Friendly Enemies

Britain and the GDR, 1949-1990

Stefan Berger, Norman LaPorte

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845458270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia alemana

During the Cold War, Britain had an astonishing number of contacts and connections with one of the Soviet Bloc's most hard-line regimes: the German Democratic Republic. The left wing of the British Labour Party and the Trade Unions often had closer ties with communist East Germany than the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). There were strong connections between the East German and British churches, women's movements, and peace movements; influential conservative politicians and the Communist leadership in the GDR had working relationships; and lucrative contracts existed between business leaders in Britain and their counterparts in East Germany. Based on their extensive knowledge of the documentary sources, the authors provide the first comprehensive study of Anglo-East German relations in this surprisingly under-researched field. They examine the complex motivations underlying different political groups' engagement with the GDR, and offer new and interesting insights into British political culture during the Cold War.

Chapter 1

NEGOTIATING THE EMERGENCE OF TWO GERMANYS

BRITISH–GDR RELATIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE EVOLUTION OF THE POST-WAR POLITICAL ORDER, 1945–1955

The defeat of Nazi Germany had stretched Britain to its limits. It would have been an impossible task to achieve without the Soviet Union. Hence gratitude to the Soviet people and even the Communist government was high in war-time Britain, especially among the political Left. However, as the war drew to a close the British political class was increasingly aware of the emerging conflicts of interests with the Soviet ally. This chapter starts off by tracing the impact of this new tension between the Western allies and the Soviet Union on Britain’s perception of Germany. Support for the communist transformation of East Germany was increasingly restricted to a fringe of left-wingers in the Labour Party, the small Communist Party and to left-wing trade unionists. The majority, even on the left, perceived East Germany as a puppet regime of the Soviet Union. The enforced merger between SPD and KPD in the Soviet zone of occupation, the Berlin airlift, the communist coup in Czechoslovakia – all of these events re-enforced the perception of communist Eastern European states as dictatorships under the thumb of the Soviet Union. In its policy towards Germany the British government, alongside the USA, was soon pursuing the aim of the foundation of a separate West German state as an ally in the Cold War.

This chapter will discuss the British strategies which eventually led to the non-acceptance of the GDR, when it was founded in 1949, but it will also analyse the continued unease among the British political class, when it came to its West German ally. The strains on British–West German relations gave the GDR the means to appeal to British public opinion and present itself as the better Germany. Yet the 1953 rising confirmed all of the British suspicions vis-à-vis the GDR, so that support for communist Germany dwindled even further. At the time when both Germanys joined their respective military alliances in 1955, British relations with the GDR were extremely limited and fraught with difficulties.

From One Enemy to the Next: Changing British Perceptions of Germany in the Context of the Ensuing Cold War

From 1942, the future of a defeated Germany was extensively discussed in British political circles.¹ Whilst there were many who followed Robert Vansittart in describing Germany as an inherently aggressive nation,² others attempted to take a more differentiated look at the Germans. The Labour Party, which unexpectedly formed the government in 1945, was most divided on how to judge Germany.³ At Potsdam, the Allies had agreed to govern Germany as one unit, but this proved impossible in the post-war world. Those British observers most closely involved with these developments had seen it coming. In 1944, Rennie Smith, a former Labour MP who was now a civilian officer with the Control Commission involved in re-educating Ruhr miners and cooperating closely with trade unionists and social democrats, had been hopeful of US–Soviet cooperation in Germany. By the end of 1945, Smith doubted the democratic motives of the Soviets. After only six months in Germany, he noted the possibility of a division of the country, as the Soviet zone of occupation was developing in significantly different ways to the Western occupation zones.⁴ While The Times in May and June 1945 was still hopeful that the war-time allies could agree on administering Germany, it also recognised that the division of Germany would mean the division of Europe.⁵ By September 1945 the paper was worried that the lack of central authority in defeated Germany might lead to chaos.⁶ The growing volume of voices critical of the intentions of the Soviet Union were still intermingled with the voices of those on the left of the political spectrum who admired the Soviet Union for encouraging the growth of a new political culture in their zone of occupation.⁷ In the columns of Tribune there was much criticism of the way in which the Allies handled the division of Germany in their zones of occupation.⁸ In particular the Western allies’ alleged encouragement of the depoliticisation of Germans and their lack of support for the German Left were heavily criticised.⁹ Yet such voices had little impact on the direction of British foreign policy.

