?”
“They’re dealing to us with a stacked deck.”
“They can’t win after what they’ve done to this city,” Hazzard insisted.
“They’ve made a calculation, Colonel, that we won’t lift a finger to help the free parties. They’ll have them demoralized to a pulp.”
Sean’s estimation was based on the way the Communists had squeezed the life out of the political opposition in the Russian Zone of Germany. In city after city the Democratic Party leadership along with the other free parties were coerced into the anti-Fascist front. The pattern was the same. For window dressing a Democrat or member of the Christian Party sometimes held the post of mayor. But always he was flanked with deputies like Heinz Eck and the police, education, propaganda, and food control was in Communist hands.
After smarting from Ulrich Falkenstein’s rebellion, the Communists went to work on the Democrats in the Russian Sector of Berlin where the West could not operate. Systematic terror lopped off Democratic and Christian leadership.
Despite Falkenstein’s earlier pleas, his party was being splintered away.
Feeling no Western opposition, Trepovitch then presented the petition to license the anti-Fascist front as an operating group in Berlin “because it was in existence in the Soviet Zone.”
In England, the Labor Party, first cousins of the German Democrats, brought pressure on their occupation officials to stiffen British opposition. It was Colonel T. E. Blatty who answered in the negative to the anti-Fascist front.
Then a strong French stand by Jacques Belfort said that France would recognize the anti-Fascist front, but only as a continuation of the Communist Party. This was the first feeble beginning of resistance.
At American Headquarters individual officers such as Sean O’Sullivan acted on their own initiative to help the free parties in dozens of “unofficial” ways.
For the most part, the West remained ineffective as Rudi Wöhlman and Heinrich Hirsch engineered an election campaign to put the most uncouth