Europe: Early Modem and Modem
pion of the AEL. And even after they were generally
accepted, he did not want to admit the so-called
"Eastern Workers." In his opinion, those people were
destined to be imprisoned in concentration camps.
However, local Gestapo and police authorities adhered more to the calls of the local businesses. Eastern
workers, too, were imprisoned in the AEL. For the
Gestapo offices in the field, the AEL constituted a
more or less independent terror instrument. Therefore, not only disobedient laborers but also those who
were seen as political risks ended up in the camps. The
AEL became the local all-purpose prisons for the
Security Police (p. 97). Clearly, power shifted from the
center to the local and regional level.
Toward the end of World War II, conditions in the
labor education camps matched those in the concentration camps. Forced to work under appalling conditions, undernourished, without medical care, and
beaten by the police guards innumerable prisoners met
violent deaths. Frequently prisoners were handed over
to the concentration camp system.
While the steady decline in the living conditions in
the AEL is apparent, I disagree somewhat with the
notion that the labor education camps were generally
comparable to the concentration camps and were,
indeed, the concentration camps of the Gestapo. The
AEL were not a different kind of concentration camp
but a new institution with its own history and character
(p. 11). Although a good portion of AEL inmates were
eventually released, most concentration camp prisoners remained imprisoned, and the majority died. This
is, however, only a minor point in assessing this
important and well-written contribution to our understanding of the internal politics and terror system of
Nazi Germany.
JAN ERIK SCHULTE
WewelsburgDistrict Museum,
Germany
THERESIA BAUER. Blockpartei und Agrarrevolution von
oben: Die Demokratische Bauempartei Deutschlands
1948-1963. (Studien zur Zeitgeschichte, number 64.)
Munich: R. Oldenbourg. 2003. Pp. 639.
Theresia Bauer's impressive study of the Demokratische Bauernpartei Deutschlands (Democratic
Peasant Party of Germany, or DBD) is nothing if not
thorough. An artificially created subservient agricultural party in an undemocratic system receives nearly
560 pages of text and mostly archival footnotes, thirty
pages of statistical tables, and over forty pages of
scholarly apparatus-and all this for the first sixteen
years of its forty-three-year existence. This might seem
excessive, and, in terms of reader concentration and
the need for editorial restraint, it is. The impact of
Bauer's meticulous research would have been greater
if some of the detail and all of the repetition had been
lost along the way. Nonetheless, the book is a fine
achievement, superseding all previous studies.
By 1948, according to Bauer, the Soviet administra-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1331
tion in Germany was concerned about the way in which
the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, or SED) was handling the
aftermath of the 1945 distributive land reform, about
the inadequacies of the peasant-aid association
(VdgB), and about the political difficulties associated
with the existing "block" parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Liberal Democrats (LDPD).
Against the wishes of the SED and-perversely-in
order to reassure the CDU and LDPD of the continuing importance to the Soviet Union of "block" politics,
the Soviet authorities pressed for the foundation of a
peasant party in 1948. The DBD's role was to engage
the small farmers and thereby to consolidate the land
reform, but very swiftly it became acquainted with its
wider schizophrenic purpose. The SED's attack on
"kulak" larger farmers developed from 1948 into the
first collectivization drive in 1952, which the DBD was
supposed to support, while at the same time fostering
connections with the independent peasants and stressing the whole-German dimension of agricultural policy. This early collectivization resulted in rural protests, real and alleged sabotage, and farmer flight from
the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the
Federal Republic. The DBD leadership and membership were purged, and from late 1953 the party had to
pick up the pieces. It was charged by the SED both
with supporting the foundering agricultural cooperatives and with maintaining the compliance of the
independent peasantry.
Bauer makes excellent use of the archives of the
SED Sector "Friendly Organizations" and of the Ministry for State Security to show how the DBD was
controlled and criticized in the mid-1950s. She draws
in a range of political personalities and regional differences but could have developed her comments
about the village experience of farmers in their relations with the DBD, about religious observance, and
about the experience of rural women. The crunch
came in 1957-1958, when SED pressure for collective
agriculture mounted. In the first half of 1958 there was
a substantial increase in the founding of agricultural
cooperatives (LPG) and of LPG members in the DBD,
despite the fact that the party was not supposed to
recruit from either cooperative farmers nor from
individual peasants with larger landholdings. Bauer
then argues that the first sign of the next drastic course
of action to be taken was in the postponement and
relocation of the DBD party congress to May 1960 in
Gustrow. The significance of this was that Gustrow was
in a northern district of advanced collectivization and
that May was being set as a target for full collectivization. Bauer charts the complex process of debate
within the SED leadership, within the DBD and with
the Soviet allies. She draws in the local initiative for
collectivization in the Rostock district, which went
under the slogan "De Appel is riep" ("The apple is
ripe"), and concludes that urgent decisions were made
by the SED in mid-January 1960 to proceed with
enforced full collectivization, not least in order to grab
OCTOBER 2004
1332
Reviews of Books and Films
the agricultural machinery of the middling peasants.
