Berlin Wall: 20 Years Since Its Fall

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The Wall was the ultimate symbol of the East-West division during the Cold War. Many people do not realize that there was more than one Wall - the Berlin Wall surrounding West Berlin from East Germany and East Berlin and the Inner-German Wall between East Germany and West Germany. To understand the significance of the fall you must first understand what the Wall meant when it was up.

The Berlin Wall was built on August 13, 1961 by the Soviets and East Germans to keep the East Germans and other Eastern Bloc citizens from fleeing to the West. Prior to the Wall there was a huge "brain drain" that would have collapsed East Germany if it wasn't curbed - which wouldn't have been a bad thing in my mind.

There are those (me included) who believe the other Allies (the US, UK and France)were wrong when they stood-by and did nothing to prevent the Wall. On the one hand they (the other Allies) won in that the Soviets never took West Berlin, but they sold-out the ordinary East Germans (and those from the Eastern Bloc) in doing so. The Wall did avoid a battle that could have resulted in World War 3, but left hundreds of thousands of innocent people stuck behind in a prison for the next 28 years.

There were four different stages of the Wall. (1) the Wire Fence built in 1961, (2) the Improved Wire Fence from 1962-1965, (3) the Concrete Wall from 1965-1975 and (4) the Border Wall 75 from 1975-1989. The last stage was the final and most sophisticated version of the Wall. It was constructed from 45,000 separate sections of reinforced concrete, each 12 ft high and 3.9 ft wide, and cost 16,155,000 East German Marks or 3,638,000 United States Dollars. The top of the Wall was lined with a smooth pipe, intended to make it more difficult to scale. It was reinforced by mesh fencing, signal fencing, anti-vehicle trenches, barbed wire, dogs on long lines, "beds of nails" under balconies hanging over the "death strip", over 116 watchtowers and 20 bunkers.

Despite the major and deadly "defences" the Wall had around 5,000 people successfully escaped to West Berlin from 1961-1989. Each time the Wall was strengthened. It is estimated that 200 people died while trying to escape and hundreds, if not thousands, of people were arrested before they could attempt to.

On November 9, 1989 following numerous demonstrations the East German Government finally agreed to allow direct crossing into West Berlin from East Berlin and was supposed to start on November 17th, but a spokesman for the East German Politburo read the message wrong and within hours thousands of East Germans flocked to the border crossings demanding to be allowed to cross. The borders were opened and the celebrations began.

After 20 years more needs to be done within Germany to punish those that committed crimes against their own people. The border guards that shot people, the Stasi, the informers and those in the government. It seems that Germany doesn't like to deal with the evils of their past until it is too late to do anything about it. In the 1950s the German Government allowed former Nazis to hold office and did very little to punish the criminals. It seems that nowadays that the criminals are in their 90s-100s the Germans are starting to put them on trial knowing that nothing will really come out of it. I think the Germans are going to do the same with the East German criminals - wait 50-60 years and then start putting them on trial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_wall