Word: ulbricht
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After the June explosion in East Germany, the first panicky reaction of the Communists' fish-eyed strongman, Walter Ulbricht, was to appease. He canceled work norms and production quotas, increased food rations, encouraged dancing in the streets. Then, accompanied by several colleagues and stooges, he went to Moscow to find out what the master solution was to be. Not long after his return, the answer was clear-not relaxation but more terror and repression...
...Communists set out to identify and punish the rioters of the June uprising, to sniff out and crush every lingering trace of dissidence, and to discipline party members who were guilty of "capitulatory behavior." Strongman Ulbricht fired Wilhelm Zaisser, boss of the SSD (the Soviet zone security police), reinstated the backbreaking work norms, launched a clattering campaign against Western "spies" and "saboteurs." East German papers were crammed with lurid stories of arrests, trials, confessions and stern punishments. By last week, in the courts of cold-eyed Minister of Justice Hilde Benjamin, "the Red guillotine," some 320 sentences had been handed...
Whether more carrots or more stick is now in prospect, no one knows. Walter Ulbricht went to Moscow again on Oct. 6, presumably for new orders. He is not back...
Busily fishing in Germany's agitated waters, Georgy Malenkov summoned his two chief East German puppets-Otto Grotewohl and Walter Ulbricht-to Moscow last week for a Feast of "Soviet-German Friendship." They were wined & dined in Moscow as no German has been since the days of Von Ribbentrop. In a sudden onrush of vodka, the workers' rebellion of June 17 and the puppet regime's consequent loss of face, were supposed to be forgotten. Malenkov toasted the East German regime as "the bulwark of peaceful forces of all Germany"; he promised to give it "full support...
...make some propaganda hay among Germany's fearful neighbors, the Poles, the Czechs and the French. But would it have much effect on the German elections? Probably not, for if there is one thing all West Germans are united on, it is a contempt for Messrs. Grotewohl, Ulbricht...