1950. Soviets Shut Down Internment Camps in East Germany

NKVD Internment Camps Shut Down After Five Years

A column of German prisoners is led by Red Army soldiers through a ruined village near Stalingrad, December 1942 (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

January 25, 1950 (recorded to air later)

In the middle of January, General Vasily Chuikov, Soviet High Commissioner for Germany, announced that Russian occupation authorities were liquidating three internment camps in Eastern Germany.

Camps that were a political embarrassment to Germans and Russians trying to sell Communism here. Camps whose names already were notorious under the Nazis and which were becoming equally so under the Communists.

Buchenwald. Sachsenhausen. Bautzen.

Chuikov's announcement said that 15,000 persons in these camps would be set free to return to their homes. Another three and a half thousand would be held as criminals. The USSR would keep 649 others for major war crimes against the Soviet Union.

The Communist propaganda ballyhooed this as a great show of humanity and generosity by the Russian occupying power—propaganda that political prisoners and opponents of the satellite regime will not agree with.

These are the pictures of some of the people who know something of the so-called generosity of totalitarianism. They were taken in at a headquarters of an organization called the "Fighting Group Against Inhumanity," an association of former war prisoners, internees, and persecutees formed to expose terror behind the Iron Curtain in Germany.

The first thing they do when they check in is to put down the names of comrades who they know have died behind the barbed wire.

Every day women come here to check on husbands, sons, or relatives.

Some of the prisoners were in fairly good shape, particularly if they had good jobs in the camps, like in the kitchen. Others are slated for TB hospitals—and probably early death.

The Fighting Group Against Inhumanity has figures that disagree with General Chuikov's. They say that out of 180,000 persons interned in 1945—five years ago—90,000 died behind the wire, and that 30,000 have been deported to Russia and disappeared. Those now returning every day by the hundreds are only what's left.

The three young men here, all in their early twenties, were arrested for trying to cross the Russian zonal border without the proper papers. They were accused of being spies and spent four years in the camps.

The Russians gave them good shoes when they were released, but the clothing has something to be desired. The coats they call "Sokolovsky" Mäntel; the hats "Kotikov" Mütze.

Life in the people's democracy is, it seems, more strange than wonderful.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

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Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

January 25, 1950

Transport trucks continue to pile up at the Helmstedt autobahn checkpoint today in what is being called a "creeping blockade" of road traffic in and out of Berlin.

Russian transport authorities are allowing only a half-dozen trucks an hour to come through.

Today something new has been added. Transport trucks trying to return to the Western zones from Berlin also are being held up. So now there are queues of heavy trucks lined up on both sides of the Russian zone border. Currently no more than a hundred loaded trucks are waiting to get in, and about half that number trying to get out. Also this morning four barges were stopped on the inland waterway out of Berlin. Railroad traffic is normal.

One Berlin Communist newspaper denies that there is any blockade or slowdown. Western reporters who say there is are "attempting to create tension and unrest."

Two weeks ago Russian occupation authorities announced they were liquidating three concentration camps in their zone and returning more than 15,000 Germans to their homes. The move is designed as a goodwill gesture to win public opinion toward the East.

This morning I spent several hours talking with some of the men and women returning from Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Bautzen.

It was a strange sight, this long after the war, to see war prisoners again. Some were fat and healthy, others were emaciated and tubercular. Some were teenage kids picked up making illegal border crossings and held as spies.

There was one new category—a middle-aged machine worker. He was arrested three years ago when his machine jammed and was ruined. For this he was sent to the coal mines to work out the cost of the machine—30,000 rubles. But in the mines he was denounced as an unreliable person and sent to Buchenwald. Strangely enough, he was included in the recent amnesty.

He is the only inmate I ever found in favor of a concentration camp—otherwise, he said, he would still be in the mines instead of walking free as he is today.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

1949. Soviets See Favorable Prospects for Agreement with United States

Possible Softening of the Propaganda Line

Black market deal in East Berlin in 1953. The poster on the wall reads: "Es lebe die große Freundschaft zwischen den kulturen der Sowjetunion-Deutschland, die sewahr eines dauerhaftlen friedens in Europa!" ("Long live the great friendship between the cultures of the Soviet Union of Germany, which is a lasting peace in Europe!") (Photo by Ralph Crane – source)

Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

January 3, 1949

As in Paris, the sun has come out for the first time in a week to shine in Berlin, and it is possible to see the effects at once. People walk more sprightly in the streets, they smile and are kinder to each other. And for a moment it is even possible to forget that this is a blockaded city—that there is a Berlin crisis.

This is the first business day of the new year. The propaganda from the East sector of the city is not quite so abusive. Or perhaps the men who write the stuff haven't gotten their breath back after the holidays.

