The plan might have worked had the SPD in the eastern zone accepted its assigned role, but the majority of the party refused to do so. Over the objections of the Soviet-chosen SPD leadership, rank-and-file Socialists insisted on putting the merger question to a secret vote, which resulted in a landslide victory for the opponents of fusion. Calling the referendum “irrelevant,” on April 21, 1946, the leaders of the KPD and eastern SPD went ahead and merged their two parties into the SED (Socialist Unity Party). The bond was sealed by a handshake between the Communist chief Wilhelm Pieck and the Socialist leader Otto Grotewohl. Recognizing this gesture as the headlock it really was, antimerger Socialists refused to join the “unity” group and recast the rump SPD as a rival to the SED. The old division of the German left that had grown out of the First World War and helped to weaken the Weimar Republic was now back in place, courtesy of Soviet bullying. Soon it would segue into the division of Germany and Berlin, with the two leftist parties on opposite sides of the fence.
The SED’s ineffectiveness as a political force in the former Reich capital became evident in the first municipal elections of the postwar era, on October 20, 1946. Despite extensive interference by the Soviets, including prohibitions on SPD meetings and publications in the eastern sector, the SED proved no match for its Socialist rival, winning only 19.8 percent of the vote compared to the Socialists’ 48.9 percent. The SED did badly even in the Soviet zone and in the working-class districts of the western sectors, where the KPD had once been strong. “The women of Berlin have decided against the Russian lovers,” said an SED member sarcastically.
As a result of the elections, the new municipal government that began meeting a month later was dominated by the SPD. The city assembly appointed the Socialist Otto Suhr as its chairman, while another Socialist, Otto Ostrowski, became postwar Berlin’s first Lord Mayor. However, because Ostrowski seemed too easily intimidated by the Russians, the
Rightly seeing Reuter’s appointment as a demonstration of municipal independence, the Soviets used their veto in the Kommandatura to squelch his selection. Louise Schröder stepped in as acting mayor and did a brilliant job at running the city in this difficult moment. Reuter, meanwhile, continued to oppose Communist policies from his position in the
Frustrated by their inability to control Berlin through their German marionettes, the Soviets sought to impose their will through repression and terror. In their own sector they heightened censorship and began arresting non-Communists, even members of the front organizations that they themselves had created. Some of the victims ended up in recently liberated Nazi concentration camps like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, which slipped almost seamlessly from one dictatorship into another. Hoping to evade the Soviet net, anti-Communist East Berliners began moving to the western sectors, but this was no guarantee of safety, for Russian secret policemen thought nothing of kidnapping people in broad daylight off streets in the West. George Clare reported:
[The Soviets] began to ‘take out’ political and human-rights activists who opposed them. It was all over in seconds. A car screeched to a sudden halt, hefty men jumped out, grabbed their victim, bundled him into their vehicle, and before those who witnessed it could comprehend what had happened, they were racing off in the direction of the Soviet sector. There, of course, such dramatics were unnecessary—people just disappeared.
