In Europe

Plan, and Stalin's paranoia increased by the week. The Cold War escalated.
    In West Germany the Americans began a new purge of the administrative system, directed this time not against Nazis, but against communists. In June 1948 the announcement was made that a parliamentary council would be set up, the start of a new and independent Germany under the leadership of the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, a man of unimpeachable reputation. At the same time, West Berlin and the area occupied by the Western Allies received a new currency: the Deutschmark.
    The Soviet Union reacted immediately: on 24 June, 1948, all connections to West Berlin – including water, gas and electricity – were cut off. The Soviet action ended in fiasco. The Americans and British, using the enormous logistical experience gained in the war, began a bold operation: the entire city, with its 2.5 million inhabitants, received all the crucial supplies it needed – including oil and coal – by means of an airlift. For almost a year, hundreds of Dakotas, C-47s and C-54s wended their way through a narrow air corridor. Thousands of pilots and air traffic controllers took part, and in May 1949 Stalin had no choice but to back down. He had not only suffered a political and strategic defeat, but he had also handed the Americans a fantastic propaganda opportunity. The Berlin blockade convinced the West Germans that they needed the Americans. After the
Luftbrücke
the Allies were no longer an occupying army, but welcome protectors. The blockade had far-reaching consequences for the Americans as well: rather than pull out of western Europe as planned, they decided to stay.
    During that same summer in 1948, Stalin decided to tighten his hold on the Soviet Union's satellite states. He may have been relatively powerless against the sovereign and popular Tito, but he still had a hold on thepatriotic leader of Poland. On 3 June, 1948, in the midst of the Yugoslavia crisis, Gomulka had poured oil on the flames by announcing in a speech that his own Polish communists had not been independent or patriotic enough in the 1930s. The nod towards the present situation could not have been clearer. Within two months, Gomulka had disappeared – for the time being – from the political arena.
    One year later it was Hungary's turn. On 30 May, 1949, the loyal communist and Spanish Civil War veteran László Rajk was arrested, along with seven other ‘conspirators’. He was horribly tortured, and during a show trial soon confessed that, working with American intelligence chief Allan W. Dulles, he had tried to set up a ‘bloodthirsty, fascist-patterned dictatorship’ in Hungary. He was hanged on 15 October, 1949, and succeeded by the grim Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi. In 1951, the secretary general of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slánský, was arrested and charged with a similar ‘conspiracy’.
    Slánský's trial – at the conclusion of which all the defendants were hanged – had a special twist to it: eleven of the fourteen suspects were Jewish. It was the starting sign for a new series of purges throughout the Eastern Bloc, a wave of terror with pronounced anti-Semitic characteristics. The excuse upon which it was originally based was reminiscent of the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934. This time it had to do with Andrei Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo and a hero of the siege of Leningrad, who had died of a heart failure in a party clinic in 1948. Immediately after his death, one of the female physicians there accused her Jewish colleagues of having neglected Zhdanov's ailment, and said that they were responsible for his death. At the time, the complaint had been dismissed.
    Four years later, in 1952, the dossier was retrieved from the shelves. In 1950, a man by the name of Ivan Varfolomeyer had been arrested in China; he had confessed – probably under duress – to his Russian interrogators that he worked for a group of American conspirators, led by President Truman, who were planning to blow up the Kremlin with nuclear missiles fired from one of the windows of the American embassy in Moscow. No one – except for Stalin – would ever have believed such a cock and bull story. He, however, made the Varfolomeyer affair the focal point of a new series of show trials intended to bring together all the loose ends: the American plot to destroy the Kremlin, the Zionist Jewishplot to infiltrate the party, and the Zionist physicians’ plot to