The Russian-licensed newspaper, Forward, today even hints that perhaps the new American Congress, meeting in a few hours, may come up with a solution to the East-West difficulties. This editorial claims that the victories of the Communist forces in China have changed the world outlook. And that this fact, coupled with the American elections and the rumored resignation of Secretary of State Marshall and other cabinet officials, presents favorable prospects for agreement between the United States and Soviet Russia. The newspaper says that the pressure of the peace-loving majority in America will force President Truman to seek a compromise with Russia in the coming months.

I mention this only as a possible softening of the Communist propaganda line toward the United States.

Meanwhile there is no letup of the blockade. Today East Berlin officials announce that all vehicles which do not have the new Soviet military permits will be confiscated where found in the Russian sector of the city.

The Soviet-occupied sections of East Berlin and Eastern Germany today begin what they hail as a "Two Year Plan" of socialization and reconstruction. Streetcars in the zone were decorated with banners and flags—red, of course—factory whistles were blown, meetings were held in the factories.

The idea is to increase production. The East German government has approved what is called the "Hennecke movement," a speed-up labor campaign similar to the Stakhanovite movement in Russia.

The current joke concerns the carpenter who bragged he had increased his production 1,500 percent. "How can this be?" he was asked.

"Someone asked me to bring him a nail," the Hennecke man replied, "And I brought a handful."

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

1932. Hitler Complains Nazis Are Victims of "Alarmist Propaganda"

Hitler Protests Crackdown

President Paul von Hindenburg in Berlin followed closely behind by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, February 25, 1934 (source)

This article is part of a series of posts on how newspapers covered the rise of fascism. Two weeks ahead of the German presidential election in 1932, Adolf Hitler complained to incumbent President Paul von Hindenburg that the Nazi Party was subject to "alarmist propaganda" from its opponents who warned about the dangers of a Nazi victory.

From The New York Times, February 29, 1932:

HITLER PROTESTS ALARMIST CHARGES

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Complains to Hindenburg About Forecasts of Disturbance if Nazis Win Elections

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SCORES MUZZLING OF PRESS

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Appeals to Foreign Correspondents After Prussia Tightens Ban on Agitation by "Subversive Parties"

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BERLIN, Feb. 28 — Adolf Hitler summoned foreign correspondents to his headquarters at the Kaiserhof today to protest against his opponents' practice of predicting terrorism and disturbance to Germany's foreign relations and credit in the event that the National Socialists were victorious in the Presidential election March 13. He declared that such "alarmist propaganda" was dangerous in that it might really produce such an effect.

Herr Hitler said he believed his election would contribute to better foreign relations and establish internal stability. Then he made public an open letter to President von Hindenburg protesting against the alleged attempt to discredit him abroad and muzzle his newspapers and periodicals which he declared compelled him to appeal to the foreign press.

Herr Hitler's protest to the President follows instructions issued by Carl Severing, Prussian Minister of the Interior, to local administration officials to suppress agitation by "subversive parties inimical to the State" by rigorous employment of the special powers of censorship over the press and public meetings conferred by the emergency decrees.

Der Angriff Suspended

Der Angriff, the Nazis' Berlin organ, has been suspended for a week for an article representing President Hindenburg as the candidate of the Socialist party, whose spirit, according to the paper, is characterized by the words of one of its members, "We know nothing of the German fatherland; our country is the world."

"Herr Field Marshal, do you consider it worthy of your name to have your honor as a Presidential candidate guarded by a wilderness of emergency decrees and legal paragraphs while abandoning the candidate opposing you as a free game for partisan lies and defamation?" Herr Hitler asks in his open letter.

Citing the Socialist election appeal that "Hitler instead of Hindenburg means chaos in Germany and Europe, the direst peril and bloody struggles at home and abroad, and the annihilation of all civic liberties," Herr Hitler enters "an indignant protest against the attempt to mobilize the foreign world under cover of your name, Herr Reichspräsident, against the free decision of political issues in Germany."

Will Ward Off Attacks

"In my statements to foreigners," the Nazi leader continues, "I have never failed to emphasize that every German government to date has been imbued by a sincere love of peace.

"Attempts to discredit an inconvenient German movement before the foreign world as a disturber of the peace, made under cover of your name and not disclaimed, I shall henceforth know how to ward off personally. During the election campaign my utterances shall come to the knowledge of the world, just as do the statements of the representatives of the present system."

Herr Hitler charges that although his party is represented as endangering civil liberties the present system's emergency decrees have abolished democratic freedom and the liberty of the press, and that the suppression of his newspapers while the campaign is in progress represents a violation of the freedom of election guaranteed by the Constitution.

He contrasts his opponents' demands for a "chivalrous campaign" with alleged defamation of his lieutenants and himself, such as false accusations that he deserted the Austrian military service.

