Berlin Wall

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that for 28 years encircled the western half of a divided city, turning West Berlin into an isolated exclave surrounded by hostile territory. When East German construction workers began tearing up streets and stringing barbed wire on the 13th of August 1961, they split families overnight, cut East Berliners off from their jobs across the sector line, and created what Mayor Willy Brandt would call the Wall of Shame. What drove a government to wall in its own citizens? How did the structure actually work, and how deadly was it to cross? What finally cracked it open, and why did that moment come on an otherwise ordinary Thursday evening in November 1989?

• 2. The Exodus That Built the Wall

  ›

  By 1961, 3.5 million East Germans had left for the West, roughly 20 percent of the entire population. The numbers from the early 1950s tell the story in stark terms: 187,000 left in 1950, 165,000 in 1951, and 331,000 in 1953 alone. A sharp jump that year traced partly to fear of further Sovietization as Joseph Stalin grew increasingly paranoid in the final months of his life.

  Yuri Andropov, then the Communist Party's director on relations with socialist countries, wrote an urgent letter to the Central Committee on the 28th of August 1958 warning of a 50 percent increase in the share of intelligentsia among those fleeing. Andropov reported that while East German officials attributed the flight to economic motives, refugee testimony pointed to political causes. He wrote that "the flight of the intelligentsia has reached a particularly critical phase."

  By 1960, the combined toll of World War II losses and westward emigration left East Germany with only 61 percent of its working-age population, compared to 70.5 percent before the war. The losses fell disproportionately on engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, and lawyers. Economists later estimated the direct manpower cost to East Germany at between 7 billion and 9 billion dollars. East German party leader Walter Ulbricht would later claim West Germany owed him 17 billion dollars in reparations and manpower compensation.

  The Berlin sector border remained a structural vulnerability. A new passport law introduced on the 11th of December 1957 actually worsened the problem by pushing more refugees toward the Berlin route: the share of those leaving through West Berlin jumped from 60 percent to well over 90 percent by the end of 1958. Construction of a railway bypassing West Berlin, the Berlin outer ring, had begun in 1951 to cut this escape valve. Its completion in 1961 made closing the border a practical proposition for the first time.

• 3. Barbed Wire Sunday

  ›

  On the 15th of June 1961, Walter Ulbricht stood at an international press conference and declared: "No one has the intention of erecting a wall." It was the first time the word had appeared in this context, and it was a lie. A phone call transcript from the 1st of August between Ulbricht and Nikita Khrushchev suggests the initiative for construction came from Khrushchev himself, though other sources indicate he had earlier worried about the West's reaction.

  Khrushchev had grown bolder after the 1961 Vienna summit, where US President John F. Kennedy admitted the United States would not actively oppose a barrier. Kennedy later acknowledged a feeling of miscalculation in a candid interview with New York Times columnist James "Scotty" Reston.

  On Saturday the 12th of August 1961, the leaders of the GDR attended a garden party at a government guesthouse north of East Berlin. There, Ulbricht signed the order. At midnight, police and army units began closing the sector border. By Sunday morning, streets were torn up, barbed wire was strung along the perimeter around the three western sectors, and the line dividing West and East Berlin was sealed. Germans came to call that Sunday Barbed Wire Sunday.

  The National Security Agency had intercepted advance warning of the Socialist Unity Party's plan on the 9th of August, four days earlier. That warning did not reach President Kennedy until noon on the 13th of August, while he was vacationing on his yacht off the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Kennedy was angry about the lack of warning, though relieved the Soviets had only divided Berlin rather than moved against West Berlin's access routes. Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared that year: "The Wall certainly ought not to be a permanent feature of the European landscape."

• 4. Engineering the Death Strip

  ›

  The finished Wall went through four distinct versions between 1961 and 1989. The final and most sophisticated, known officially as Border Wall 75, was begun in 1975 and completed around 1980. It was built from 45,000 separate reinforced concrete sections, each 3.6 meters high and 1.2 meters wide, and cost DDM 16,155,000 - roughly 3.6 million US dollars.

  In June 1962, a second parallel fence was constructed farther inside East German territory, creating the space that became the death strip. Buildings between the two barriers were demolished, residents relocated. The strip was covered with raked sand or gravel so that footprints showed clearly, making it easy to see both trespassers and which guards had neglected their patrol duties. It offered no cover. The Wall stretched more than 156 kilometers around West Berlin. The infrastructure within and beside it included 161 kilometers of light strips, 127.5 kilometers of contact and signal fencing, 186 observation towers, 259 dog runs, and 20 bunkers.

  Smooth piping lined the top of the Wall to prevent climbing. At strategic points the construction was deliberately weaker, so that East German and Soviet armored vehicles could break through if war came. Maintenance on the exterior was performed by workers accessing the outer strip via ladders or hidden doors that required two separate keys in two separate keyholes to open.

