Bernd von Kostka Allied Museum
Berlin
Germany
The establishment of the military liaison missions goes back to the time of World War II. The plans for the subsequent occupation of Germany were discussed by the Allies – the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain - at that time. Article 2 of the Agreement on Control Machinery in Germany, laid the foundation for the missions in late 1944. It stated that each commander in chief of a zone of occupation would have attached military representatives, from each of the other zones of occupation, for liaison duties. This was an idea that made perfect sense from the point of view of the wartime alliance.
After the surrender and occupation of Germany in 1945, however, a good year passed by before the first bilateral agreement between Great Britain and the Soviet Union was concluded in September 1946. Bilateral agreements with the Americans and the French – the 4th occupation power in Germany - followed in April 1947. The members of these missions, 63 in total for all three western nations, had their mission houses located in Potsdam/GDR. Mission members would ideally be military ‘diplomats’ who would maintain contact and foster relations with the commanders-in-chief to whom they had been assigned.
However, the role of the military liaison missions soon changed with the beginning of the Cold War. Gathering intelligence in East German territory would be the most important task in the decades that followed. This was already the case in 1952 as top-secrets documents confirmed.
With the increasing importance of intelligence in the Cold War, the training of the small number of representatives each country was permitted to send to Potsdam had to be improved. Good knowledge of Russian or German was a priority. By the end of the 1950s, the three Western military missions in Potsdam were regarded as an outstanding and reliable early warning system for any possible surprise attack by the Soviet Union in Europe.
They were, so to speak, the eyes and ears of the Western powers in East Germany. For the purposes of their inspection tours, the three Western powers divided East Germany into three large operational areas A, B, and C. Each large area was allocated to a different Western power with each sending two teams to patrol its allocated area. This meant all three Western powers together had three ground teams and three air teams covering most of East Germany. Responsibility for the large areas A,B,C also switched once every few weeks. This system could only work if there was good cooperation between the three missions. They maintained telephone contact with one another almost daily and held meetings once a week to ensure they did not duplicate their efforts. Such exchange of military information could not be taken for granted, especially given that France withdrew from NATO in 1966. Yet this did not in any way impact on the bond of trust the Americans and British had developed with their French counterparts in Potsdam.
While on their inspection tours in East Germany, the members of the military liaison missions had to take notes and photos of any facts of military value. Where were units stationed? What was their strength? What equipment did they have? Were there any modifications to equipment that was already known to exist? Photographs of vehicles or aircraft were of particular interest, especially if they possessed new components. The pictures could then be sent to military specialists in the West for analysis. In some years more than 500.000 photos were taken from the mission members on their tours. There were other questions that were obviously important from a military standpoint. Were Soviet and East German ground troops on the move or was a member state of the Warsaw Pact conducting manoeuvres on East German soil?
This freedom of movement was increasingly restricted the more the missions undertook intelligence activities. Even at the outset, it had been stipulated that some areas, designated Permanent Restricted Areas (PRAs), would be out of bounds to mission personnel. The PRAs in East Germany covered approximately a quarter of the country. Also introduced were Temporary Restricted Areas (TRAs). The extent of these restricted areas varied over the decades, but it usually amounted to between 25 and 33 per cent of the total area of East Germany.
The inspection tours in East Germany were not at any stage without danger. East Germany, which gained no advantage whatsoever from the bilateral agreements between the Soviet Union and the Western powers, regarded the military liaison missions as ‘a thorn in the flesh’. East Germany does not have the power to prevent the reconnaissance tours. Therefore the East German State Security (Stasi) did everything possible to make their work more difficult. There were a large number of incidents in which mission vehicles were fired on or were damaged by roadblocks or detentions. In 1984 a French mission car was brutally rammed by a military truck and the French driver died. One year later a US Officer was shot in the GDR while he was inspecting a rural area.
The missions in Potsdam played a significant role during the years of the Cold War. They could legally obtain information on East German territory and could pass it on to Western military authorities and intelligence agencies. Yet the missions were also an instrument for defusing crises. Its members were able to gain an idea not only of what the potential enemy was up to but also of what he was not up to. Furthermore, the existence of the missions ensured the Western powers were in constant contact with the Soviet Union even in times of international crisis.