Leon Uris by Armageddon

Author:Armageddon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780440102908
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1964-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

A SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE Kommandatura worked with the Germans to update the 1920 Constitution of the city. The Berlin Assembly, the lawmakers, would consist of 130 members voted from the twenty boroughs.

The Assembly, in turn, would select an Oberburgermeister and two deputy mayors to be approved by the Kommandatura.

The Magistrat, the executive branch, held eighteen civic departments running the functions of police, transportation, welfare, education, and the like.

As the Constitution neared completion it would signal a city-wide election for a new Assembly.

This election was pondered broadly by the commissars, for the Communist Party in Austria had been soundly beaten in an open election and they were not looking forward to a repetition in Berlin.

Rudi Wöhlman felt that, with his control of the labor union and the propaganda apparatus, and with Communists already imbedded in the government, a victory was sure. Furthermore, the People’s Proletariat Party were the true anti-Fascists and would be accepted as the way to redemption by choice of the German people.

Heinrich Hirsch was not so certain. The opposition Democrats had come out of the war the strongest and by sheer weight of numbers had the most people working in the Magistrat and could control the new Assembly. Some of the Democrats could be frightened, bought, bent, terrorized ... but not Ulrich Falkenstein. How deeply did Falkenstein’s influence run with the people?

As both Constitution and election grew imminent, V. V. Azov received instructions from the planners in Moscow: UNIFY ALL POLITICAL PARTIES IN BERLIN INTO A SINGLE ANTI-FASCIST FRONT WITHOUT DELAY.

They were calling for a textbook maneuver to swallow the other parties.

There were three free parties in Berlin. The Christian Party was a religious front, Catholic-dominated. Its main strength was in western Germany along the Rhine, and in Bavaria.

The smallest of the parties was the Conservatives, who represented right-of-center businessmen’s ideology.

Ulrich Falkenstein’s Democrats were the plum and the target. Berlin was traditionally a labor city and the Democrats their political arm; Berlin, furthermore, was the Democratic stronghold of Germany.

Wöhlman decided to lop off the Democrats first, leaving the other opposition stripped. A meeting between the two executive committees was arranged in the office of Berthold Hollweg, the appointed Democratic Oberburgermeister who was also on the Democrat’s Executive. Hollweg was weak, but still earned a good name and the Democratic tag. It was widely known that the Communists who flanked him—Heinz Eck, first deputy, and Adolph Schatz, president of police—held the true power of his office.

The third member of the Democratic Executive was Hanna Kirchner, a grandmother and the leading woman politician in all of Germany. She had fled to Sweden early in the Nazi era, kept a liaison with the first cousins of the German Democrats, the British Labor Party, and the Social Democrats around Europe. During the war she worked for the International Red Cross.

The Communist/People’s Proletariat Executive consisted of Rudi Wöhlman, Heinrich Hirsch, Deputy Mayor Heinz Eck. The fourth man was there for no other purpose than a naked display of police terror. He was Adolph Schatz.

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