Western German reservations about Berlin notwithstanding, by spring 1949 the Allied airlift had become so successful that it seemed capable of going on forever. The preparations for a West German state were also proceeding apace, with the drafting of a Basic Law, or constitution, in May. Another epochal creation, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was formalized in April. Short of going to war, there was little that the Soviets could do to impede these developments. They had blockaded Berlin partly to strengthen their hand in the tough poker contest over Germany that they were playing with their former partners; now they were dealing themselves out of the game.
The Western powers, moreover, were putting pressure on the Russians through a painful counterblockade of their own. They blocked shipments of crucial raw materials and manufactured goods from the western zones to the east. In addition to hard coal from the Ruhr, they prevented the Soviet zone from receiving key items like electrical motors, diamond drills, and optical equipment. The losses were all the more grievous because the economy in the Russian zone was in terrible shape due to the earlier pillaging and ongoing mismanagement by Sowjetische Aktiengesellschaften—Soviet-controlled companies known by their apt acronym, SAGS.
Obviously this was not what the Soviets had intended when they launched their blockade, and therefore they decided to bargain. In March 1949, their delegate to the United Nations Security Council, Yakov Malik, began meeting secretly with his American counterpart, Philip Jessup. After lengthy negotiations, the Soviets agreed to lift their blockade if the West consented to hold a Council of Foreign Ministers meeting on Germany some time in the spring. When this deal was announced in early May, many Berliners remained skeptical, fearing a Russian trick. But at one minute after midnight on May 12, 1949, all the lights finally came on in Berlin for the first time in eleven months, and the trains started rolling again between Berlin and western Germany.
Berliners were understandably relieved when the blockade ended. People paraded through the streets, cheering as garland-bedecked trucks entered the city. But the relief was mixed with anxiety. Everyone knew that the Soviets could cut the place off again if they chose to. To drive this point home, the East German newspaper
Even before the blockade was lifted, Berlin was effectively split into two sections, with each part increasingly taking on its own character. As of August 1948, the city had two separate police forces. This came about because Police Chief Markgraf, the Soviet appointee, had begun ordering his men to arrest and even to beat up political opponents everywhere in Berlin, including in the western sectors. In response, the Western powers sanctioned a new police force for their half of the city; many of its members were refugees from Markgraf’s force. The Berlin city council also split apart. SED thugs had begun harassing Social Democratic delegates when they tried to attend council meetings at the Red City Hall in the eastern sector. Fed up, non-Communist representatives began meeting at the Technical University in the British sector. Later they would switch to the City Hall in the borough of Schöneberg, which became the seat of West Berlin’s city government. SED loyalists not only continued to meet in the East, but elected their own mayor, Friedrich Ebert, son of the Weimar president. (Having in his day hated the Communists, Ebert senior would not have been pleased by this development.) The former Reich capital did not yet have a wall running through it, but for all practical purposes it was now a divided city, the most prominent urban casualty of the Cold War.
Division
On May 23, 1949, the West German
