18. The uprising remained little known outside Germany and the Soviet Union
Although newspapers and radio broadcasts reported the June uprising in the west as it occurred, it received little follow-up coverage. The Soviet Union immediately quashed reports of the events in the Eastern Bloc, downplaying their significance. Both the BBC and the Voice of America broadcast reports of the events in East Berlin and elsewhere in Germany. The Soviet Union began jamming broadcasts into the Eastern Bloc in 1949, and the reports that did reach Eastern Europe were countered with their own propaganda machine. Nonetheless, reports of the events did cause considerable concern and embarrassment for the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev. They revealed the so-called workers’ paradise was not the idyllic state they claimed it to be. Soviet propaganda blamed the uprising on foreign agitators.
The remains of Nazism received some of the blame as well. In several sites across the GDR, Soviet and East German symbols and banners were vandalized during the protests. In many cases, they were defaced with swastikas and other Nazi symbols and slogans. Several Soviet propagandists claimed the uprising had been fostered by the last vestiges of Nazism in Germany. The Soviet and East German response had been to quash those last remnants. At the time of the uprising in June, the Soviet Union still held German prisoners of war, who were used as forced labor. At least 85,000 German prisoners remained in Soviet hands in 1953, in part justified by the Soviets by the belief they had not been de-Nazified. Not until 1955 was Konrad Adenauer able to negotiate the release of the remaining German PoWs held in the Soviet Union.