In May 1951, the Hamburger Freie Presse published an article on the alleged experiences of Hans Schmidt, an East German police officer (Volkspolizist) who had sought to register earlier that year for political asylum in West Berlin. The newspaper profile followed the twenty-one-year-old Schmidt from his unit's barracks in the northern city of Rostock, across the still undefended border between Brandenburg and West Berlin, to a police station in the northwestern district of Spandau, where he announced his intention to flee to West Germany.
After a night in a jail cell—no other accommodation was available—Schmidt took a bus to 8 Kuno-Fischer-Straße, the location of West Berlin's Central Refugee Office, where he registered with the refugee service and requested asylum in West Berlin. Several interviews with representatives of various Allied intelligence agencies followed, during which he provided information about his weapons training, details on the strength of his police unit, and a sketch of the unit's barracks; he later learned that revealing this information would not improve his chances for recognition as a refugee. Schmidt's application for asylum was ultimately rejected, as were the applications made by more than half of those who had fled East Germany between 1949 and 1951. The refugee commission that heard his case ruled that neither his life nor his freedom had been in danger before his arrival in West Berlin. According to the article in the Freie Presse, Schmidt further claimed that the commissioners had instructed him simply to recross the border and return to his unit in Rostock. Fearing imprisonment in East Germany, Schmidt chose instead to stay in West Berlin, even though he could not legally apply for a municipal residence or work permit. He claimed to have spent several weeks thereafter living in the basement bomb shelter of the Anhalter Bahnhof—Berlin's former central rail station, located in the no-man's land near the junction of the Soviet, American, and British zones of occupation—before moving into a refugee shelter operated by a charitable organization. The Freie Presse article, which closed by criticizing the West Berlin administration for creating a “social nobody” out of a “willing convert,” was reprinted in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and several other West German papers in the weeks that followed, prompting attempts by the press office of the West Berlin Senate to obtain more details on the case from the refugee office. The latter responded that no records of anyone named Hans Schmidt, Volkspolizist or otherwise, could be found in their files.Footnote 1
It remains unclear whether or not Schmidt actually existed. It is possible that his experiences were completely fictional, though they were similar to what one would have expected for a refugee in his position. Furthermore, a newspaper reporter would likely change such a protagonist's name and identifying details—“Hans Schmidt” would not have been a surprising choice as a pseudonym to represent an unidentified German male, and Rostock was a typical provincial East German city—and perhaps even embellish the original account of a single refugee for dramatic effect. Still, Schmidt's story was that of a typical refugee: young, male, and apparently unwilling to accede to the demands placed upon him by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). His misfortunes likely resonated with many inhabitants of West Berlin and West Germany; at the very least, they would not have been unfamiliar with refugees like Schmidt. Between the beginning of 1949 and the publication of the article in the spring of 1951, more than one hundred thousand East Germans had crossed the sector boundaries into West Berlin, seeking recognition from the municipal government as political refugees. They were part of a broader migration during the same period in which more than two hundred thousand East Germans had registered for asylum in West Germany; between 1952 and 1961, more than two million additional refugees followed, most via West Berlin.Footnote 2 From 1949 to February 1952, when West Berlin's refugee administration was finally integrated into the Federal Emergency Reception System (Notaufnahmeverfahren), more than 190,000 refugees had registered in the city, but only 70,000 of them were accepted as political refugees. Many of those rejected, “Hans Schmidt” among them, remained in the city as unauthorized residents, living in refugee camps or staying with family or friends, and occasionally finding unauthorized work.Footnote 3
In response to the crisis caused by the arrival of thousands of East German refugees, West Berlin's municipal administration tried to establish a standardized reception procedure to register, review, and care for these new arrivals. The influx was first handled by individual district offices and later by various combinations of municipal departments, including the Department of Social Affairs, the Department of Personnel and Administration, and the Department of the Interior. By the end of 1950, quasi-independent West Berlin had not only established its own Refugee Office to provide for the newcomers, but also set up commissions to determine if those seeking asylum had fled East Germany on political grounds and could therefore remain in the city as recognized refugees. Despite their clear mission, these institutions were reluctant participants in the reception process: having been created in response to the demands of public opinion, elected officials, and occupation authorities, they were slow to react to the increasing numbers arriving from East Germany in 1950 and 1951. Peter Gatrell's study on refugees in the twentieth century refers to the “durable solutions” sought by international agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in addressing the postwar refugee crises; in West Berlin, the proposed solutions were anything but durable.Footnote 4
The West Berlin Refugee Office's unenthusiastic involvement in the reception process both reflected and perpetuated the bureaucratic confusion that had engulfed Germany at the end of World War II. As constituted in 1949 and 1950, West Berlin was a provisional state. While awaiting a peace treaty that would officially end the war, the city had been placed under four-power occupation, with separate zones assigned to the Soviets, the British, the French, and the Americans. Self-government returned slowly, first at the district level, and later for the city as a whole; the municipal administration split in late 1948 into eastern and western halves, however, leading to its eventual division into two separate political entities in 1949. The Western Allies maintained veto power over the political status of their occupation sectors, and what would become West Berlin was not allowed to join the Federal Republic of Germany when that state was established in May 1949. When West Berlin's representative assembly approved a newly drafted constitution in August 1950 that tried to force the issue—by including sections that referred to the city as a West German Land and extended the Grundgesetz, the West German constitution, to West Berlin—the Western Allies suspended those sections of the city's constitution while allowing the remainder to go into effect.Footnote 5 Throughout this period, West Berliners and West Germans continued to assume that the division of Berlin—and of Germany itself—was a temporary aberration, and that East German refugees would simply choose to return to their original homes following the expected reunification.Footnote 6 The municipal administration of West Berlin and the federal government both conceded that some sort of refugee reception process was necessary for reasons of security and control; they also agreed that migrants who did not conform to a narrow definition of “political refugee” should be denied the benefits of asylum. But neither one was willing to lay the groundwork for a permanent—or at least durable—system of refugee reception and relief in the former capital city.
