International: He Who Surrenders Berlin

To the German capital and its people last week came the most violent and perhaps the most fateful days since Red armies three years ago blasted their way across the Tiergarten, littered with uniformed corpses. After watching the Berlin scene last week, TIME'S Bureau Chief Emmet Hughes cabled:

The whine of bullets echoed in the hollow ruins. Deep in the Russian sector, Red mob violence had finally pushed Berlin's government to the city's Western half. But on this side, the people rose some 300,000 strong to shout their defiance of the Reds in one cf the greatest voluntary mass meetings in German history.

No such show of popular force had been seen in Germany since 100 years ago, when the people of Berlin took to the same streets to fight the royal troops. In 1948 they were without revolutionary leaders, but they had one great unifying purpose—freedom from Red tyranny. Momentously, the weight and voice of the German masses was coming into play in the battle between East and West. There was enough mass power in the Berlin throng to change the fate of Europe.

Generalissimo Winter. "Even Hitler didn't get crowds like this," I heard a grey little man in shirtsleeves murmur to his friend. Indeed, it was a crowd worthy of this highest German superlative. The 300,000 blanketed the whole rubble-strewn area before the Reichstag, choked every path through the Tiergarten, stood in neat, tight ranks between rows of planted cabbages in the little garden plots. A hot sun beat on the crowd; the air was heavy with sweat and whirls of dust from the sandy earth and the odor of cheap tobacco. A seven-year-old girl whimpered against her father's shoulder. He muttered to someone near him: "Why shouldn't she be here? These are historic hours. We're going to see freedom either reborn or reburied."

That was the way the people's leaders felt this day, too. They had few original phrases to add to what had been said often before. But the words had a new and bolder meaning, and the people cheered. Said Ernst Reuter simply: "He who surrenders Berlin surrenders a world, surrenders himself." Gustav Pietch, railroad labor leader, bellowed hoarsely: "The blockade has failed, and now the Communists can only wait for the help of General Hunger and Generalissimo—" (here he paused long enough for the crowd to expect to hear "Stalin") "—Winter." Pietch concluded: "Again they will fail!" And the crowd roared its assent.

The climax came when Social Democratic Leader Franz Neumann asked the crowd's approval to carry a memorandum to the Western powers documenting the tyranny and police methods of the Soviet. The hundreds of thousands of arms went up in approval as they cried "Freiheit!" in a mighty roar. Neumann rode on the crowd's shoulders as he tightly clasped the typewritten sheets of his memorandum in one arm and a bouquet of red roses in the other. Slowly the crowd began to melt back into the ruins from which it had come. Loudspeakers blared Wagner's Overture to Tannhäuser.

A Stamped Foot. This was the prelude to trouble. No one expected it, no one planned it. It flared in one spot, subsided, flared again blocks away, finally burned itself out in two hours.