Daf Ditty Eruvin 93: When Walls Collapse

1
2
Rav Hoshaya raised a dilemma: What is the ruling with regard to residents who arrive on
Shabbat, i.e., who join the residents of a courtyard on Shabbat, e.g., if the wall between two
courtyards collapsed on Shabbat so that new residents arrive in one courtyard from the other. Had
these people arrived before Shabbat they would have rendered it prohibited for the residents to
carry in the courtyard unless they participated with the original residents in their eiruv. Do these
residents render it prohibited for the original residents to carry in the courtyard, even if they
arrive on Shabbat itself?

3
4
Although the cases of residents who arrive on Shabbat and partitions that are removed on Shabbat
are apparently identical, there is a difference between them. If courtyard partitions that face the
public domain are removed, the area is no longer a private domain. Consequently, the principle:

Since it was permitted it was permitted, is not in effect as it is in the case of residents who arrive,
even though it also involves ruined partitions.

The rationale for this difference is that the destruction of partitions between courtyards does not
affect the status of the courtyard, as it remains a private domain. It merely adds new residents to
the courtyard, which affects the halakhot of eiruv.

As a result, the principle: Since it was permitted it was permitted, is in effect.

5
Rav Ḥisda said: Come and hear a resolution to the dilemma from the mishna: With regard to a
large courtyard that was breached into a small courtyard, it is permitted for the residents of
the large courtyard to carry, but it is prohibited for the residents of the small one to do so. It is
permitted to carry in the large courtyard because the breach is regarded like the entrance of the
large courtyard.

Apparently, even if the breach occurred on Shabbat, it is prohibited for the residents of the small
courtyard to carry. Rabba said: Say that the mishna is dealing with a case where it was breached
while it was still day, i.e., on Friday. However, there is no prohibition if the breach occurred on
Shabbat itself.

RASHI

Abaye said to him: The Master should not state: Say, indicating that it is possible to explain
the mishna in this manner. Rather, the mishna is certainly referring to a case where the courtyard
was breached while it was still day. As Master, you are the one who said: I raised a dilemma
before Rav Huna, and I raised a dilemma before Rav Yehuda: If one established an eiruv to
join one courtyard to another via a certain opening, and that opening was sealed on Shabbat, or
if one established an eiruv via a certain window, and that window was sealed on Shabbat, what
is the halakha? May one continue to rely on this eiruv and carry from one courtyard to the other
via other entrances? And he said to me: Once it was permitted to carry from courtyard to
courtyard at the onset of Shabbat, it was permitted and remains so until the conclusion of
Shabbat. According to this principle, if a breach that adds residents occurs on Shabbat, the breach
does not render prohibited activities that were permitted when Shabbat began.

6
It is stated that amora’im disagreed: With regard to a wall between two courtyards, whose
residents did not establish a joint eiruv, that collapsed on Shabbat, Rav said: One may carry in
the joint courtyard only within four cubits, as carrying in each courtyard is prohibited due to the
other, because they did not establish an eiruv together. Rav does not accept the principle that an
activity that was permitted at the start of Shabbat remains permitted until the conclusion of
Shabbat.

And Shmuel said:

This one may carry to the base of the former partition, and that one may likewise carry to
the base of the partition, as he maintains that since it was permitted at the beginning of
Shabbat, it remains permitted until the conclusion of Shabbat.

Rav Avrohom Adler writes:1

Rav Chisda says that if ground is elevated five handsbreadths and a person puts five handsbreadths
of man-made wall on top of that, the resulting ten handsbreadths do not have the status of a wall,
even though a wall only requires ten handsbreadths of height.

This implies that it is because it must either be comprised of ten handsbreadths of ground, or ten
of man-made wall.

The Gemora retracts this understanding of Rav Chisda and does not rule it is correct at all. The
Gemora proves from a braisa that such a wall is clearly a halachic wall for the shorter yard, as it
faces a ten handsbreadth wall. The question is regarding its status towards the people on the higher
yard. The Gemora ends up saying that this is only correct in a certain case, and proceeds to rule
that in general such a wall is a valid wall.

If two yards made an eiruv due to a shared doorway that gets plugged up on Shabbos, the eiruv is
still valid. The Gemora explains that being that the eiruv was valid when Shabbos entered, it
remains valid throughout Shabbos. This is despite the fact that if the entrance would have been
blocked before Shabbos, they would not have been able to make an eiruv at all.

1
http://dafnotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Eiruvin_93.pdf

7
Rav says that a wall that fell between two yards on Shabbos causes a prohibition of carrying in
these two yards. The case is where there was no entrance between the two yards, which made
separate eiruvin, and a wall between them fell on Shabbos. Rav holds that they cannot carry more
than four cubits in their yards.