This ambiguity had a significant effect on the city's response to the social and legal problems posed by the arrival of refugees. Prior to the passage of the West Berlin constitution in the fall of 1950, no permanent laws could be passed to create a refugee bureaucracy. As a result, existing institutions—district residence offices, responsible for issuing residency permits, and district welfare offices, responsible for coordinating poverty relief and emergency housing for the homeless—took up the slack, straining their abilities to provide for the rest of the population's needs.Footnote 7 But even after the constitution was approved, the city's options for resettling refugees remained limited. In West Germany, refugees arriving in the registration centers in the towns of Giessen and Uelzen (in Hesse and Lower Saxony, respectively) were governed by the 1950 Federal Law for the Emergency Reception of Refugees (Notaufnahmegesetz). This was also intended to be a temporary measure (hence the term emergency); the West German Federal Ministry for Expellees took responsibility for the East German refugees and constructed a reception system that coordinated both registration at the federal level and the transfer of accepted refugees to the West German Länder for resettlement.
After August 1950, however, legislation passed by the West German Bundestag did not apply to West Berlin—unless the city's House of Representatives passed a separate law (known as a Mantelgesetz, or “covering” law) allowing the relevant federal legislation to take effect. Because West Berlin was not associated with the West German Ministry for Expellees between 1949 and early 1952, the West German Länder were not obligated to accept for resettlement those refugees granted asylum by the West Berlin authorities. As a result, even though the Länder had committed to taking 80 percent of the refugees accepted by West Berlin after 1949, fewer than 25 percent actually found their way to West Germany before 1952.Footnote 8 It was only after February 4, 1952, when the West Berlin Senate adopted the federal law that merged the city's refugee bureaucracy with the federal reception process, that the city's proportion of refugees to be transferred from the entire reception system (including from West Germany) was set at 4 percent.Footnote 9 Focusing only on the disposition of successful applicants for asylum ignores, however, the tens of thousands of refugees whose applications for asylum were rejected. Neither administration wanted to deport unsuccessful applicants back to East Germany, since this would have effectively conceded legitimacy and sovereignty to the GDR. Refugees could thus only return home of their own volition.Footnote 10 The ambivalence of the West Berliners and West Germans (as well as the Western Allies) toward the refugees also contributed to their insecure status: while administration officials and media outlets welcomed anyone fleeing the communist government of East Germany, often praising them for “voting with their feet” and asking for more discretion in cases such as that of Volkspolizist Schmidt, they routinely lamented the cost of refugee relief, watched West Berlin's unemployment rate climb, and worried that the influx of refugees included East German and Soviet spies, saboteurs, and criminals.Footnote 11
The Rhetoric of Rejection and Acceptance
While the particulars of the reception process differed, the primary goals in both West Berlin and West Germany remained the same: to maintain the highest possible degree of control over refugee migration through registration, categorization, and limited approval; to force potential refugees to consider carefully their decision to leave East Germany; and to demonstrate to the broader population in both West Berlin and West Germany that the authorities would not allow the refugee situation—or crisis, as it was often considered at the time—to become unmanageable. In part, they accomplished these goals by setting out explicit guidelines defining the term political refugee. By the terms of the West German law establishing the Emergency Reception Procedure, recognition would be granted to those who fled East Germany on “political grounds, especially on account of danger to life and limb or for personal freedom”—i.e., prosecution under laws pertaining to political activity, followed by imprisonment, torture, or possible execution. Other fears, such as that of military conscription, were less likely to be considered acceptable, though some exceptions were made for other compelling reasons, including persecution of family members or close colleagues.Footnote 12 West Berlin's Law for the Recognition of Political Refugees, passed a few weeks after the federal law, omitted the “other compelling grounds” exception, however, which gave the city's refugee commissions less leeway for deciding asylum cases.Footnote 13 In both cases, the intention of this language was clear: to exclude refugees migrating purely for economic reasons, whether to seek higher-paying employment or to enjoy a better standard of living.Footnote 14
Few cases were unambiguous, of course: outside of the several thousand refugees who had indeed been threatened or imprisoned in East Germany for their political activities, most of the new arrivals' reasons for migration alternated between political disillusionment and the desire to find a better job and a nicer apartment in West Germany. The West German journalist Curt Riess, who interviewed a number of these refugees in 1951 and 1952, noted that even those who had displayed little interest in political opposition while living in East Germany still claimed to have fled for political reasons. To illustrate this point, Riess cited a man named Heinrich, a former watchman at the Bautzen Prison in Saxony who could not stomach the treatment of political prisoners, and another named Alfred, who had returned from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp only to find himself under suspicion for arguing with his superiors about conditions in the Soviet Union “that he had seen with his own eyes.”Footnote 15
