Berlin Wall: why was it build?
The Berlin Wall ran not only straight through the city but also through many people their lives. It separated friends and family and made life a lot more tragic and complicated.
Of course it's propaganda to state that the Berlin Wall was a 'antifaschistischer schutzwall' (antifascist wall). But this was what the GDR government told its people and how a lot of patriotic East Germans felt about the Berlin Wall. They believed West Germany was still full of Nazi's and that war criminals were still roaming the country. In fact this was not entirely untrue. In West Germany a significant number of former Nazi's held very good jobs, even in politics. In East Germany this was far more difficult. East Germany put a lot of effort in sweeping the country clean of Nazi-elements.
On the other hand East Germany, according to West Germany, was full of communists. They suppressed their own people by putting up a wall. Many who tried to flee were shot. In the eyes of many West Germans East Germans led depressing lives, lived in depressing houses and wore depressing clothes.
In other words: the Berlin Wall was more than concrete, watchtowers, vicious border policemen, watchdogs, barbed wire and graffiti. It not only divided the city of Berlin, but also stressed to what part of the country you belonged and what you believed in.
Of course, life and the Berlin Wall is more complicating than that. Not everyone on the East side was a patriotic communist and not everyone on the West side a war criminal. Many people in Berlin had nothing to do with politics and propaganda from East of West Germany, but nevertheless were confronted every day with the reality of the Berlin Wall.
Several surveys show that a lot of people think the Berlin Wall was erected to punish the Germans for the Second World War. That is of course, not true. At the end of the Second World War there was an important battle in Berlin. After Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in front of his Fuhrerbunker in Mitte the Russians took over control of Berlin. The allied forces came in soon after. They all wanted to control the city from which Germany was ruled. They decided to divide it into four sectors. The British got a piece of West Berlin, as well as the French and the United States. The Russians got what was later called East Berlin.
Dividing up the city did not proof to be that difficult, that West Berlin was a free haven and East Berlin wasn't was however a very big problem. The land surrounding Berlin all belonged to the Russians and East Germany. It was very easy to cross the East-West border in Berlin. The rest of the border was sealed by the Iron Curtain.
Therefore, before 1961 a lot of East Germans fled their country through West Berlin. According to the GDR government this brain drain could only be stopped by creating a new border that was impossible to cross. The GDR government wanted people to stay in East Berlin to build up East Germany and make the communist state work.
In the summer of 1961 GDR leader Walter Ulbricht went to the Soviet Union to discuss the matter with the Russian leader Khrushchev and the other Warsaw pact leaders. In a speech on the 4th of August, 1961 he already talked about sealing of the border. The translation of this speech got destroyed, so no one in West Germany or the rest of the allied world had any idea of what was about to happen. They had an inkling of an upcoming crisis because there were so many GDR-refugees (a thousand a day just before border closure). But they thought it was impossible to seal off a great city in a hermetic fashion.
But in the mean time, the later GDR leader Erich Honecker was a busy bee. On orders of Walter Ulbricht he was on the telephone all day to manage the situation. 400 trucks had to be moved to get all the barbed wire and other material ready to close of the Berlin border, without being noticed by the West. Operation 'Rose' was operating at full speed. On the 12th of August 3150 soldiers of the 8th Motorized Artillery Division went to Berlin. They installed their 100 battle tanks and personnel at Friedrichsfelde, just outside Mitte – the historic center of East Berlin. 4200 men of the 1st Motorized Division and 140 tanks left Potsdam to cover the area of the outer ring around West Berlin. 10.000 men of all units of the East Berlin People's Police were also waiting for orders. They were ready to seal of all the pedestrian and vehicle routes to West Berlin. When Berlin was asleep, all this happened in total secrecy. At dawn on the 13th of August, 1961 all the borders were closed off and Honecker went home. Tired, but satisfied. East Berlin was sealed off.
People in East Berlin woke up to a new reality. They couldn't get out anymore. Some tried to find the last stretch that was unsealed and succeeded, but most people could do nothing else than accept that the border had become reality. The people in West Berlin were furious. Angry mobs gathered at Brandenburger Tor. At Potsdamer Platz West Berliners swore at the border police and threw stones at them. West Berlin police pulled them back. Their motto was: no provocations in this new, unstable situation.
The allied forces in the United States, France and Great Britain discussed how to interpret this border closure. Would East Germany and the USSR risk a third world war by annexing West Berlin? France, England and the United States were not ready to fight with the USSR over East Berlin. The French Defense Minister Pierre Mesmer told his English colleague weeks later that the French were not prepared to 'die for Berlin'. It soon became clear that the GDR put up the Berlin Wall only out of defensive strategies. They didn't mean to annex West Berlin.
The closure of the border at Berlin made the inhabitants furious. But politicians easily settled the matter. After years of tension in Berlin because of the many East German refugees the erection of the Berlin Wall replaced an unstable political situation with a brutal new reality but also stability.
When 28 years later the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the Berliners were so happy they finally got rid of this hated piece of concrete, it is really hard to find where the Wall that effected all these lives for such a long time. "Is this East? Or is this West?" people ask all the time when they visit Berlin.
If you know where to look, you will know the answer. www.placetobe.info will show you all these stories and remains of the Berlin Wall.