Being that Rav holds that Rabbi Shimon’s leniency of carrying from yard to yard only applied to
yards which did not make an eiruv, each yard now is forbidden to carry to the other, and one is
limited to carrying less than four cubits. Rav also does not agree with the rule above that being
that the eiruv was valid when Shabbos entered, it remains valid throughout Shabbos.

CARRYING IN A CHATZER AFTER THE DIVIDING WALL FELL DOWN

Rav rules that in the case of a wall between two Chatzeros that fell down, one may not carry in
either Chatzer more than four Amos, just as one may not carry in a Karmelis.

Why is one prohibited to carry in either Chatzer? Rav rules like Rebbi Shimon (90a) that all
adjoining Chatzeros are considered one Reshus and thus one may carry utensils from one Chatzer
to another, as long as those utensils were in the Chatzer before Shabbos began. Why, then, does
he prohibit one to carry in the Chatzer when a wall between the two Chatzeros fell down?

RASHI answers that Rebbi Shimon's ruling that one may carry from one Chatzer to an adjacent
Chatzer applies only when the residents of the Chatzeros did not make individual Eruvin to permit
carrying in their respective Chatzeros. In the case of Rav, each Chatzer made its own Eruv which
permits the residents of each Chatzer to carry items from their homes into the Chatzer. Rav
maintains that there is a decree that prohibits carrying anything from one Chatzer to another,
including items that were in the Chatzer when Shabbos began, lest one carry items that were in the
house when Shabbos began (such items may not be carried from one Chatzer to another).
Accordingly, Rav is consistent with his opinion earlier (91a) that Rebbi Shimon does not permit
one to carry from one Chatzer to another when the houses in the Chatzer made an Eruv, which
permits items to be carried from the houses into the Chatzer.

TOSFOS (DH Ein) explains that Rav's ruling applies whether or not the residents of the Chatzeros
made Eruvei Chatzeros for themselves. When Rav says that one may not carry in the Chatzer more
than four Amos, he refers only to utensils that were originally in the house and were moved to the
Chatzer on Shabbos. Although normally one is permitted to carry such items throughout the
Chatzer to which the house opens in this case the Chatzer to which the house opens is Parutz
b'Milu'o, open on one entire side (the side of the fallen wall), to a Chatzer in which these utensils
may not be carried. This prohibits carrying them in the first Chatzer as well.

However, utensils which were in the first Chatzer at the onset of Shabbos may be carried
throughout that Chatzer and its adjacent Chatzer, because of Rebbi Shimon's ruling that all
Chatzeros are like one. With regard to those utensils, the adjacent Chatzer is not a forbidden area,
and it does not forbid carrying in the first Chatzer.

8
It is evident from the words of Tosfos that when a Chatzer is Parutz b'Milu'o to a place in which
one is selectively prohibited to carry (that is, certain forms of carrying are prohibited, while other
forms are permitted), it is considered to be Parutz b'Milu'o l'Makom ha'Asur Lo (open on an entire
side to a place in which one may not carry) for a certain type of carrying, while other types of
carrying remain permitted in both areas.

Rashi argues with this principle of Tosfos in a number of places in the Maseches. He does not
agree that a Chatzer can be considered open to an area in which one is forbidden to carry with
regard to certain utensils or certain forms of carrying, while it is considered open to an area in
which one is permitted to carry with regard to other utensils or other forms of carrying. (See Rashi
to 42a, regarding the case of the Nochrim who built Mechitzos around a Jew on Shabbos. Rashi
there says that an area cannot be called "Parutz b'Milu'o l'Makom ha'Asur Lo" unless it is open to
a place where one cannot carry anything. If one is permitted to carry some types of items to that
area, it is not called a "Makom ha'Asur Lo" at all.) In the case of the Gemara here, as far as the
utensils of the Chatzer are concerned, the other Chatzer is a Makom ha'Mutar Lo, and therefore it
cannot be considered a Makom ha'Asur Lo at all, even for the utensils of the house.

TOSFOS (42a, DH u'Metaltel; 42b, DH Lo; 89a, DH Rav), on the other hand, maintains that even
if the adjacent area has a partial use, then for those items that one is permitted to carry there it is
considered a Makom ha'Mutar Lo, and for those items that one is not permitted to carry there it is
considered a Makom ha'Asur Lo.2

If a Wall Falls Down Between Two Courtyards

Steinzaltz (OBM) writes:3

Rav Hoshaya asks about a situation where the division between two courtyards collapsed on
Shabbat, in effect adding new residents – the residents of the hatzer (courtyard) next door – to
each of the courtyards.

