Cold Victory

“The vote was by show of hands and no one bothered to ask how many were opposed. It passed unanimously at the first vote,” Brandt explained.

“Typical Communist Party!” Liebherr snorted eloquently. “The whole charade was designed to discourage and disguise any kind of dissent!”

“Do the procedures matter?” Brandt asked the others in exasperation. “The point is they’ve done it! They’ve set up a rival City Council under Friedrich Ebert the Younger.” That was the son of the revered first president of the Weimar Republic. “Ebert spoke to the crowd after his election—”

“He was not elected, Willie,” Reuter reproached his aide. “He is a puppet of the Soviet Military Administration.”

“I know, but many ordinary people are going to see this as an election!” Brandt insisted.

“Then we will have to educate them otherwise,” Reuter countered calmly but firmly. “Now, tell me about Ebert’s speech?”

“His main topic was how he would improve the provisioning of the city—”

“Brilliant!” Wolfe snapped sarcastically. “Anyone sleeping with the bear holding back our food can promise that!”

With a slightly reproving look, Reuter admonished his elder colleague to let Brandt finish, than addressed Brandt, “Did he say anything else?”

“Well, he talked of the economic necessity of being integrated into the surrounding countryside.”

“Which is the Soviet Zone, so he openly embraced a Soviet take-over,” Reuter concluded.

Brandt equivocated, “He couched it in economic rather than political terms.”

Wolfe cursed colourfully, something one didn’t expect of a lady over sixty, but Liebherr was less outraged than discouraged. It would take very little for the Soviets to improve the provisioning of the city since all they had to do was end the blockade that they had started in the first place. As for complete integration into the Soviet Zone, that might be the solution to the economic catastrophe, but the price would be Soviet political rule, their worthless currency and their murderous police. From Liebherr’s perspective, the problem was that “life” under Stalin was like being a man condemned to death; you knew your life would end abruptly and unnaturally, you just didn’t know exactly when his terror troops would put you up against a wall.

Reuter remained calm. “Thank you for bringing us the news, Brandt. In a way, it is a relief. The Soviet-controlled media has been whining about ‘administrative chaos’ and howling for ‘action’ against us for weeks. I’d feared they might use violence against voters at the elections rather than to put together a farcical ‘counter government.’”

“There’s nothing to say they won’t still use violence,” Liebherr reminded Reuter, alarmed by the mayor’s apparent complacency. “By artificially forming a new city government, they have manufactured a plausible justification for calling the real elections ‘superfluous.’”

“Tell that to all the people who weren’t allowed to vote!” Wolfe snapped. “I don’t care how many puppets from the factories and SED-controlled organisations in the Soviet Zone obeyed orders to vote for the single slate of candidates, no one in the Western Sectors of the city had that opportunity! Certainly not the women! They aren’t going to accept this kind of theatrics! An Opera Government indeed!”

“Opera or not, it is dangerous,” Liebherr warned his colleagues. “It’s because they know they would lose in a free and fair election that they felt compelled to stage this coup. Only by controlling who voted and offering no alternatives could they be sure of winning. But they didn’t need armed ‘readiness troops’ to carry out this staged ‘election’ of their hand-picked delegates.” He paused to let his words sink in before adding, “That can only mean one thing: they created those readiness troops for another purpose.”