During the first few years of the reception process, the threat of rejection was primarily intended as a way to deter prospective refugees. Jobs and housing were still in short supply in most areas of West Germany, and conditions in West Berlin were significantly worse: the city's unemployment rate in the early 1950s exceeded 25 percent—without counting the unrecognized refugees.Footnote 16 In February 1951, the Federal Ministry for Expellees (renamed the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War Victims in 1953 to emphasize the importance of the East German refugees and to support the claim that this migration represented another after-effect of the war) circulated an information sheet to the reception camps and refugee advisory organizations in both West Berlin and West Germany that spelled out its stance on claims of economic hardship: “Economic grounds, without accompanying personal danger, will without exception not be considered as grounds for acceptance.” The guide also cited the long and difficult reception process, as well as the low percentage of applicants eventually accepted, as reasons for prospective refugees to think twice about seeking admission to West Berlin or West Germany on political grounds.Footnote 17 The ministry clearly intended to dissuade the majority of refugees from going through with the registration process; the main goal was to return as many potential asylum seekers as possible to their homes in East Germany.
Individuals not deterred from pursuing refugee status on political grounds could also visit one of several Beratungsstellen (counseling centers) in West Berlin operated by refugee organizations and staffed by former refugees with legal training. Some of these groups took the mission of deterring refugees very seriously: in November 1950, the leader of one refugee organization, the Association of Victims of Stalinism (Vereinigung der Opfer des Stalinismus, or VOS), wrote a letter to the Federal Minister for All-German Affairs, Jakob Kaiser, in which he bragged that in just the previous eight weeks, his group had been responsible for convincing one hundred prospective refugees—presumably, those who did not match his particular definition of “political” refugee—to return to their homes in East Germany.Footnote 18 Given that this number represented fewer than 2 percent of the refugees who had registered in West Berlin during those two months, the staff in these offices did not seem to provide an effective deterrent.
The distinction between political and economic claims for asylum had an impact on the language used to describe the refugees in both internal bureaucratic documents and the media. Despite attempts to limit the use of the word “refugee” (Flüchtlinge) to those who had fled East Germany for political reasons, the term gradually took on broader meaning, eventually replacing “in-migrant” (Zuwanderer) as the preferred term for all newcomers from East Germany. In German media and administrative use, terms that quickly fell out of favor included “inmates” (Insassen)—i.e., of the refugee camps—or “migrant homeless” (zugewanderte Obdachlose), both of which would have likely reinforced perceptions of migrant criminality or the need for care and housing provided by the state.Footnote 19 By 1951, the generally accepted categories of “recognized” and “not-recognized refugees” (anerkannte and nicht anerkannte Flüchtlinge) were predominant, with the latter description occasionally replaced by “rejected refugees” (abgelehnte Flüchtlinge). Of course, as German citizens residing in West Germany and West Berlin, neither group qualified for official refugee status under most international legal definitions, including the 1946 constitution of the International Refugee Organization and the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. However, this legal distinction was overlooked by all but a few commentators—including the first High Commissioner for Refugees, Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart—and was rendered moot by the official definition of “Soviet Zone refugee” (Sowjetzonenflüchtlinge) as a specific legal category in the Federal Expellee Law (Bundesvertriebenengesetz) of 1953.Footnote 20 On rare occasions, new refugees were referred to as “border-crossers” (Grenzgänger), but this term was generally reserved for those Berliners who lived (legally) on one side of the demarcation line and worked on the other.Footnote 21 Official sources sometimes referred to not-recognized refugees as “illegal in-migrants” (illegale Zuwanderer) or “illegal border-crossers” (illegale Grenzgänger), in order to reserve the term Flüchtling for the “true”—and thus acceptable—political refugees who were likely to be granted asylum. This construction, in turn, was often shortened to “illegals” (Illegalen) in newspaper headlines and colloquial formats.Footnote 22 The term illegal conveyed a degree of negativity that went far beyond the proper and more precise term—“not-recognized”—in reference to refugees; the reception laws did not prohibit migration, even without registration. But the continued reference to not-recognized refugees as “illegals” reinforced the popular view that many were, in fact, criminals, “asocials,” or potential Soviet agents, or that they were active on the black markets.Footnote 23 In the words of Heinrich Vockel, who served as the West German representative in West Berlin in the early 1950s, the not-recognized East German refugees “live in ruins, occupy themselves with smuggling and the black market in all sorts of dark places, jeopardize the safety of the population, [and] spread disease and vice of all kinds.”Footnote 24