In 1945, the Labour Party’s electoral victory was accompanied by the expectation that war-time cooperation with the Soviet Union would continue during the post-war occupation of Germany. In 1944, a Labour Party foreign policy manifesto championed the idea of consolidating ‘the great wartime association of the British commonwealth with the USA and the USSR.’¹⁰ A year later, in the 1945 election campaign, the party campaigned under the slogan ‘left can speak to left’, indicating that the antagonistic stance between Churchill and the Soviet leadership could give way to a better mutual understanding under a Labour government. By the spring of 1946, however, the meeting of Foreign Ministers in Paris showed how much of the earlier optimism had already evaporated. Close collaboration between the British Foreign Office and the American State Department produced the strategy of containing communism, which included rebuilding West Germany as a bulwark against the further westward expansion of the Soviet Union.¹¹ The division of Germany was now part of the British and American policy vis-à-vis Germany, thereby reinforcing the separate development of the Soviet and Western zones of occupation.¹²

By May 1946, the British foreign minister Ernest Bevin was arguing that the Soviet threat was more important than the German danger. Subsequently, the British Labour government intensified efforts to bring the three Western zones closer together. The division of Germany was accepted as the result of the Cold War, but the USSR’s aim to dominate Europe had to be resisted.¹³ Growing British suspicion of Soviet policy was also expressed by Sir Patrick Deane, head of the German Department in the Foreign Office. In August 1948, Deane stated that, ‘What has in fact happened is that the Soviet authorities have established in the Eastern Zone a totalitarian one party police state, bearing many close resemblances to the Nazi State of 1933 to 1945.’¹⁴ By this point, with the exception of the far left, Deane’s views had become almost communis opinio among the British political class, left and right.

Since the later nineteenth century, Germany’s geographical position in the centre of Europe had conditioned a Janus-faced foreign policy, which looked either eastwards or westwards depending on circumstance. The West’s ‘Rapallo complex’ – a deep-seated anxiety that Germany could again forge an alliance of convenience, this time with Soviet Russia – served as the incentive to integrate the FRG firmly within the Western alliance. Such integration necessitated the Western allies’ refusal to recognise the parallel foundation of the ‘second German state’, the GDR. Yet, from the policy’s inception, there were voices in the British Foreign Office expressing the view that de facto recognition could not be avoided indefinitely.¹⁵ Just a week after the foundation of the GDR in 1949, The Times also argued that it would be unwise simply to ignore the existence of two Germanys: ‘Instead of pretending that it does not exist it is wiser to recognise it for what it is – one more “People’s Democracy”, dependent on Russian support, lacking popular backing, riddled with obvious weaknesses, yet, in spite of these things, imbued with a revolutionary toughness and persistence which may in the end produce results. It widens the division of Germany and is a challenge to the western Powers and to the West German Republic which cannot be ignored.’¹⁶ An explanation for this stance can be found in the actual objective of British policy, which was not reunification, but the containment of Soviet influence. Indeed, Britain was more afraid of a unified Germany coming under Soviet influence than of a divided Germany anchored within opposing alliance systems. The more West Germany became integrated in the West, the more distant prospects of reunification would appear and the easier it would be for Britain to move slowly towards an acceptance of two Germanys.

Dissenters: The Third Force Movement and East Germany

The foreign minister’s critics, organised within the Labour Party in the ‘Keep Left’ group, championed a socialist foreign policy based on the idea of a socialist Europe as a ‘third force’ between the ‘twin evils’ of the United States and the Soviet Union. Founded in January 1947, the group’s leading light was Richard Crossman, who wrote ‘The Job Abroad’ section in what amounted to Keep Left’s policy statement. Critical of both the Soviet Union and the USA in post-war international relations, ‘The Job Abroad’ invested its hopes in maintaining independence from both superpowers by cooperating with France in the formation of a united and socialist Europe.¹⁷ From this perspective any long-term division of Germany would just cement the division of Europe. Hence, the Labour Left tended to be in favour of dialogue with communist states in Eastern Europe, including the GDR.

In the PLP, a small group of MPs around Konni Zilliacus, John Platts-Mills and Julius Silverman thus welcomed the merger of SPD and KPD in March 1946 as the happy ending of the historic division of the workers’ movement in Germany that had enabled Hitler’s rise to power. Twenty-eight of them sent the new party a telegram wishing it ‘success in bringing about the political unity of the German workers on terms fair and just to both Social Democrats and Communists.’¹⁸ Despite the PLP’s outright censure of this action, a year later thirteen backbenchers sent a message of support to the SED-sponsored ‘People’s Congress’, welcoming ‘all efforts made in Germany to organise a united representation of all democratic forces of Germany which would be able to state the opinion of German democrats on the future of their country.’¹⁹ Again, the PLP stridently disassociated itself from this statement. At a meeting of the PLP on 10 December 1947, Herbert Morrison forcefully informed the signatories of the second telegram that their actions had contravened official party policy.

In agreement with the official Allied position, the Labour government saw the congress as an undemocratic communist front designed to counter Allied attempts to establish separate political institutions in the Western zones. A lead article in the Daily Herald took the thirteen to account describing the SED as ‘a Communist concoction, brewed in the Soviet Zone of Germany, and intended to poison if possible the minds of the German people against the Social Democratic Party.’²⁰ Thos...