ABSTRACT
The uprising of workers in the German Democratic Republic, which broke out on 16 June 1953, was completely different in character and origin from the revolt against Moscow by the Communists in Yugoslavia. On that morning several hundred building workers at a block of flats in the Stalin-Allee in the Soviet Zone of Berlin stopped work in protest against the raising of the work norm, decreed by the government a few weeks earlier. On the following day, 17 June, the workers in most of the bigger industrial centres of East Germany came out in support of a general strike; in Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Jena, Rostock, Chemnitz and Gorlitz. The uprising evoked the most profound sympathies throughout the Socialist world. The congress of the Socialist International, meeting in Stockholm one month after the events in Berlin, sent fraternal greetings to the workers in the Soviet Zone of Germany. 'They dared,' the resolution stated, 'to rise against a totalitarian régime.