The Development of the Reception Process in West Berlin, 1948–1952
Before 1949, under the terms of the Allied occupation, residents of the Soviet Zone and Soviet sector of Berlin could travel freely into the western sectors of Berlin, but they needed the permission of the occupation authorities to move permanently between sectors. Unanimous agreement by representatives from all four occupiers was a prerequisite for such permission, which meant that it was granted only in exceptional cases. Notwithstanding the seemingly strict rules, such movements were difficult to control, and the occupation authorities relied on district residence offices (Bezirkswohnungsämter)—responsible for issuing moving and residence permits (Zuzugsgenehmigungen and Aufenthaltserlaubnisse) to anyone moving within and between districts, and for maintaining registers of local residents—to help enforce their regulations. Only after the de facto division of Berlin in the fall of 1948, during the Soviet blockade of the western sectors, did West Berlin's district residence offices establish a routine policy of questioning East Berliners applying for residence permits; the queries focused on the crossers' political motives for moving from East to West Berlin, and their answers determined whether district residence officials would consider classifying them as political refugees.Footnote 25 There is some indication that the Western Allies tried to limit the number of crossers recognized as political refugees to 750 per month, but this is not reflected in available statistics.Footnote 26
There are no central records before the end of 1948 for the number of individuals moving to West Berlin as political refugees, but it seems that there were enough of them to elicit a response from the city's administration.Footnote 27 At the beginning of 1949, Marie Elisabeth Lüders, West Berlin's Magistrate for Social Affairs, authorized the creation of a refugee service (Flüchtlingsdienst) to provide for former residents of the Soviet Zone and Soviet sector of Berlin then living in the western sectors. Provisions were made under the authority of municipal welfare laws for the homeless dating from 1924, an ad hoc solution necessitated by the lack of an independent municipal administration.Footnote 28 Recognition—in this case the awarding of residence permits—remained at the discretion of officials in the district residence offices; there were no official criteria for granting or rejecting asylum beyond a concern for refugees who believed their lives were in danger for political reasons. Only on June 5, 1950, did Lüders's office finally establish explicit guidelines for the recognition of political refugees; these allowed district officials to interview refugees and grant them asylum if their lives or personal freedom were endangered by remaining in East Germany. Lüders's guidelines for acceptance specifically excluded refugees who cited “economic difficulties, criminal offenses, or ‘mild discomfort’ (gemütsmäßiges Unbehagen) as reasons for flight.”Footnote 29 These guidelines did not seem to have had a noticeable effect, however, on the number of refugees who were recognized as such. In 1949, the refugee service estimated that seventy thousand refugees had registered, but only thirty thousand of them—or just under 43 percent—were accepted as political refugees. The proportion barely changed the following year, when 26,776 of 62,152 arrivals were accepted as refugees, i.e., also roughly 43 percent.Footnote 30 It thus seems likely that the 1950 guidelines only codified the criteria already in use in the residence offices, and may have served merely as a way to prevent refugees from applying for asylum in multiple districts.
West Berlin's constitution was approved on August 4, 1950, and took effect on October 1 of that year. It reorganized the city administration: the mayor's cabinet was renamed the Senate; heads of departments, formerly called magistrates, were now referred to as senators; and the city assembly was renamed the House of Representatives (Abgeordnetenhaus).Footnote 31 The constitution also allowed the city to pass its own legislation, although this remained subject to veto by the occupation powers, still the supreme authority in the city. The Law for the Recognition of Political Refugees (Gesetz über die Anerkennung politischer Flüchtlinge) was part of the first set of laws passed in the fall of 1950, with the final vote held the day before the new constitution went into effect. Under this law, promulgated on October 11, 1950, the responsibility for screening incoming refugees was given to the Office of the Senator for the Interior, although responsibility for their welfare remained with the Office of the Senator for Social Affairs. Although West Berlin's Law for the Recognition of Political Refugees was based, in part, on the West German law that had established the Federal Emergency Reception Procedure (passed in Bonn on August 22, 1950), it was not a so-called Mantelgesetz that would have applied the terms of the West German law to West Berlin; the differences between the two laws proved crucial during the subsequent sixteen months.