There were 400,000 of these in late 1959 and only
30,000 in April 1960. Bauer successfully conveys the
phases of organizational and economic chaos throughout the period. The DBD, led in the main by experienced farmers but thoroughly infiltrated by SED
stooges and informers to the Ministry for State Security, trod a precarious course between asserting the
interests of individual farmers, pressing for collectivization, and coping with protest, violence, and sabotage. It was capable of reflecting peasant discontent,
but its main function was to deflect attention from the
SED and to coerce the agricultural population. By
1963, collectivization was more or less complete and
the GDR sealed off from the West, so the DBD was
forced into a submission that lasted for the next
twenty-seven years.
JONATHAN OSMOND
Cardiff University
HOPE M. HARRISON. Driving the Soviets up the Wall:
Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961. (Princeton
Studies in International History and Politics.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. Pp. xx, 345.
$42.50
Primarily, Hope M. Harrison's study is a contribution
to the history of the Berlin Crisis. Based on relevant
sources of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) regime,
eyewitness accounts, and individual sources from Moscow, she is able to show that throughout this crisis
Walter Ulbricht and Nikita Khrushchev pursued different priorities and applied different methods. The
tensions between East Berlin and Moscow that resulted led to a crisis within the crisis, and at least
temporarily Khrushchev acted under the pressure that
Ulbricht managed to create. While Khrushchev hoped
to win the Germans for socialism and pursued an
agreement in the Berlin Crisis with the Western powers, Ulbricht continuously aimed at force and control.
He wanted to terminate the rights of the occupation
powers unilaterally without giving thought to the risk
of war that would result. Ulbricht's long-term objective
was the incorporation of West Berlin into the German
Democratic Republic (GDR).
The tensions between Moscow and East Berlin
escalated after the U-2 incident caused the spectacular
failure of the plan to negotiate a solution at the Paris
Summit of May 1960. While Khrushchev still pursued
an agreement, now with the president who was to
succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ulbricht grew increasingly nervous because of the new wave of refugees who
left the GDR. Harrison is able to show that the new
regulation for visits by West Berliners and West Germans to East Berlin was introduced in September 1960
without prior Soviet authorization. In January 1961,
Ulbricht presented an urgency program to Khrushchev
for the lifting of the occupation statute of West Berlin
and the transfer of the control of the access routes
from West Berlin to the GDR. Due to the bleeding of
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
the GDR, possibly as early as March (if the account of
Jan Sejna can be trusted) but definitely in June,
Ulbricht wanted to carry through with the cutting off
of West Berlin independent of a peace treaty. According to Yuli Kvitsinsky, Ulbricht warned Khrushchev at
the end of June or the beginning of July that "if the
present situation of open border remains, collapse is
inevitable" (p. 185). The July 4 memorandum of
Ambassador Pervukhin confirms Khrushchev's later
report (to his son Sergei and to ambassador Hans
Kroll) that he then decided to build the wall.
Harrison's account somewhat exaggerates the
course of events: "The tail boldly wagged the dog" (p.
139). It does not fit that Khrushchev in the final
analysis denied Ulbricht the separate peace treaty,
first, because after his meeting with John F. Kennedy
in June 1961 he considered the risk of war too high,
and second, because he feared the consequences of an
economic embargo imposed by the West. By giving in
to Ulbricht's demand to close the borders, Khrushchev
at the same time took the German's most important
tool to put pressure on the Soviet leader. However,
Harrison examines the Berlin Crisis in the context of a
recapitulation of recent research results on the creation of the GDR and the crisis of 1953. She also
recounts the tensions between Ulbricht and Khrushchev in the phase of destalinization in 1956-1957. This
portrays Ulbricht as pursuing independent policies;
primarily, it was his dogmatic stubbornness that created the GDR with its weaknesses, independently of
other objectives and changing methods of Soviet policies. Harrison's study firmly supports this account.
Khrushchev's objectives in the Berlin Crisis remain
somewhat unclear, not only because of the Soviet
leader's volatile nature and the inaccessibility of the
presidential archive. Curiously enough, Harrison does
not use the sources of the Moscow Foreign Ministry,
which Oleg Grinevsky used in his monograph on
Khrushchev's foreign policies. Harrison is able to show
that after Anastas Mikoian warned that the transfer of
the occupation rights to the GDR would be too risky,
Khrushchev understood the idea of a "Free West
Berlin City" as an offer for compromise. However, this
does not show as clearly as she gathers that the
stabilization of the GDR was the major objective of
Khrushchev's initiative and that fear of the atomic
armament of the German Federal Republic played
only a minor role. Regarding the reasons for the
renunciation of the separate peace treaty, Harrison at
times is rather speculative, even though the documents
she presents clearly show that in Vienna Khrushchev
was unable to obtain the certainty that the West would
renounce military resistance. Such inaccuracies, however, do not alter the fact that this study essentially
contributes to the understanding of Soviet policies in
the Cold War.
WILFRIED LOTH
University of Essen
OCTOBER 2004