The Berlin Wall

On August 13, 1961 the residents of Berlin, Germany woke up to find that their city had
been divided in two. A barrier had been erected overnight by the East German
government leaving Berliners in complete shock. The story of the rise and fall of the Berlin
wall is both astonishing and fascinating. The fact that it remained standing for 28 years, in
spite of it being detested by an overwhelming majority of Berliners, serves as yet another
lesson in history of how a small group of people in a position of power, could exert total
control over a population by using fear and intimidation. Thousands tried to get over,
under, through or around it. More than a thousand died trying. In the end the wall came
down almost as suddenly as it went up. It could not contain the will of the German people
to be free.

The reason for the wall goes back to the end of the Second World War. At the end of the
War in 1945, the city of Berlin lay in ruins. The winners of the war - America, England,
France and the Soviet Union - divided Berlin among themselves. West Germany was
occupied by the Americans, the British and the French who established a new Democratic
Government that stood in direct opposition to Communism. The Soviets took control of
East Germany and made it into a brand new Socialist country that would prove to the
West that Socialism was the best Political System in the world. The leader of the Soviet
Union, Josef Stalin, was sure that the new German Democratic Republic (East Germany)
would be so superior to West Germany, that the country would eventually be united
under communist control. However, dividing up the capital, Berlin, was not so easy.
Although the city lay deep within Soviet occupied East Germany, the Americans and the
British refused to give it up. After negotiations with the Soviets, an awkward compromise
was reached. East Berlin would be under the control of the Soviets and West Berlin would
be divided up into American, British and French sectors and be part of capitalist West
Germany. This made West Berlin a non-communist island deep within a communist
country.

By the 1950s, West Germany began to enter a twenty year period of rapid economic
growth. As West Germany’s standard of living improved, East Germans began flooding
into West Germany. The simplest way to cross over into West Germany was by crossing
the border within the city of Berlin. Between 1945 and 1961 two and a half million East
Germans crossed from East Berlin into West Berlin and from West Berlin into West
Germany. The majority of the migrants were professionals: engineers, technicians,
physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers. The continued loss of its work force
threatened East Germany’s economic survival. In 1961, Party Secretary Walter Ulbricht
secretly ordered a barrier to be built to stop the hemorrhage of human talent. Over a
period of time, barbed wire and concrete were stashed in and around Berlin in
preparation. Then on the night of Aug 12, 1961, the border was closed with the help of
the police and the East German army, and the barrier of barbed wire and concrete was
quickly erected. By 6 o’clock in the morning it was all done. Berliners woke up to find that
their city had been cut in two. On the Bernauer Strasse (Bernauer Street) in the north of
Berlin, the border closure created an odd situation. The front doors of many apartment
houses opened onto West Berlin but the people who lived inside were East Berliners, and
now they would no longer be allowed to use their front doors. Many who lived on the
lower floors, ran down and out of their front doors across the street into West Berlin
before the East German police could catch them. The border guards soon caught on and
sealed the front doors of the buildings. Other residents of Bernauer Strasser had a much
harder time escaping. It involved jumping from windows of the higher floors. Some lost
their lives as they jumped to safety from the windows of the apartments. Within weeks all
the windows and doors that opened onto the street were sealed shut with bricks, thus
preventing anyone else from escaping that way into West Berlin.

Desperate escape attempts became commonplace and many succeeded. To reduce the
number of successful escapes, the East German government began to strengthen the wall
until it became a very sophisticated barrier that made it virtually impossible to cross. For
an East Berliner trying to cross over into West Berlin, he would first have to get over the
inner wall. On the other side of the wall about 90 yards away was the wall that divided
East Berlin and West Berlin. Between the two walls were a number of obstacles including
automatic search lights, watchtowers with armed guards, a ‘bed of nails’, dogs on long
leashes, an electrified barbed wire fence and automatic machine guns connected to
tripwires. If an escapee managed to get through all that, they had to get over the concrete
barrier that was seen by West Berliners as the Berlin Wall. The wall was 12 feet high in
most places and was topped with a cylinder of smooth cement that made it almost
impossible to grip. Since getting through this multitude of barriers that made up the Berlin
wall was virtually impossible, escapees preferred to fly over, dig tunnels or go around it.

Officially, the East German regime claimed that the border was fortified to keep
antisocialist influences out. But most East Germans knew it made their country into a
virtual prison. Inside East Germany, the Secret Police, called the ‘Stasi’, enabled the state
to exert full control over its citizens. With a web of 90,000 agents and nearly 200,000
informants they used every resource available to them to record the private lives of
people, making it difficult for them to express themselves freely even in the privacy of
their own homes. In the process, they ruined people’s lives, destroyed families and broke
up marriages. By the 1980s the Stasi had collected information on one third of the
country’s population. Thousands were arrested and imprisoned. Prisoners were isolated,
sleep deprived and interrogated for hours every day to get information about ‘anti-
government activities’. These prisoners were led to believe that their families and closest
friends had turned against them until they finally gave up any valuable information they
had, thus betraying even their close friends and families. By the 1980s, every part of life
was controlled by the socialist unity party and its head Erich Honecker. The state claimed
that socialist East Germany had a standard of living every bit as high as the West. But the
reality was quite different. Everyday items were often in short supply. Most citizens dared
not complain for fear of a visit from the Stasi.