In addition to the slightly different language concerning allowable reasons for leaving East Germany, the two laws set out somewhat different administrative paths. Both laws codified a reception procedure that included a medical exam and interviews with police and intelligence agencies, as well as the formation of committees tasked with interviewing refugees and making a judgment on their qualification for asylum. Those who were granted asylum would either be accepted into the resettlement program in West Germany—which entailed a second stay at a transit camp in a West German Land—or be given residence and work permits for West Berlin. The composition of these committees varied by location, and there were significant differences between those working in the West German refugee centers at Giessen and Uelzen and those in the Refugee Office in West Berlin. In the former, three-person committees were comprised of civil servants, employees of the Federal Ministry for Expellees, and often former refugees themselves; they were, at the very least, supposed to possess knowledge of the political conditions in East Germany, though this did not always guarantee impartiality. Committee members were subject to official vetting, however, and even though individual refugees occasionally complained about the decisions made by the committees, rejected refugees still had the opportunity to appeal the decision within fourteen days. Their cases would then be reheard before a five-member appeals committee, where they could restate their reasons for flight and request a reassessment of certain aspects of their case that the original committee may have overlooked. Around 20–30 percent of the appeals led to a reversal of the original rejection, but a second rejection at this stage in the process was final.Footnote 32
In West Berlin, by comparison, three-member refugee commissions reviewed the case of each individual or family applying for asylum and determined whether they were to be accepted or rejected under the city's reception law. Unlike the West German committees, the commissions were comprised of individuals nominated by the major political parties (i.e., the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, and the Free Democrats/Liberal Democrats) in proportion to the size of their fractions in the West Berlin House of Representatives, with at least two parties represented on every panel. No specific qualifications were required of any appointee, but a few had legal training and some were former residents of the Soviet Zone. Others appear to have been party activists with little experience of life in the Soviet Zone or East Germany. At any one time, the commissions had several dozen rotating members, each of whom drew a monthly salary of 300 DM or more (usually 15 DM per full day of work). Because of the political balancing act required to maintain the roster proportional to the size of the political fractions, the Department of the Interior, which was responsible for this part of the reception process, found it difficult to add and replace commissioners. In another departure from the West German system, West Berlin's refugee procedure lacked an appeals process: the commissions' decisions were final, and refugees were not given a second chance to make their case.Footnote 33
A much smaller percentage of refugees were accepted under the commissions, compared with the years 1949 and 1950, when the district residence offices, under the direction of the Magistrate for Social Affairs, had accepted around 43 percent of those requesting asylum. In 1951, the first (and only) full year under the new process, only 16,808 political refugees were accepted out of 60,975 arrivals, i.e., fewer than 28 percent.Footnote 34 This decrease was undoubtedly related to the shift from conducting refugee interviews at district residence offices to the centralized commissions. It is also likely that a renewed commitment to dissuading refugees played a role in the decrease. But despite their ability to pare down the number of requests for asylum, the commissions soon wore out their welcome: officials within the Department of Social Affairs, who were responsible for the welfare of the refugees, began to raise doubts about whether the process was fair and objective, and whether the personal histories of the commissioners should disqualify them from the job. Several were allegedly former members of the Nazi Party, and at least one was accused of avoiding the denazification process altogether. Others—particularly those who were refugees from East Berlin and, as political activists, often former members of the eastern branches of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) or the Social Democratic Party (SPD)—were accused of having ties to the communist administrations in the East.Footnote 35 The commissions also proved unable to adjust quickly to the increasing numbers of refugees. After starting with nine active commissions in the fall of 1950, new commissioners were added until, by January 1952, there were fifteen commissions meeting daily, with several substitutes ready to step in when needed. Each increase in the number of available commissioners required new appointments, in the proper political proportions, by the House of Representatives. Adding members was thus a slow, politically charged process that required negotiations within the administration to ensure that the proportions did not change and that panels were constituted fairly—at least from the perspective of the political parties. Because of this, hearings for refugees in West Berlin were often postponed numerous times.Footnote 36
The Laufzettel
Appearing before the refugee commissions and awaiting their judgment was only a small, if crucially important, part of the refugees' path through the reception process. Depending on the volume of new arrivals, it took nearly two weeks (and occasionally much longer) for refugees to proceed from their initial registration to hearing the committee's decision. Unlike the West German reception offices, which were consolidated in refugee camps in smaller towns near the border, West Berlin's Refugee Office and related services occupied several different buildings in the districts of Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf; moreover, the residential quarters available for refugees were scattered around the city. This made the newcomers' task in West Berlin significantly more complicated: after their initial registration in the main reception office at 8 Kuno-Fischer-Straße, deep in Charlottenburg, they were expected to travel to the proper offices in succession. As a small consolation, refugees were provided with free public transportation on West Berlin's subways, rail lines, and buses for the duration of their stay in the city; they could not use, however, Berlin's S-Bahn (urban light rail) system, which was operated by the East German government (even in the western sectors of the city) and patrolled by East German border guards.Footnote 37
