Berlin Wall
On August 13, 1961, the Communist
government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to
build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or
“Antifascist Bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of
this Berlin Wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and
undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of
stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until
November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced
that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That
night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin,
while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall
itself. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and
enduring symbols of the Cold War.
The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin
As World War II came to an end in
1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam determined the
fate of Germany’s territories. They split the defeated nation into four “allied
occupation zones”: The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union,
while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and
(eventually) France. Even though Berlin was located entirely within the Soviet
part of the country (it sat about 100 miles from the border between the eastern
and western occupation zones), the Yalta and Potsdam agreements split the city
into similar sectors. The Soviets took the eastern half, while the other Allies
took the western. This four-way occupation of Berlin began in June 1945.
The Berlin Wall: Blockade and Crisis
The existence of West Berlin, a
conspicuously capitalist city deep within communist East Germany, “stuck like a
bone in the Soviet throat,” as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it. The
Russians began maneuvering to drive the United States, Britain and France out
of the city for good. In 1948, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin aimed to starve
the western Allies out of the city. Instead of retreating, however, the United
States and its allies supplied their sectors of the city from the air. This
effort, known as the Berlin Airlift, lasted for more than a year and delivered more
than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel and other goods to West Berlin. The Soviets
called off the blockade in 1949.
After a decade of relative calm,
tensions flared again in 1958. For the next three years, the Soviets–emboldened
by the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite the year before and
embarrassed by the seemingly endless flow of refugees from east to west (nearly
3 million since the end of the blockade, many of them young skilled workers
such as doctors, teachers and engineers)–blustered and made threats, while the
Allies resisted. Summits, conferences and other negotiations came and went
without resolution. Meanwhile, the flood of refugees continued. In June 1961,
some 19,000 people left the GDR through Berlin. The following month, 30,000 fled.
In the first 11 days of August, 16,000 East Germans crossed the border into
West Berlin, and on August 12 some 2,400 followed—the largest number of
defectors ever to leave East Germany in a single day.
The Berlin Wall: Building the Wall
That night, Premier Khrushchev
gave the East German government permission to stop the flow of emigrants by
closing its border for good. In just two weeks, the East German army, police
force and volunteer construction workers had completed a makeshift barbed wire
and concrete block wall–the Berlin Wall–that divided one side of the city from
the other.
Before the wall was built,
Berliners on both sides of the city could move around fairly freely: They
crossed the East-West border to work, to shop, to go to the theater and the
movies. Trains and subway lines carried passengers back and forth. After the
wall was built, it became impossible to get from East to West Berlin except
through one of three checkpoints: at Helmstedt (“Checkpoint Alpha” in American
military parlance), at Dreilinden (“Checkpoint Bravo”) and in the center of
Berlin at Friedrichstrasse (“Checkpoint Charlie”). (Eventually, the GDR built
12 checkpoints along the wall.) At each of the checkpoints, East German
soldiers screened diplomats and other officials before they were allowed to
enter or leave. Except under special circumstances, travelers from East and
West Berlin were rarely allowed across the border.
In all, at least 171 people were
killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall. Escape from East
Germany was not impossible, however: From 1961 until the wall came down in
1989, more than 5,000 East Germans (including some 600 border guards) managed
to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing
over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers
and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds.
The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall
On November 9, 1989, as the Cold
War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin’s
Communist Party announced a change in his city’s relations with the West.
Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross
the country’s borders. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking
beer and champagne and chanting “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”). At midnight,
they flooded through the checkpoints.
More than 2 million people from
East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration
that was, one journalist wrote, “the greatest street party in the history of
the world.” People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall–they
became known as “mauerspechte,” or “wall woodpeckers”—while cranes and
bulldozers pulled down section after section. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin
was united for the first time since 1945. “Only today,” one Berliner
spray-painted on a piece of the wall, “is the war really over.”
The reunification of East and
West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost one year after the
fall of the Berlin Wall.
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