1967. The Central Intelligence Agency's Long Financial Reach

The Department of Dirty Tricks

The 6th World Festival of Youth in Students in Moscow, later revealed to have been infiltrated by the CIA (source)

Bill Downs

ABC Washington

February 19, 1967

Official Washington was reminded this week of the double standard by which the citizens judge their government and its operations. It's a Puritanical and, some say, a hypocritical ethic, the kind that made Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter an American classic. For it is still a fact of life in this country that the people regard secrecy in government very much like they regard adultery in marriage. Or more accurately, they seem to equate the super-secret Central Intelligence Agency with the kind of man who finds it necessary to keep a discreet mistress as a professional sideline. It's really no one's business as long as the mistress doesn't interfere with his family, that he keeps her out of the neighborhood, and above all he does not get caught.

As this week in Washington ended, the most avidly-read publication in the national capital was not the Congressional Record with its slightly juicy revelations of the investigated antics of Adam Clayton Powell. It was a slick, West Coast, monthly publication called Ramparts magazine with a story about the CIA which during the week captured the top headlines from the war in Vietnam, the troubled Cultural Revolution in Communist China and the political pronouncements from the White House and Capitol Hill.

The Ramparts' exposé revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency for years had been consorting with its mistress of secrecy right under the noses of some of the most respected members of American society. The Agency not only brought her into the neighborhood but actually brought her in the nation's bedroom, so to speak, to entice innocent young collegians in the National Student Association.

Not only that, it now develops that the CIA, in its secret efforts to advance American foreign policies and defend the nation from infiltrating espionage agents, also employed the international departments of a number of AFL and CIO unions, including the American Newspaper Guild, which when I was a member was concerned with getting the normal $25 a week salaries of legmen raised to maybe $30 a week.

CIA gold also was channeled into the US branches of a number of so-called egghead and do-gooder organizations such as the international society of writers called PEN—or the Paris-based, highly intellectual Congress for Cultural Freedom.

But most startling of all was the complex and most cumbersome method which the CIA used to disburse its secret money. More than a dozen wealthy foundations have been named as conduits for the Agency's dollars—dollars which, incidentally, by law the CIA does not have to make a public accounting.

These foundations, which channeled the money into a myriad of projects connected with the CIA's overseas intelligence operations, were based in such disparate places as Boston, Philadelphia, Columbus, Baltimore, and Dallas. Over the years, millions of tax dollars were involved. The foundations don't pay taxes, so presumably the CIA funds were not themselves taxed.

But what the Ramparts magazine article did was to open a floodgate of criticism of the Agency. For the Central Intelligence Agency, like the respected adulterer, made that unforgivable mistake—it got well and truly caught. But of more seriousness, as the professional intelligence officials put it, the CIA has lost its fig leaf—or rather a whole vine-full of fig leaves—which is going to make its covert operations overseas more difficult.

This correspondent spent some fifteen or so years as a foreign correspondent working around the world, including a wartime year in the Soviet Union. We suspect that the hullabaloo over the CIA's financing of students to attend international youth rallies, the financing of international labor organizations to teach democratic unionism to the working men of developing nations being wooed by the Communists, the secret sponsorship of professional organizations to counter totalitarian propaganda among the intellectuals of the world—we suspect these revelations are causing much more sensation here in Washington and across the country than they are in most foreign capitals.

In Moscow, for example, we found that every foreign correspondent was automatically assumed to be an intelligence agent for his government. News reporters deal in facts. Facts about Russia, put together even in the most innocuous story, constitute intelligence in the Communist mind. It did no good to explain that the private companies like the press associations, newspapers, and broadcast networks who sent their own correspondents overseas did so as a competitive business policy to sell the news collected by its correspondent-employees. To the Kremlin we were foreign intelligence agents. And to make it clear, they assigned black-capped and leather-coated members of the secret police to follow us about and report what we were up to.

Let me clear up one point here. When I was in the Soviet Union there was no CIA. The Office of Strategic Services under General William Donovan was just getting its intelligence service organized. To my knowledge, the news organizations for whom I worked overseas never accepted a dime of federal financing. For the United Press, CBS, and the American Broadcasting Company to allow its correspondents to become secret agents would risk the basic asset of the news that it markets—the integrity of their news gathering staffs. Destroy that integrity and the news organization is destroyed. It would be just plain bad business, because the UPI and the Associated Press and the broadcast networks market their integrity and their news not only in the United States but in foreign countries as well.

So while the current flap over the Central Intelligence Agency has surfaced many of its overseas operations, we suspect that the intelligence organizations in most capitals of the world darn well knew or suspected what was going on. In the case of the Russians and other Communist countries, the KGB and other secret police groups would expect the CIA to use American students. They've been doing it for years. Just as here in Washington it's generally assumed that the foreign correspondents for Pravda, Izvestia, and Tass most certainly are expected to work for the KGB. In fact, it's their patriotic duty by the standards of the USSR.