This is where “Hans Schmidt,” the possibly apocryphal Volkspolizist from Rostock, would have entered West Berlin's reception system. After registering as an asylum seeker at the main reception office, he would have been provided with a Laufzettel, i.e., a fifteen-line card that would be stamped or signed by each separate office as he progressed through the system. After undergoing a medical exam in the basement of the same building, he would have traveled to nearby offices located at Kaiserdamm 85 and Fehrbelliner Platz, as well as on Meerscheidtstrasse and Bredtschneiderstrasse, to complete the card. As a German citizen who had already made his initial contact with West Berlin police, Schmidt would have been spared the first round of interviews, which separated out non-German refugees and those with criminal records. Around half of 1 percent of all refugees arriving in West Berlin were from other central and eastern European countries, and thus ineligible for welfare support from West Berlin or West Germany; they were generally transferred to the American “escapee” system.Footnote 38
Given the close quarters in the refugee camps and residences, the refugees' health was an area of primary concern, and the medical service was thus the first stop after their initial registration. This was the only segment of the entire reception process that was staffed twenty-four hours every day; even those refugees arriving late in the evening could be examined by a doctor working on one of three shifts before being assigned to a refugee camp for the night. Tuberculosis was the primary fear; refugees showing signs of that disease were immediately transferred to hospitals at Tegel-South or Heckeshorn to prevent them from infecting others. Refugees showing symptoms of other infectious diseases, or those with lice or scabies, were moved to a quarantine center; they could continue with the reception procedure only after being cleared and released. Entire families could be held up if one member failed the medical exam—a requirement that could add several weeks to their time in the reception system.Footnote 39 In addition, the medical exam was used to assess the health of former political prisoners who had been mistreated while incarcerated.Footnote 40 Refugees accepted for resettlement and intending to leave West Berlin also required a clean bill of health before they were allowed onto flights to West Germany; the city's district health offices were instructed to be vigilant about the possibility of individuals requesting forged or altered health certificates, especially those that labeled refugees as “able to fly” (flugfähig).Footnote 41
The medical examinations were a clear response to the potential outbreak of epidemics created by the dense concentration of people in mass quarters; the next step in the process—a gauntlet of interviews with security, political, and intelligence agencies, including those of the three Western occupiers—was a response to the Cold War situation in Germany. Occupation authorities required interviews for new arrivals who had spent more than three months in East Germany or another Soviet-controlled country; in practice, this meant that all incoming refugees had to report for security interviews. In West Berlin, refugees exiting the medical exam with a clean bill of health were bused directly to the Allies' security offices for such interviews. According to a contemporary account of the interview process, refugees' names were then checked against a master “blacklist” of individuals whose movements were to be restricted for political or security reasons. This list, maintained by the Combined Travel Board, which was comprised of representatives of the occupying powers, was revised, compiled, and distributed weekly to reception offices in West Berlin, the West German reception centers, and the refugee authorities in each individual West German Land.Footnote 42 This was an important part of the refugee registration process: fear of subversion and sabotage orchestrated by the Soviets and the East German government against West Berlin and West Germany was a constant theme in the West German press. The repetition of such charges produced popular support for the continuing registration and control of incoming refugees, even during later years, when acceptance rates approached 99 percent.Footnote 43
For the Allied occupation forces in West Germany, refugee interrogations and interviews also provided one of the few sources of intelligence on border defenses and conditions in East Germany and other communist states. All refugees were screened upon arrival, but only those deemed useful sources of intelligence—such as “Hans Schmidt,” who had supposedly told journalists that he had disclosed details about his training and police unit—received a more thorough debriefing. The West German government estimated that only 6 percent of refugees actually provided useful intelligence; but even such a small percentage meant a significant source of information, given that two hundred thousand refugees were interviewed between 1949 and 1952 alone.Footnote 44 In 1951, some American intelligence agencies, following the lead of U.S. Army Intelligence, tried to consolidate the existing system for interviewing recent border crossers. The refugees had previously been questioned in succession by several different units, including the CIA, Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), representatives of the High Commissioner, and the Military Police Customs Unit. This process, which could take several days, required refugees to repeat their stories many times. Under the new system, the first organization to interview a particular refugee—usually the military police—sent a report and an identification card to a central file so that other interested agencies could arrange subsequent interviews while the refugee remained in West Berlin. This change—and access to the central card file—applied only to American organizations, however; British, French, and West German investigations were carried out independently.Footnote 45
Since most refugees could not provide much information on intelligence issues, most spent little time speaking with the various intelligence agencies. It is telling that this was the one part of the process that did not appear on the official Laufzettel—though it seems that refugees were not given much of a choice regarding their participation. Most refugees continued on quickly to the screening office operated by the West Berlin police force. This step was intended to separate out potentially dangerous individuals, including possible agents and saboteurs, criminals fleeing “legitimate” prosecution in the German Democratic Republic, as well as individuals reregistering as refugees after having already returned once to East Germany. Refugees carrying identification papers issued by the GDR had to surrender them to the police; they were given a receipt in case they wished to retrieve them before returning to East Germany. Those with falsified papers or without identification went through a second and more thorough police screening.Footnote 46
Only after these security requirements were met—and this could take several days—were the refugees finally able to register with West Berlin's welfare service, which provided changes of clothing, allowances for food, assistance in locating family members, as well as an assignment to a specific refugee camp or residence for the remainder of the reception process. At this point, incoming refugees were also separated demographically: families with young children from those with older children or none at all, groups traveling together from individuals, single males from single females. Many of the refugee camps in West Berlin specialized in housing specific groups, e.g., “Hans Schmidt” would likely have found himself assigned to a residence with other unmarried men. Unaccompanied minors, and occasionally youths as old as twenty-four, were often sent directly back to East Germany; they were considered too young to be truly fleeing political persecution, and it was generally believed that they were merely looking for an adventure.Footnote 47 In 1951 and 1952, however, press reports from the refugee camps indicated that many of these youths were fleeing conscription into the East German police forces and labor service (most feared was an assignment to the Wismut uranium mines near Aue in Saxony).Footnote 48 The ensuing public outcry forced a change in policy: minors began to be segregated by gender in special camps until they could find apprenticeships. In later years, they would be flown directly to West Germany to undergo the reception process there.Footnote 49
In early February 1952, when responsibility was transferred from municipal to federal control, the forty-seven separate camps that made up the West Berlin refugee service comprised some six thousand individual places for refugees. These were not refugee camps in the traditional sense—most were situated in disused commercial and industrial buildings, whereas smaller residences might occupy one or two floors of an apartment building—but they were just as crowded. It was common for two families to share a single room in an apartment, while individual refugees were accommodated in the large, barracks-like rooms of former warehouses, depots, and factories. Some of these camps were operated directly by the city, including a former garage for street sweepers on Erlangerstraße in Neukölln that was converted, at a cost of nearly 50,000 DM, to house 250 refugees.Footnote 50 Others were operated by charitable organizations like the German Red Cross of Berlin, which operated several camps, many like the one that occupied several floors of an apartment building at Alt-Moabit 126 (across the street from the Moabit prison in Wedding), which housed three hundred refugees in forty rooms; or like religious foundations such as the Catholic Caritas and the Protestant Evangelisches Hilfswerk. Still others were operated by private citizens, paid by the city per refugee: Seebad Mariendorf, a former suburban resort, was run by property owner Margarete Hilgner and had 456 beds in 12 rooms, the largest of which could house 80 people.Footnote 51
Refugees living in the camps and going through the reception process were not allowed to take other jobs or live on their own, but they did draw a small allowance. In West Berlin, the municipal authorities issued 5 DM every month to unmarried refugees living in the camps, and 8 DM to married couples. Dependent children also received a monthly allowance: 3 DM if over the age of sixteen, 1 DM if under. Families were limited to 12 DM per month altogether, but this did not include the additional support given for food, housing expenses for those in private camps, and other allowances, all of which could add up to as much as 90 DM per person every month.Footnote 52 Refugees were issued a work permit only after they had been granted asylum and assigned to West Berlin, a status that allowed them officially to seek employment in the city. This left the rejected refugees, as well as those whose path through the reception process had been delayed (e.g., by the illness of a family member) with few sources of income; some—the Department of Labor and Social Affairs estimated around ten thousand—worked in temporary or undocumented positions, mostly in the construction trades, a practice referred to as “black labor” (Schwarzarbeit).Footnote 53
West Berlin's reception process culminated with a hearing before one of the refugee commissions. Refugees submitted written statements in advance, laying out their reasons for fleeing East Germany and requesting asylum in West Berlin. Commissioners could review these statements and use them to question refugees during hearings that lasted twenty to thirty minutes; if at least two of the three commissioners agreed that the refugee's motives for crossing the border were sufficiently political in nature, he or she would be granted asylum.Footnote 54 Of those accepted as refugees, around 20,000 (of 70,000 altogether) subsequently left for resettlement in West Germany, even though the city had negotiated for the West German Länder to take 80 percent (i.e., approximately 56,000). Those who remained in West Berlin received residence and work permits, but they were not guaranteed employment. Viable housing was in short supply, especially for these legal newcomers, and the city's unemployment rate was much higher than that of West Germany.Footnote 55 Regardless of their destination, many refugees continued to live in residential camps for several months. West Berlin, like many West German cities, was only beginning to rebuild areas destroyed during the war, and vacant apartments were consequently rare. Of the 120,000 who were not granted asylum, some 20,000 likely returned to East Germany and about half as many traveled illegally to West Germany, where more employers were willing to overlook their status and lack of an employment permit. Most of the rest stayed in West Berlin's refugee camps; they could no longer claim the special welfare benefits given to recognized refugees and those going through the reception process, but could still rely on other forms of municipal welfare, including food assistance and a small monthly allowance, less than the amount given to those who were still awaiting a decision on their applications.Footnote 56
Some of the unrecognized refugees chose to leave the camps, however, and this was one particular aspect of Hans Schmidt's story that rang true. In January 1951, a group of unnamed refugees living in the former bomb shelter under the Anhalter Bahnhof sent a proposal to Willy Kressmann, the district mayor of Kreuzberg. Having been rejected by the commissions, these refugees were unable to reside and work legally in West Berlin. Asserting that other refugees might have turned to criminal activity, they said that they preferred instead “to earn their salaries in a fair manner (auf ordentlichem Wege),” and thus offered their services to Kressmann (and, by extension, to the rest of the West Berlin administration) as manual laborers, doing the “necessary work of rubble-clearing” in exchange for food, decent accommodations, and a chance to earn a legal place in West Berlin. Through this bargain, they hoped to demonstrate their willingness to turn their backs on their previously “unregulated” (ungeregeltes) lives and aspire to a more normal working existence that included regular work.Footnote 57 No response from Kressmann was recorded, but the refugees' account is reminiscent of Hans Schmidt's alleged experiences.
