9781422282809

C H A P T E R 1 A World of Deprivation

W orldWar II had been over for three years, but Berlin was still a city in turmoil. By the summer of 1948, it had become the first flashpoint in the new Cold War, an ideological battle between communism and the Western democracies. The United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—the former Allies that had defeated Germany, Italy, Japan, and the rest of the Axis powers—had carved the country into zones of occupation. The four-way partition extended to Berlin, even though it was in the middle of the Soviet sector. Strains in the alliance between the West and the Soviets threatened to escalate into an even wider conflict. Traute Grier, a teenager at the time, remembered those tortuous days well. Germany’s economy was in shambles. Coal, food, and other necessities were in short supply. The war had obliterated the city’s electrical, sewer, and water systems. Berlin’s once grand boulevards were reduced to rubble. “I saw how people literal- ly ate the garbage off the streets and desperately tried to fill their stomachs with potato peels and grass,” Grier wrote for the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2008. Grier and her mother lived in the American sector of West Berlin, where life was slowly getting back to normal. The Americans provided the Germans with food, energy, and other supplies. Moreover, the Western democracies were slowly trying to revive the German economy, as well as their own, by establishing a free market system, an approach the communist Soviet Union did not support. On June 25, 1948, life changed drastically for those living in West Berlin. The Soviets closed the door on food shipments by blockading the land and water routes that connected the western sectors of the city to the outside world. It was a calcu- lated move by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to force the Western powers to retreat from the city. The blockade was front-page news the next day in the New York Times . “About 2,250,000 Germans in the Western sectors of Berlin came face to face with the grim specter of starvation . . . [as] the Soviet Military Administration banned all food ship- ments from the Soviet-controlled areas into Berlin as part of its calculated policy

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CHAPTER 1