But what disturbs many people here in Washington is the extent to which the CIA secret operations have penetrated the economic and intellectual structure of our society.

For example, the Agency has channeled some of its money into the publication of books, good books which give a fair picture of the country and explain its origins. To give these books the necessary "cover," as it's called, reputable publishers put them on the newsstands for sale to American readers, thus divorcing them from any covert propaganda purposes when they are distributed overseas. This raises the question of whether there is something wrong about the US citizens purchasing again a book for which he has already been taxed to publish. Or more seriously, it raises the question of whether any democratic agency should ever be in a position to secretly propagandize its own people.

The use of federal funds to finance collegiate delegations overseas could and should be a worthy educational project. But for the CIA to make secret use of the National Student Association for this end has raised serious questions about the integrity of American education.

Allen Dulles this week defended the action, which he administered at the time when he was directer of the CIA.

"If you studied the student conference movement abroad during those years of the early 1950s," Mr. Dulles explained, "you would find that the Communists were making very effective use of them. The international conference had great propaganda value for them, and were influencing the youth in the United States as well as in other countries."

The question still remains: having succeeded, why didn't the CIA get out of the National Student Association? Its so-called fig leaf cover became more transparent as each graduating class increased the number of young people aware of the CIA secret. And, sure enough, it was a former NSA official which blew the whistle on the Agency in the Ramparts magazine article.

President Johnson this week ordered a review of the CIA's involvement and assistance to the Student Association and other areas of the nation's education establishment. The Washington Post says today that the investigation will probably broaden its scope to look into the CIA's involvement with American labor unions, charitable foundations, and ostensibly independent organizations and other institutions.

Mr. Johnson appointed a three-man panel to make the study, composed of Under Secretary of State and former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare John Gardner, and the present CIA director Richard Helms.

Congressional criticism already is blowing from Capitol Hill about the membership of the investigating group. "It's like asking an errant husband to investigate his mistress," said one Congressman.

Translated, that probably means that before the fig leaves have settled to the ground, either the Senate or the House of Representatives—or both—will be getting into the act.

More than a century ago, observing foreigners traveling in the United States returned to their homelands to write books about the brash young country. Eminent writer such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, to name a few, variously admired or criticized many facets of US life. But they all agreed on one thing: Americans have big mouths. Their pride and energy make them talk too much, and living in a broad and open country where freedom of speech is a way of life, they have a great disdain for secrets—especially official secrecy.

Therein lies the paradox of the Central Intelligence Agency and the roots of the troubles which now are plaguing it. In the open society that is the United States, how does the government and its people accommodate an institution which, to serve them, must remain anonymous?

The authoritative Washington Star today raises the question of whether "the current flap over the CIA can be escalated to the point where it will destroy the nation's intelligence organization." We don't think so. In the nuclear era of what might be called the possibility of "instant stone age," if the CIA did not exist then Congress and the White House would invent it.

We do think that the Central Intelligence Agency can, like the snail, emerge out of its shell so people can observe and understand it. Like the snail, the Agency can keep its most sensitive organs concealed and people can still admire its impressive super-structure.

For ironically, by public declaration of virtually every CIA director from Allen Dulles to Dick Helms, about eighty percent of the enormous work that the Agency does is in the non-secret area. Today's intelligence mostly is made up of collecting, collating, and assessing overseas publications, winnowing statistics and details from agricultural, engineering, and professional journals, scanning big and little newspapers for national trade and troubles, and most important, monitoring thousands of broadcasts in dozens of languages which serve to update the top secret National Intelligence Estimate—a global summary of events prepared for the president and the National Security Council each morning.

The Agency has boasted that it has "the most comprehensive information retrieval system now in operation anywhere," with rows and rows of electronic memory banks, specialized miniature photographic machines, facsimile printing devices, and punch card indexes which contain more than fifty million cards.

One intelligence official once boasted that the Agency had collected a most eminent group of scholars knowledgeable about China, and that this collection of Sinologists was better than any university staff in the world.

For what it's worth, we suggest that the CIA's information retrieval system would be of great value to the students and historians throughout the country—that the CIA's historians and scholars should be shared with the nation when they can be spared.

We even suggest that someone in the Agency be allowed to come right out and say that there's a $60 million building on the banks of the Potomac in Langley, Virginia that several employees drive out to for work every day, and that they proudly work for the Central Intelligence Agency, which is a keystone to the defense and security of the nations of the Free World.

Let the Agency keep its so-called "department of dirty tricks" to itself. But when the government needs American students to attend the next International Youth Conference, let the appeal be open and above-board, not a behind-the-barn operation.

This is Bill Downs for ABC in Washington.