tographers, and journalists could witness and record the shooting. Early in August, a machine gun was installed on top of the Brandenburg Gate. According to Richard Crossman, chairman of the British Labour Party, who returned from a visit to East Germany in late August, Ulbricht plans to extend the wall along the entire zonal border, and thus turn West Berlin into “an island completely surrounded by a full-fledged national frontier.” The projected extension will cost well over twice as much as die Mauer, which already represents a considerable investment for a country whose economic situation is as precarious as East Germany’s. On the first anniversary of the erection of the wall, the West Berlin newspaper Berliner Morgenpost reported that a consensus of estimates by engineers and construction contractors placed the cost of the wall and the zonal barrier at about a hundred million West marks, or approximately twenty-five million dollars. That includes the cost of some thirty-eight hundred miles of barbed wire, which is enough, the paper noted, to fence in half of Europe.
The continuing expansion of the East German border fortifications has been accompanied by a steady strengthening of the police and Army units assigned to them. At present, the Communist barricades enclosing West Berlin are guarded by three brigades, totalling eighteen thousand men. (The West Berlin side of the border is in the hands of fifteen hundred police.) The Vopos on border duty, according to the Polizeimeister with whom I became acquainted, have changed in character, and not for the better. “Before the wall, we used to have quite a bit of contact with the Vopos,” he said. “I remember one night, on an inspection tour, I stopped at the Moritzplatz station of the U-Bahn—the border cuts right through that station—and there were two of our men and two of their men playing cards across the border. We didn’t usually get that clubby, but in those days a great many of the Vopos were people from Berlin, and we could usually find something to exchange a few words about—sports, personal matters, and such. Of course, they were all youngsters— eighteen or nineteen—and still are, so there’s never been any point in talking politics with them. What do they know about politics? How old were they when the war ended? One? Two? Three? You might mention, for instance, that some friend of yours had just made a trip to the Tyrol on his vacation. They’d say, ‘Sure, capitalists can take vacations.’ And you’d say, ‘He isn’t a capitalist. He’s a locksmith.’ But you couldn’t make them believe you. They might ask about the potato ration, and you’d tell them there wasn’t any ration—you could buy all you wanted. They’d say, ‘Oh, yes, in West Berlin, but in West Germany your people are starving.’ They just wouldn’t believe anything. It was useless.”
All the same, fraternization led many Vopos to defect, and in order to eliminate it the East Germans began, around the first of this year, to transfer the Berliners on duty at the wall and the zonal border—some two thousand, all told—to other units, and to replace them with young Vopos from rural areas, mainly Saxony. The changeover has been completed, and the boundary is now guarded solely by outlanders, who are referred to by some East Berliners as “the fifth occupying power.” The political indoctrination of these generally rough country boys has been stepped up, and the various units are kept isolated from one another to discourage the exchange of subversive ideas. Each company is assigned to Berlin for only six months, on the average, and a company that loses as many as ten men is replaced immediately. For the most part, the Vopos now on the borders of West Berlin are reliable, sternly disciplined, and tough. At least, they try to look and act tough. One day a while ago, Ernst Lemmer, the Bonn Minister for All-German Affairs, paid a visit to the wall with a small group of West German journalists and made a gesture of greeting to two Vopos standing sentry. He got no response. “You don’t have to look at us so angrily,” he called to 