Nivel Avanzado

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.
In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev, was named General Secretary of the USSR, and things began
to change quite rapidly. In 1986 he initiated Perestroika (restructuring), a new policy of
political and social reform to revive the Soviet Union’s stagnating economy. In 1988 he
introduced Glasnost (Openness) which gave more freedom of speech to the Soviet People.
By 1989, growing opposition to the communist party in Poland led to free and fair elections
and heralded the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. The government of
Hungary openly defied the Soviet Union by destroying the electrified fence that separated
it from Austria to the west. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev did not send in tanks as
they had done during previous acts of defiance. Within weeks, thousands of East German
vacationers began to take advantage of the open borders in Poland, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia to escape to the West. Those who could not get permission to travel
simply fled across the border abandoning their property and, sometimes, their families in
order to get out of East Germany.
Along with the changes in the Soviet Union, East Germans began to take advantage of
new laws allowing more freedom of organized religion. By the summer of 1989 the prayer
meetings at the churches turned into rallies demanding reform. In spite of violence and
intimidation by the police and the Stasi, the protests grew. Finally, on October 9, 1989,
about 70,000 demonstrators marched in the streets of Leipzig, calling for freedom. Erich
Honecker, the new head of the East German government, was prepared to use force to
break up the protest. Tanks had surrounded the city and armed police waited for the
order to charge. Hospitals were ordered to prepare for a large number of casualties. When
the time came, Honecker’s aide, Egon Krenz, refused to give the order to crush the
demonstrations. Seventy thousand East Germans had been allowed to criticize their
government in public with no retaliation from the government. Within a week, Honecker
was replaced by Krenz. Faced with new protests he tried to announce new reforms. It was
too little, too late.
On the evening of November 9, 1989, during a press conference announcing the easing of
travel restrictions, a misunderstanding led the press to believe that the Berlin Wall would
be opened immediately, allowing East Germans to cross over into West Berlin. It was a
mistake. Within hours, the news had spread throughout Germany. The East German
government was caught off guard and didn’t have enough time to rectify the error.
Thousands of East Germans gathered at the crossing points at the Berlin Wall. The
guards, overwhelmed and confused had no orders. In the chaos they opened the gates
and thousands of East Berliners crossed over into West Berlin ending twenty-eight years
of imprisonment. A year later on October 3, 1990, Germany was officially reunified.
If you visit Berlin today, you will find that there is not much left of the original Berlin Wall.
Lines of cobblestones in some places mark where the wall used to stand. Very little of the
original wall is left. It was destroyed in the months after the city was reunified. Although
badly damaged by souvenir collectors you can still see what’s left of the wall near the
Berlin Ostenbanhof (East railway station). Most guide books will refer to it as the East
Side Gallery. There is also a section of the original wall left next to the Topographie des
Terrors (Topography of Terror), the site of the former Nazi Gestapo headquarters. The
most famous crossing point, Checkpoint Charlie, is now a tourist attraction located next
to the Allied Museum in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin.