European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - June 17, 1988, Darmstadt, Hesse Friday. June 17, 1968 the stars and stripes Page 3 tanks silenced cry for Freedom unarmed Freedom starved East germans were no match for the might of the soviet military. Above left soviet tanks rumble Dawn an ens Berlin Street. Above red army soldiers form a Tine against demonstrators. Left with paving stones As their Only weapons two rioters face off against a soviet tank. Uprising from Page 1 prison where i helped free the people the Day be martial Law had been ii fled. Roemer Gal life imprisonment instead. On Berlin s Potsdam or Platz just cast of the Demar cation line Between the British and soviet sectors throngs of Rock throwing workers scattered As soviet tanks moved into the crowd to re establish their 8 year old Hegemony. Eight years later the erection of the Berlin Wall would staunch the devastating flow of refugees from East to West and put an end to the battered myth of an undivided City. It also would spell the end of Potsdam or Plata a Cornier Center of the City. Today Streetcar tracks and cobblestones arc All that remain of the Square that sits in the no Man s Jand Between two Concrete Walls. Nonetheless it remains a popular tourist Stop. Protest is again in Vogue at least on the Western Side where squatters set up Camp to protest development plans for a Swath of territory recently ceded to West Berlin. East Berlin guards occasionally place lad Ders against the 13-foot-High Wall to peer Over at the protesters. There was no Wall to prevent a group of workers from going to a radio station in West Berlin in 1553 to plead that their Call for a general strike in East Germany be broadcast. It was t. Four Power confrontations in Berlin such As the 1948 Airlift to Supply the Western sectors of the City and earlier creation of separate currencies in the City already had supplied the ground Rule for the cold War protect your own there also was the problem of identifying what the june 17 uprising was and who was behind it. We did t have any strategists said Rainer Hilde Brandt 73, gatherer of an Oral history of the june 17 movement and director of the Haus am checkpoint Charlie museum. We were without the Western Media according to Hildebrandt Only wrote that there was trouble but no one wrote what it was All the . Radio station in Ber Lin r1as, confined itself to broadcasting situation re ports Hildebrandt said. Trouble had been brewing for months but it came to a head on june 16, when construction workers Busy on a showpiece Complex of massive apartment build Ings on East Berlin s former Stalin Alice Laid Down their tools and marched to the seat of government. About 5,000 Strong they gathered in front of the build ing. Among their demands were free elections repeal of the new work quotas and release of German prison ers of War still held in Russia. The crowd dispersed and agreed to meet the next Day. Meanwhile the russians prepared to Send troops into East Berlin and other cities. According to Roemer word of the consensus general strike reached Magde Burg nearly 100 Miles from Berlin by bicycle relay. On june 17 the workers marched. So did the soviet troops. It was no match. Order quickly was re established and Roemer found himself in jail the next Day. He was to spend the next 11 years in prison before he was expatriated under a political prisoner buy out program funded by West Germany. Roemer has inc Turcato groups in the Haus am checkpoint Charlie museum for More than two decades. He theorizes that his harsh sentence partly stemmed from the fact of his West German origin. The official version of the uprising was that Western instigators were behind it. Roemer says he was just one of 60,000 people who look to the streets of Magdeburg that Day. And when the russians stepped in according to Hildebrand it put East Germany Back in the Stone age. Soviet dicta Tor Joseph Stalin had died in March of 1953, and Mil Debrandt said the fortunes of one of his chief disciples East German Leader Walter Ulbricht were on the de Cline. Bui the state had to stand fast under the onslaught of the first mass uprising in a soviet occupied country. Ulbricht remained. His doctrinaire Brand of Cornu Nisim would endure for almost another two decades despite the brutal swiftness with which German uprising ended it was not to be the last in a soviet occupied country. The 17th of june was Only one Day Hildebrand began a chronology. The hungarian revolution six Days. Prague Spring was four months of Freedom and then Solias Ruosch brought i i years of perhaps it is a Mark of Honor to be first but As West germans Mark the Day of German Unity it is the spirit not the flesh they commemorate. Just ask Gerhard Roemer. In the 35 years since the uprising he has received permission to Sec his Daugh ters Only three times