Rav Hisda said: Come and hear a resolution to the dilemma from the mishna: With regard to a
large courtyard that was breached into a small courtyard, it is permitted for residents of the large
courtyard to carry, but it is prohibited for the residents of the small one to do so. It is permitted
to carry in the large courtyard because the breach is regarded like the entrance of the large
courtyard. Apparently, even if the breach occurred on Shabbat, it is prohibited for the residents of
the small courtyard to carry.

Rava and Abayye argue that this ruling would only apply if the dividing wall fell down before
Shabbat began. If however, the wall was standing at the beginning of Shabbat, we apply the rule
that we have learned before (Eiruvin 17a) that once an area was declared permitted with regard to
the rules of eiruvin it remains so until after Shabbat.

2
See the Gadol of Minsk's YISRON HA'OR printed at the end of the Mishnayos, Eruvin 9:1, and see also Rav Chaim
Dickman's notes to Tosfos Rabeinu Peretz.
3
https://www.steinsaltz-center.org/home/doc.aspx?mCatID=68446

9
Tosafot point out that this rule does not apply in every case of eiruv, and it is important to
distinguish between the case discussed in our Gemara, where the wall collapsed and we need to
rule with regard to the relationship between the residents of each of the two courtyards, and a case
where the wall between the courtyard and the reshut ha-rabim – the public domain – collapses. In
that case we would rule differently, and the residents would not be allowed to carry in the hatzer.

This distinction stems from the fact that in our Gemara, when the dividing wall collapsed, the
courtyards retain their basic designation as a reshut ha-yahid – a private domain – and all that has
happened is that there are more residents than there were when the eiruv was established at the
beginning of Shabbat. In such a case, we can apply the rule that once an area was declared
permitted with regard to the rules of eiruvin it remains so until after Shabbat. In the second case,
however, the collapse of the walls changes the courtyard from a reshut ha-yahid. It is no longer a
simple hatzer. In such a case the entire situation with regard to the eiruv needs to be reevaluated.

Attribution
Rabbi Elliot Goldberg writes:4
The Talmud is scrupulous about attributions — statements are painstakingly reported in the names
of individual rabbis, and we often hear which rabbi or rabbis transmitted the original teaching as
well. But in a work that was written down long after many of the statements were originally uttered,
and transmitted as a hand-copied document for hundreds of years before it was printed, are such
attributions reliably accurate? It’s hard to know.

On our daf, the Gemara explores a case when a group of people join the residents of a courtyard
on Shabbat, like when a wall collapses between two courtyards and residents from one courtyard
move to the other:

Rav Hoshaya raised a dilemma: What is the ruling with regard to residents who arrive on
Shabbat, do these residents render it prohibited for the original residents to carry in the
courtyard, even if they arrive on Shabbat itself?

Rav Hisda said: Come and hear a resolution to the dilemma from the mishnah: With regard
to a large courtyard that was breached into a small courtyard, it is permitted for the residents
of the large courtyard to carry, because the breach is regarded like the entrance to the large
courtyard, but it is prohibited for the residents of the small one to do so.

When Jews study Talmud today, most are studying a printed version of the Babylonian
Talmud originally produced in Vilna in the early 19th century. But this is not the only version out
there. There were earlier printed versions and hand-written versions, called manuscripts, also
survived the ravages of history. And there are subtle differences between all of these.

4
Myjewishlearning.com

10
In today’s text, Rav Hoshaya raises the question, and Rav Hisda answers it, which seems
reasonable enough — Rav Hisda is a generation older than Rav Hoshaya and they both lived in
Babylonia. But in his commentary on Tractate Eruvin, contemporary scholar Rabbi David Weiss
Halivni notes two alternate attributions for Rav Hisda’s statement:

1. According to Rabbi Yoel Sirkis, a 16th-17th century scholar, that statement should be
attributed to Rav Hinena.
2. Rabbi Raphael Nathan Rabinovitch, a 19th century scholar, suggests that the statement
should be attributed to Rav Hananya.

Note that these names — Rav Hisda, Rav Hinena and Rav Hananya — are all quite similar. In fact,
the last two are nearly identical in a language like Aramaic that is written without vowels. These
alternate attributions are not frivolous suggestions. Sirkis, who lived just after the Talmud was
printed for the first time, was known for correcting errors in the printed version of the text. His
corrections became invaluable to students of the Talmud and were eventually included in printed
editions. Likewise, Rabinovitch is known for a massive tome, Dikdukei Sofrim, in which he
compared the printed edition of the Talmud to a 14th century manuscript, now housed in Munich,
which is the oldest complete manuscript of the Talmud and includes passages that were later
censored by the Church that are absent from most other manuscripts.

So, who answered Rav Hoshaya’s question? Halivni suggests that since Rav Hananya is frequently
in conversation with Rav Hoshaya in the Talmud, likely he gave the original answer. And this also
has the advantage of favoring the Munic manuscript, which is older than the printed versions of
the Talmud.

