Word: ulbricht
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...refugee barracks, the registration clerks were swamped, and West Berlin authorities had to charter extra planes to haul the escapees out to the West. One reason was the new food shortage in East Germany, which had brought tighter rationing of potatoes and butter, new crackdowns by Red Boss Walter Ulbricht. But the overriding impulse that sent East Germans by the hundreds surging across the frontier was a cold fear inspired by Nikita Khrushchev and his threat to provoke a new Berlin crisis...
Everybody from movie stars to dictators can use front men. In the threatened Berlin crisis, Khrushchev's front man is Walter Ulbricht, 68, the grim, goateed boss of East Germany. When Khrushchev tries reassurances, Ulbricht offsets them with threats. When Khrushchev assures the West that he has no thought of a Berlin blockade, Ulbricht growls that supplies to the U.S., British and French garrisons will be blocked and their planes shot down...
Chief of the East German Communists for 15 years, Ulbricht is a cynical master of duplicity who fought his way to the top by years of sycophantic loyalty to Moscow. Today, Ulbricht is thoroughly detested even in his own circle. No one can forget that he made no protest as Stalin purged dozens of his fellow German Communists in the World War II days, when much of the party fled to Moscow for asylum from Hitler. Ulbricht was apparently happy to see his political rivals disposed of. In May 1945, it was Ulbricht who led the little ten-man convoy...
With the satisfying presence of some 20 Soviet divisions at his elbow, Ulbricht runs his puppet nation from an opulent, chandeliered office in Niederschonhausen Palace, onetime residence of the wife of Frederick the Great, in the Pankow section of Berlin. There he puffs black cigars and barks orders in a guttural Saxonian accent that is the butt of gibes among his unwilling subjects. At day's end he retires to a sumptuous fieldstone house in the residential enclave for Communist bigwigs near Liepnitz Lake, where he, his Communist wife Lotte and a 17-year-old daughter share the comforts...
...eminence in the U.S. who bail-jumped to East Germany in 1949, is a scarce commodity behind the Iron Curtain. After facetiously broadcasting a proposal to partition Washington and to garrison "East Washington" with German Democratic Republic troops, Chief Radio Propagandist Eisler found himself afoul of Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht, who seemed to take the suggestion seriously. After explaining himself, Eisler took to a local newspaper next day to slap his own heavy hand, admitted that Ulbricht "told me I should have my head examined...