Klaus Wiegrefe: Adenauer Wanted to Swap West Berlin for Parts of GDR

Klaus Wiegrefe writes for Der Spiegel where he has been in charge of its contemporary history section since 1997. 

Former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was known not to mince his words when it came to the Soviets and their allies. He labelled the communist superpower the "deadly enemy," called Kremlin Chief Nikita Khrushchev "a brutal fighter" and referred to East Germany as a "concentration camp."

So Andrei Smirnov, Moscow's ambassador to Bonn, probably had an inkling of what might be in store for him when he walked into Adenauer's Chancellery on August 16, 1961.

Three days before, members of the East German police and of the communist party militia had begun sealing off the border between East and West Berlin with barbed wire. Concrete blocks lay ready nearby to build the Berlin Wall. Millions of East Germans found themselves locked in the self-proclaimed "workers' and farmers' state."

But the tall, elegant Smirnov met a peacable, polite Adenauer, who praised Khrushchev's intelligence and farsightedness and expressed his "urgent wish" to coexist in friendship with the Soviet Union.

The catholic Adenauer had never liked protestant Prussia. As Cologne's mayor in the 1920s, he used to close the curtains of his train compartment as soon as he crossed the Elbe river, the border to Prussia, while travelling to Berlin. He disliked what he called the "Asian steppe" on the other side of the river.

'Bothersome and Unpleasant' Wall

So now the communist regime had closed the border and the chancellor was appeasing the Soviet ambassador. He complained that it was a "bothersome and unpleasant" matter that had been played up "more than necessary." He said he hadn't asked the East Germans to move over to West Germany and would rather that they stayed "over there."

He did not protest about the building of the Wall, nor did he call for the border to be reopened or try to open negotiations to that end. If Adenauer's reaction in that meeting with Smirnov had become public at the time, he would probably have lost the pending general election. As it was, he defeated the SPD candidate and West Berlin mayor, Willy Brandt.

Until now, only excerpts of the protocol of that meeting had been known...