But even if Rav Hananya was likely what the text originally said, can we know whether he actually
said this? Traditionally, Talmud scholars treated attributed statements as if they were direct quotes
from particular rabbis passed down through the generations. But with virtually no extra-talmudic
source to confirm anything reported in the Talmud, contemporary academic scholars are more
hesitant to assume direct quotes are accurately attributed and have argued that such statements
might say more about the final editors of the Talmud than the rabbis who came before. We’ll
probably never know for sure.

Combining
Rav Chisda says that if ground is elevated five handsbreaths and a person puts five handsbreaths
of man-made wall on top of that, the resulting ten handsbreaths do not have the status of a wall,
even though a wall only requires ten handsbreaths of height.

This implies that it is because it must either be comprised of ten handsbreaths of ground, or ten of
man-made wall. The Gemora proves from a braisa that such a wall is clearly a halachic wall for
the shorter yard, as it faces a ten handsbreadth wall.

11
The question is regarding its status towards the people on the higher yard. Tosfos advances an
interesting query. It would seem that according to Rav Chisda this area is a paradox. For example,
if a pile of earth five handsbreadths tall and four handsbreaths wide would be in the public domain,
and a person would add five handsbreadths of man-made wall, what would be the law of this area
on Shabbos?

It seems that Rav Chisda should hold that if a person is in the public domain and throws an object
on the surface of this area, he should be liable for carrying from a public domain to a private
domain. However, if he was on the surface of the area and he threw from it to the public domain,
he should not be liable.

This is because he is only facing a wall of five handsbreadths, and therefore is not in a private
domain. This would seem to mean, Tosfos concludes, that one could have the same area be a
different domain depending on one’s perspective. However, the Keren Orah says that it is obvious
that there is no way this has the status of a private domain, even according to Rav Chisda.

When walls collapse:

12
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.

All the Ways People Escaped Across the Berlin Wall

13
Did you know? On October 22, 1961, a quarrel between an East German border guard and an
American official on his way to the opera in East Berlin very nearly led to what one observer called
"a nuclear-age equivalent of the Wild West Showdown at the O.K. Corral." That day, American
and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie for 16 hours. Photographs of the confrontation
are some of the most familiar and memorable images of the Cold War.
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

14
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 during the “Space Race” 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

15
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.

The Berlin Wall: 1961-1989

The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to
West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin. (Though he was not happy about
it, President John F. Kennedy conceded that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than
a war.”) Almost two years after the Berlin Wall was erected, John F. Kennedy

16
delivered one of the most famous addresses of his presidency to a crowd of
more than 120,000 gathered outside West Berlin’s city hall, just steps from
the Brandenburg Gate. Kennedy’s speech has been largely remembered for one
particular phrase. “I am a Berliner.”

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

17
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.”

Although the wall’s days were probably already numbered, the speed with which it fell seemed to
confirm the cock-up theory of history. Günter Schabowski, the party’s press spokesman, turned
what was supposed to be an orderly queue at police stations for passports into a stampede for the
border checkpoints after mistakenly declaring that all restrictions on travelling abroad were lifted
with immediate effect. The party seemed to have finally fallen victim to its own mismanagement,
unequal to the challenge of reform from above started by Soviet bloc leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Less than a year later the German Democratic Republic (GDR) would have disappeared within a
united Germany. This incompetence was in marked contrast, however, with the story of the wall’s
rise on 13 August 1961.

Berlin had been a peculiar space ever since the end of the Second World War. It was a quadripartite
‘island’ city run by all four occupiers, each with its own sector, but enclosed within the Soviet
zone and over 100 miles from the western zones of America, Britain and France. In retaliation
against moves towards a separate West German state in 1948, Stalin had exploited West Berlin’s
exposed position by cutting off its land links to the west. But, after nearly a year-long airlift, West
Berlin had emerged as a permanent thorn in the side of the surrounding East Germany. The CIA
and MI6 used it as a forward espionage base; its economy attracted tens of thousands of East
German commuters; and permanent leavers could easily cross the sector boundary to West Berlin
(often little more than a white line in the road) and then fly out from Tempelhof airport with
impunity to the west.

On the night of 13 August 1961 this loophole behind the Iron Curtain was closed with dramatic
suddenness. From 1am human cordons of East German border police and factory militiamen
descended on the Soviet sector boundary to face down the West Berlin police and American,
British and French troops. Large stockpiles of barbed wire, as well as wire mesh fencing and
concrete posts, were rapidly erected just within the eastern sector, sometimes with the help of
lampposts and tramlines welded into improvised barriers. Four days later, with no western
countermeasures, the East German authorities started a more permanent structure of breeze blocks
and concrete slabs: The Berlin Wall proper.