West Berlin's experiment with independent refugee relief barely lasted into the following year. An amended version of the West German law establishing the Emergency Reception Procedure was passed by the Bundestag in July 1951; it adjusted the previous year's law by redistributing the financial burden of caring for refugees between West Germany and West Berlin, and, under a merged relief program, by reducing the percentage of refugees that would be West Berlin's responsibility. This allowed West Berlin to adopt the West German system, and on December 21, 1951, the House of Representatives approved the relevant Mantelgesetz. Refugees arriving after February 4, 1952, would be the responsibility of the Federal Ministry for Expellees, and the refugee commissions—reluctant institutions to the last—were to be disbanded. The federal procedure was still provisional in nature, but it at least promised better immediate results.
This ended up being a fortunate shift for the city because the increasing militarization of the inner-German border during the spring and summer of 1952 led the following fall to a spike in the number of people arriving in West Berlin. This was only a prelude to the refugee crisis of the following spring, however: forced collectivization of private farms and the raising of production quotas in factories, along with rumors that the authorities would soon close the border to West Berlin, convinced tens of thousands of East Germans to take their chances with the reception system in West Berlin. At the high point of this influx during the first six months of 1953, over 223,000 new refugees arrived in West Berlin, nearly twice the number of arrivals for the entire year of 1952. More than 4,000 refugees were registering every day.Footnote 58 This influx nearly destroyed the existing federal system for accepting and rejecting refugees, leading to the conscious redefinition at the federal level of what constituted “political motives” for flight, one based on the argument that “in a totalitarian state, everything is politicized.”Footnote 59 By March 1953, acceptance rates in West Berlin had climbed above 90 percent, dipping only briefly in 1954 but then remaining high for the rest of the decade. The refugee relief offices in West Berlin (federally run by this time) were merged in 1953 as well, and moved to a new facility at Marienfelde, located in the southern part of the city. This provided some semblance of permanence for the reception procedure, even though the designers of the camp intended it to be converted into public housing after the eventual reunification of the city.Footnote 60
Although federal law allowed newly unrecognized refugees in West Berlin to appeal the committees' decisions, those rejected under West Berlin's old system still had no recourse. For the next several years, they would continue to inhabit a legal gray area, unable to reregister under the federal law, unable to work, and unable to leave West Berlin. Only in 1954 would these refugees—or at least those deemed “safe” by municipal authorities, a category that did not include criminals or former members of the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED)—be allowed to request rescreening under the federal procedure.Footnote 61 As of 1956, only some 17,000 unrecognized refugees remained in West Berlin, out of perhaps 100,000 four years earlier; by 1958, only 250 were left.Footnote 62 Thus, nearly a decade after West Berlin's district offices had first started screening refugees to determine whether they deserved asylum, the last individuals whose applications had been rejected by the refugee commissions were finally allowed to legally call themselves Berliners.
Conclusion
The experience of West Berlin's municipal administration in setting up an independent refugee reception service is part of a larger story: the reception and resettlement of East German refugees in West Germany (and West Berlin) prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. This migration is often overlooked, lost between the arrival of around ten million expellees in 1944 and 1945 and the increasing numbers of foreign guest workers brought to West Germany after 1955. Narrowing the focus to West Berlin, with its particular political pressures, helps to emphasize the provisional nature of the asylum process as it was established between the late 1940s and early 1950s. It should be clear that there was little sense of a broader plan on the part of either the West Berlin administration or the federal government for dealing with this migration; from the federal ministries to the district residency offices, authorities nearly always preferred reactive, ad hoc measures to more durable and systematic solutions.
Though reactive—and, at times, confused—the reception process was still intended to be comprehensive and controlling. Registering for refugee status was nominally voluntary, but refugees could not receive residence or work permits in West Berlin or West Germany without being recognized as genuine refugees, i.e., as individuals (with or without their families) who had fled East Germany for clearly political—and thus, emphatically, not economic—reasons. They had no choice but to accept what amounted to a temporary detention, along with a series of interrogations and examinations intended to prove or disprove their stated reasons for fleeing East Germany, all of which culminated in an irreversible decision delivered by an often unsympathetic review commission. Such practices will sound familiar to those who study migration, but despite these refugees' status as German citizens—contrary to the notion that refugees are “stateless” by definition—they were treated no better than other migrants and asylum seekers in Germany in the decades after 1952.Footnote 63 The district newspaper Spandauer Volksblatt, one of the most consistently anti-refugee media outlets in West Berlin, considered rejected refugees like “Hans Schmidt” to be leading “a sort of shadowy existence, [posing] a social danger to the public.”Footnote 64 Schmidt may not have disagreed with the first half, but the implications of the second half no doubt weighed heavily on asylum seekers. This was the context in which Schmidt—whatever his true name, and whether he really existed—and his fellow refugees had sought to change their lives for the better by seeking asylum in West Berlin. That they thereby put their fates in the hands of the city's refugee commissions, which consigned them to several years of legal limbo, was an accident of time: had they arrived a year or so later, their applications for asylum would likely have found a more receptive, though by no means welcoming, audience in the committees of the Federal Emergency Reception Procedure.
