Who said “No one has any intention of building a wall”?

The question that never said “wall”

June 1961 was a tense month in Berlin. Since 1958 Nikita Khrushchev had demanded that West Berlin become a demilitarized “free city,” and at the Vienna summit on June 3–4 he pressed John F. Kennedy again, with a deadline at the end of the year. Meanwhile the flight of people from East Germany grew week by week.

On June 15, Walter Ulbricht, head of East Germany’s ruling party and of its State Council, held an international press conference in East Berlin. Annamarie Doherr, correspondent of the West German Frankfurter Rundschau, asked whether a free city would mean the state border being set up at the Brandenburg Gate. She asked about a border. Ulbricht answered about a wall.

He said he took her to mean that some people in West Germany wanted East Berlin’s construction workers mobilized to put up a wall, that he knew of no such intention, and that those workers were busy building homes. Then came the sentence:

No one has any intention of building a wall.

In his German: Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten. Fifty-nine days later, the wire went up.

What he was doing in private

Historians now know, from the East German and Soviet archives, that Ulbricht had spent months urging Moscow to let him close the border, and that Khrushchev held him back. The last word was Moscow’s. On August 1, 1961, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead: “Implement it when you want, we can be ready at any time.”

Leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries, meeting in Moscow from August 3 to 5, endorsed the plan. In East Berlin it was run by Erich Honecker, then the party’s Central Committee secretary for security questions, under the code name Rose. The circle that knew was kept small. Many of the policemen, soldiers and militiamen who strung the wire on the night of August 12–13 learned of their task only that evening. Two days later, one of the men guarding the new line jumped over it: Conrad Schumann.

A sentence that became a proverb

The line is now one of the best-known sentences in German political history. Germans quote it, often with a wry smile, whenever an official denial sounds like an announcement. Was it a slip that gave the plan away, or a calm lie? Nobody can prove what was in Ulbricht’s mind. What the transcript shows is simple: the word wall was his, not the reporter’s.

Who was Walter Ulbricht?

Ulbricht was born in Leipzig in 1893, joined the German Communist Party in its early years and spent the Nazi era in exile, much of it in Moscow. He returned in the spring of 1945 at the head of a small team of German Communists, the Ulbricht Group, and built the party that ruled East Germany. His years in power saw the uprising of June 17, 1953, put down by Soviet tanks, the long exodus and finally the Wall, which he defended to the end as a shield against the West.

In 1971 his own Politburo, with Moscow’s approval, replaced him with Honecker, the man who had organized the Wall. Ulbricht died on August 1, 1973, twelve years to the day after Khrushchev’s go-ahead. Why the wire was worth that gamble to him is the subject of Why was the Berlin Wall built?