In one fell swoop, the GDR had put an end to a human exodus under way since 1945, but which
had reached epidemic proportions in the summer of 1961. Dubbed by the party Republikflucht, or
‘flight from the Republic’, one in six East Germans had left for the west, the majority via Berlin.

18
From 1958 the communist authorities had become particularly alarmed at the numbers of doctors,
teachers and engineers leaving. Despite a carrot-and-stick policy, they were unable to deter these
defections while maintaining the open border which Berlin’s special quadripartite status
demanded. From May 1960 the Stasi, the feared secret police, had been drafted in but could
intercept only one in five, concluding that “a comprehensive sealing-off of West Berlin is not
possible and therefore the combatting of Republikflucht cannot be left to the security organs of the
GDR alone”.

A more radical solution was needed, involving a physical isolation of West Berlin, a one-way
valve that would keep East Germans in the east, but would not deny the west access to East Berlin.
The East Germans had privately toyed with this idea throughout the 1950s but had been vetoed by
the Soviet big brother in favour of a diplomatic solution. The price Moscow and the fellow eastern
bloc were paying, however, was seemingly endless subsidies to the leaky East German ally, in the
form of raw materials and now even guest workers.

In May 1961 the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, formally petitioned Moscow to close the
border, but it was only after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s confrontational first meeting with
the new US president, John F Kennedy, in June, followed by the latter’s uncompromising
television address in late July, that the Kremlin leader relented. The decision to build a wall thus
came very much at the 11th hour, but had to be conducted in extreme secrecy, so as to avoid a
stampede for the exit.

The day after Kennedy’s address, on 26 July, Khrushchev instructed the Soviet ambassador to tell
Ulbricht that “we have to use the tension in international relations now to circle Berlin in an iron
ring. This must be done before concluding a peace treaty”. In effect, the Soviet leader was short-
circuiting the diplomatic crisis which he himself had unleashed in November 1958 when issuing
an ultimatum to the western powers to vacate West Berlin, or accept a peace settlement that would

19
have forced them to recognize what they regarded as an illegitimate Soviet puppet state: the ‘so-
called’ German Democratic Republic.

GDR sovereignty would have given the East Germans direct control over the transit autobahns
between West Berlin and West Germany, as well as over the air corridors that had kept the western
sectors alive during the airlift of 1948.

East Germany effectively could have started a second Berlin blockade. Kennedy’s speech had
made clear that America was prepared to go to war to defend West Berlin, but any commitments
to an open East Berlin had been conspicuous by their absence. A free hand was implicitly being
given to the communists in their sector.

From this point on Operation Rose, the plan to cut off West Berlin, was developed rapidly under
strictest secrecy.

The normal chain of command was circumvented, and altogether perhaps 60 GDR officials were
let into the secret. The chief of ground operations would be Erich Honecker, number two in the
East German Communist party, but destined to become GDR leader a decade later. In 1961, hair
thinning slightly and behind a pair of severe horn-rimmed spectacles, he was the Politbüro’s
security secretary responsible for domestic and military security.

The border closure would take place from a Saturday night to Sunday morning, to avoid potential
factory stoppages; the party had painful memories of being caught out itself, eight years earlier,
by the mass strikes of 17 June 1953. On 24 July, the party’s security section had calculated that
total closure would require 27,000 man-days of labour and almost 500 tonnes of barbed wire.

The chosen few in the interior ministry met at the Volkspolizei’s training college outside Berlin,
under Willi Seifert, commander of interior troops, but himself a former Buchenwald inmate, and
so with extensive ‘insider’ experience of maximum-security installations. Little by little, fencing
stocks were secretly ferried to the capital from other border regions and police units. But this was
not just to be a police action. In late July the chief of staff of the Soviet forces, Lieutenant General
Ariko, met his East German counterpart, Major General Riedel, to discuss coordinating the ‘iron
ring’ of Soviet and East German tanks that was to provide deterrent back up a mile behind the
police units. The army duly began conspiratorial planning at Schloß Wilkendorf, north-east of
Berlin, where defense minister Heinz Hoffmann, Riedel and 11 other officers drew up a blind order
of march, to be conducted in strictest radio silence, right down to such details as muffling tank
tracks.

Much of this secrecy was for the benefit of western intelligence. There has been great speculation
about how much the west knew in advance. The Americans did have a Kremlin superspy, Oleg
Penkovsky, who on 9 August had learned of the impending action, but he was unable to relay the
information until after the event. Previous CIA intelligence estimates, as early as autumn 1957 for
example, had predicted possible border closure. The British Joint Intelligence Committee reached
similar conclusions in February 1959. By 1961, however, CIA analysts were more fixated on what
would happen if the Soviets tried a repeat of the 1948 blockade, to drive the western Allies out of
West Berlin by attacking transit routes. There were also reports of hoarding of barbed wire, but

20
these were not new and as with most intelligence evaluation, the problem was one of information
overload. The western Allies’ military missions, which could conduct roving overt intelligence
gathering, found no evidence of the impending action. As the Americans reported on 2 August:
“situation largely same as week ago”. On 12 August the British, too, were dismissive of drastic
solutions: “The Russians are probably more impressed by the dangers of disturbances if the escape
route is completely cut than by the current damage to the DDR”.

More recent evidence has come to light from West German sources, but this too is inconclusive.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West Germany’s MI6, had a large network of
anticommunist informants in the GDR, collecting military intelligence. Its head, Reinhard Gehlen,
claimed in his memoirs that the BND had reported the action ahead of time on 1 August. Its July
1961 report indeed suggested that closure of the sector boundary was considered a real possibility
and imminent.

Despite these seemingly ominous pointers, however, there were contradictory reports. West
Germany’s domestic intelligence, the Verfassungsschutz, told Chancellor Adenauer that, although
“the island of West Berlin has now become a matter of life or death for the communist regime”,
more swingeing travel restrictions would be “intolerable to the whole population”. It therefore
seems likely that the intelligence community knew that closure of Berlin was an option being
actively weighed and planned for by the east but was uncertain of an exact date.

“The most important strategic and tactical lesson of the successful action of 13 August”, as their
opposite numbers in the Stasi later recorded, “is the importance of keeping secret the point in time,
as a decisive prerequisite for further successful blows against the enemy – at the right time and in
the right place.”

In advance of a meeting of the top eastern-bloc leaders, on 1 August Ulbricht spoke to Khrushchev
for two hours by telephone in a conversation recently discovered in Moscow. After some
pleasantries about the state of the GDR’s collectivization, Khrushchev repeated his call for “an
iron ring around Berlin… I think our troops should lay the ring, but your troops should control it”.
Ulbricht was clearly greatly concerned about a western economic embargo of the GDR, and much
of his input regarded East Germany’s economic plight. The two finally got down to security:

Khrushchev: “I read original reports from western secret services which estimate that the
conditions for an uprising have ripened in the GDR. They are using their own channels to keep
things from going as far as an uprising because that will achieve nothing. They are saying: we
cannot help, and the Russians will crush everything with tanks. Therefore, they are calling for
people to wait until the conditions are right. Is that really true? I don’t know for sure and am
relying on western reports only.”

Ulbricht: “We have information that, slowly but surely by recruiting defectors and organising
resistance, the Bonn government is preparing the conditions for an uprising to take place in
autumn 1961. We see which methods the enemy uses: the church organises the walk-out of the
farmers from the collectives, although with little success; there are sabotage actions… An uprising
is not realistic, but actions are possible which could cause us great international damage.”

21
Even at this stage, however, Ulbricht seemed to be contemplating gradualist measures requiring
political preparation. “Carry it out whenever you want,” replied the Kremlin leader. “We can fit in
at any time.” Yet he was more conspiratorially inclined than his East German counterpart: “Before
the introduction of the new border regime you should not explain anything, since that would only
increase the refugee movement and could lead to a rush… We’ll give you one, two weeks so that
you can prepare yourselves economically”. Khrushchev then raised the four-power status of
Berlin: should the border go around Greater Berlin rather than just the western sectors? Yet
Ulbricht remained adamant; the border would go right through the city centre: “Above all, it has
to happen fast”. Khrushchev was confident that the west would not overreact: “When you
implement these controls, everyone will be satisfied. Besides, they will get a taste of your power”.
Ulbricht: “Yes, then we will achieve stabilisation”.

Such a matter of war and peace nevertheless required the political backing of the Warsaw Pact.
But when it met from 3–5 August, the die had already been cast. Already on the first day, in what
was probably a private meeting with Khrushchev, the GDR leader had hammered out the essentials
of what was to come, and by then they had a date: 13 August. “We kidded among ourselves that
in the west the 13th is supposed to be an unlucky day,” Khrushchev later recalled. “I joked that for
us and for the whole socialist camp it would be a very lucky day indeed.”

On 12 August at around 4pm, Ulbricht signed off on the impending action, then invited
government and party officials to his country seat at Lake Dölln, north of Berlin, for a walk and a
dinner. Speaking to the Soviet ambassador, the East German party leader, in a rare burst of humour,
jested that “I won’t let them go until the operation is over. Just in case.” The gathered leaders were
all slightly bemused by the round of jokes and musical interludes, until at around 9.30pm Ulbricht
suddenly convened them into an emergency session of the Council of Ministers to rubber-stamp
the measures to come. When the guests broke up towards midnight, the road back into Berlin was
already choked with Russian tanks. Operation Rose had begun.

22
The secret history of the Berlin Wall
Patrick Major writes:5

The wall in context

First and foremost, the wall stabilized the GDR’s domestic crisis. Whereas from 1949–61 around
three million citizens had fled, this fell between 1961 and 1989 to 35,000 (but at the cost of at least
136 lives at the wall). Economic planners no longer had to factor in ‘natural wastage’, and by the
mid-Sixties supply did improve, although not overnight as party propaganda suggested.

The border closure was also used to grasp other nettles: military service was introduced for young
men; the recently collectivized farms were consolidated; there was an attempt to improve
productivity on shop-floors with a Production Drive; and, more surreally, television aerials
capable of receiving western programmed were targeted by bands of young communists,
sometimes saw in hand. Rather soon, however, the party realized that it could not rule by force
5
Patrick Major is professor of modern history at the University of Reading. His latest books are In the Shadow of the Wall: True
Stories from Berlin’s Divided Past (National Archives Press, October 2009) and Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the
Frontiers of Power (OUP, November 2009).

23
alone. The majority of the 7,000 persons arrested in August 1961 were soon released, and in 1963
the GDR entered a period of cultural thaw, including officially sanctioned Beatlemania.

The wall was also significant in foreign policy terms. Despite the official protests by the western
Allies, there was secret relief that the second Berlin Crisis had ended peacefully. The wall also
created a shift in thinking from its biggest West German opponent, the Social Democrat Willy
Brandt. In the mid-1960s he and his adviser Egon Bahr advocated a ‘policy of small steps’ which
culminated, once chancellor, in Brandt’s conciliatory Ostpolitik in the early 1970s, a policy of
rapprochement continued by the Christian Democrats in the 1980s.

The resulting travel concessions allowed close family members to cross the wall. Although held at
about 40,000 trips per year, these mushroomed in the 1980s to over 1.5 million by 1988. For some,
the wall was already effectively open. Yet the selective nature of the opening caused great
resentment among the majority without western relatives, indicating that, in the long term,
Ostpolitik actually helped to destabilize the GDR, not prolong it as some critics have suggested.

Defiance and disbelief: How east and west reacted when the wall went up

The initial reaction to the wall’s building from East Germans was shock, betrayal and disbelief:
“a dirty trick” in the words of one, or from another: “One cannot be for peace with tanks”. Many
East Berliners thought the initial barbed wire a temporary measure, becoming more hostile when
permanent obstacles went up on 17 August, and when West Berliners were excluded from East
Berlin on 23 August, splitting up whole families.

Although East Berliners were angry, there was no repeat of 1953’s insurrection, when half a
million strikers had taken to the streets. Now the populace was on the back foot. Instead, young
people, who had frequented West Berlin, went into a collective sulk, and middle-class ‘waverers’
as the party called them, became resigned to socialism in half a country. Party activists, by
contrast, went on the offensive, even beating up political opponents. “Dentists” warned one party
secretary, “would be getting a lot of work in the near future”.

The official rationale, nonetheless, was that the wall, soon labelled the ‘Antifascist Protection
Rampart’, had “saved the peace” by foiling the west’s alleged plans to foment a second GDR
uprising to coincide with a NATO ground attack. Few East Germans believed this. Willy Brandt,
then West Berlin’s mayor, saw the new border regime as fascist, not antifascist, the “perimeter
wall of a concentration camp”.

The most violent reactions came from young West Berliners – both students and teenagers – in a
series of running battles with GDR border police. The stationing of Allied troops right up to the
wire was as much to deter them as the Volkspolizei on the other side.

Since the west’s core interests were not touched in West Berlin – there was no interference with
the transit routes to West Germany and thus no repeat of the Berlin blockade (the Americans’
greatest fear) – John F Kennedy’s response was muted: ”A wall is not very nice but it’s a hell of

24
a lot better than a war”. Protests were made, and a morale-boosting tour of West Berlin by Vice
President Johnson and the former military governor and hero of the Berlin airlift, General Lucius
D Clay.

Privately, the Americans’ allies in Berlin – France and Britain – censured Clay’s gung-ho tactics,
which included a tank stand-off at Checkpoint Charlie in late October 1961 and encouraging
vigilante schemes to blow up the wall. Behind the scenes, however, the Foreign Office admitted
that Britain’s commitments to Berlin had been “negligible… just enough to avoid odious
comparisons with the other NATO partners”.

The brick that brought tears to a dissident’s eyes

Four BBC reporters who were in Berlin when the wall finally fell tell Greg Neale
about their memories of an extraordinary night

BBC television and radio journalists were among the first to send back reports of the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the most dramatic symbol of the wave of reforms that brought
Cold War communism in eastern Europe to an end two decades ago.

While film footage of tearful East and West Berliners coming together for the first time
in 28 years provided the most moving impressions, possibly the most symbolic moment
for British viewers came when reporter Olenka Frenkiel brandished a plaster-strewn
brick, newly taken from the wall, during a live broadcast from the city for the Newsnight
programme.

Today Frenkiel and former Newsnight presenter Peter Snow – who was hosting the
Berlin broadcast from a studio in the east of the city – still remember the episode
vividly.

“I was conducting a discussion with a West German journalist and the leading East
German dissident Jens Reich, when I saw Olenka coming onto the set,” Snow recalls.
“For some reason, I thought she was carrying a baby. Then I saw what it was. She
banged it down on the table and said, ‘that’s a bit of the Berlin Wall’. Jens Reich simply
couldn’t believe it. He was in tears by the end of the programme.’’

It was one of many extraordinary moments during a tumultuous period in European

history, which had begun several months earlier, as correspondent Brian Hanrahan
recalls, when first Hungary, then Czechoslovakia began to allow East Germans to cross
their borders with the west, sparking an exodus by tens of thousands of people.

25
Following the exodus, and large-scale anti-government protests within East Germany,
Erich Honecker, the country’s hard-liner leader, resigned in mid-October. His
successor, Egon Krenz, sought to introduce a measure of reform, but the protests
continued. Then, on 9 November, came an extraordinary development.

“I was at the Grand Hotel in East Berlin, when someone came back from the evening
press conference that the government had started holding,” Hanrahan remembers. “He
said Günter Schabowski [the East German government spokesman] had just announced
that the wall was opening, but the details… were all very unclear, and everyone was
arguing about what it meant. I listened to the tape [of the press conference] and it
seemed pretty damned clear to me – they were going to lift travel restrictions.

“I said, ‘I don’t care whether we argue about the details: as far as I’m concerned, this
evening they have made one of the biggest announcements in our lifetime’. So, I wrote
a piece [for that night’s BBC television news] saying the Berlin Wall is going. Then we
went onto the streets to see what was happening.”

Olenka Frenkiel had been filming in the city earlier that day for Newsnight before
Schabowski’s announcement. “On the way back to our hotel, I said to our producer,
‘let’s take a walk past the wall’,” she remembers. “We walked past the Brandenburg
Gate when, to my amazement, I saw someone get up and simply walk through the line
of [East German] military police. I couldn’t believe it. Everyone knew that the soldiers
were there to guard the wall, but they weren’t doing anything.

“I said: ‘I’m going to go over there, too.’ So, while our producer went back to our hotel
to find a camera crew, I walked over to the wall. One or two people pulled me up. Two
days before, the soldiers would have had orders to shoot. Now they were doing nothing.

“Then a BBC news cameraman turned up. His camera batteries were fading, and there
was little light, but I managed to record a quick, rather faltering little piece in my
excitement, saying something along the lines of ‘This is the east, over there is the west,
and I’m standing along with several thousand other people tonight on the Berlin Wall’.
I stayed there till four in the morning; I simply didn’t want to leave.”

Brian Hanrahan, meanwhile, found his way to the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint,
normally used by those few Berliners permitted to cross the city. “We had no idea where
we were going,” he says. “I didn’t want to be the only journalist who couldn’t find a
hole in the wall that particular night! But as we got to this street which would normally
have been deserted it was absolutely throbbing with people. We dumped the car and
ran. And we got there just as the orders arrived to open the checkpoint.

26
“We saw the pole go up and all these people surging through. And the guards standing
there – I remember the look on their faces – they were completely bewildered. Some
people even handed their passports in to be stamped, but others just went through. And
there they were – in West Berlin. Some were crying, some laughing. Some had taken
their kids with them and were never going back. Some were literally just popping over
to see what it was like.”

Hanrahan’s filmed report, including scenes from the impromptu party taking place at
the Brandenburg Gate, would be the first TV images that many Britons would see next
morning. That day, Matt Frei, then a young BBC reporter, flew into the city.

“I was filing for radio, and we established a phone line in this hotel which we kept open
for two weeks, so fearful were we that the line would suddenly go down,” he remembers.
“The bill must have been horrendous!”

For Frei – who met East German relatives he had never seen before – the fall of the
wall was “an incredible story. It was not just a historical milestone, it was the end of
an era, and rearranged the global furniture in a way no one could imagine at the time.”

As for the Newsnight brick – from one of the sections of wall demolished to create one
of the new crossing-points – Brian Hanrahan kept it for many years as a souvenir of
“the biggest story I ever did. I can’t think of anything else that would match it.”

27