  The outer strip was generally no more than four meters wide and was treated with relative neglect by East German authorities. Graffiti artists worked there with varying toleration: Keith Haring was apparently left alone, while Thierry Noir reported being regularly chased. In 1986, defector Wolfram Hasch was arrested when East German personnel emerged from a hidden door to apprehend him and four others who were painting the wall. All but Hasch escaped back to the western sector.

• 5. Flight and Death

  ›

  Conrad Schumann became the first East German border guard to escape, jumping the barbed wire on the 15th of August 1961, two days after construction began. Ida Siekmann was the first person to die at the Wall, on the 22nd of August 1961, jumping from her third-floor apartment at 48 Bernauer Strasse. The first person shot and killed while attempting to cross was Gunter Litfin, a 24-year-old tailor, who tried to swim the Spree on the 24th of August 1961 - the same day East German police had received shoot-to-kill orders.

  Over the 28 years the Wall stood, more than 100,000 people attempted to escape. About 5,000 succeeded. The death toll is disputed: a research group at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam confirmed at least 140 deaths; the director of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, Alexandra Hildebrandt, estimated the true number at well above 200.

  Escape methods became increasingly inventive as the Wall was reinforced. In September 1962-29 people escaped through a single tunnel to the west. At least 70 tunnels were dug altogether; only 19 succeeded, allowing roughly 400 people through. East German authorities eventually deployed seismographic and acoustic equipment to detect tunneling. One family crossed in a sports car modified so that the roof and windscreen could break away when the car drove under a metal beam at a checkpoint; the occupants lay flat and kept moving forward. Others crossed by hot air balloon, ultralight aircraft, or aerial wire. Thomas Kruger landed a Zlin Z 42M light aircraft at RAF Gatow; his plane was returned to the East Germans by road with humorous slogans painted on it by Royal Air Force airmen, including "Wish you were here" and "Come back soon."

  The most widely witnessed failure was Peter Fechter, 18 years old, shot and left to bleed to death in full view of Western media on the 17th of August 1962, near Zimmerstrasse. Western bystanders could not intervene without risking fire from the East Berlin border guards. The last person shot and killed trying to cross was Chris Gueffroy, on the 6th of February 1989. The final person to die in an escape attempt was Winfried Freudenberg, killed on the 8th of March 1989 when his homemade natural-gas balloon crashed.

• 6. Concerts, Speeches, and Pressure

  ›

  On the 26th of June 1963-22 months after the Wall went up, President Kennedy visited West Berlin and spoke from a platform on the steps of Rathaus Schoneberg to an audience of 450,000 people. Straying from his prepared script, he delivered the Ich bin ein Berliner speech, a direct statement of US support for West Germany and West Berlin.

  On the 12th of June 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate to mark Berlin's 750th anniversary and challenged Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." That same day, David Bowie - who had lived and recorded in West Berlin for several years earlier in his career - played a concert close to the Wall. Thousands of East Berliners listened from across the barrier. Violent rioting followed in East Berlin. Tobias Ruther later argued these were the first protests in the sequence that led to the events of November 1989.

  On the 19th of July 1988-16 months before the Wall fell, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played a concert in East Berlin attended by 300,000 people in person and broadcast on television. Springsteen addressed the crowd in German: "I'm not here for or against any government. I've come to play rock 'n' roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down." East Germany's FDJ youth organization had hoped the concert would improve the regime's standing with young East Germans. Instead, it sharpened their appetite for the freedoms Springsteen represented.

  In January 1989, GDR leader Erich Honecker predicted the Wall would stand for another 50 or 100 years if the conditions that had produced it did not change.

• 7. The Night the Gates Opened

  ›

  The Pan-European Picnic on the 19th of August 1989 was based on an idea by Otto von Habsburg to test Mikhail Gorbachev's reaction to a symbolic border opening between Austria and Hungary. When Hungarian authorities briefly opened a border gate that day and the Soviet Union did not intervene, more than 13,000 East German tourists streamed through Hungary into Austria in September. That mass movement set off a chain of events across the Eastern Bloc.

  Protests spread through East Germany during the autumn of 1989. On the 9th of October, 70,000 people gathered in Leipzig despite police and army units being authorized to use force. By the 4th of November, half a million people filled the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin to demand political change. Erich Honecker had resigned on the 18th of October and been replaced by Egon Krenz. The Krenz-led politburo decided on the 9th of November to allow East Germans to exit directly through crossing points between East and West Germany.

  Gunter Schabowski, the party spokesman for the SED Politburo, had not been part of the discussions and had not been fully briefed. He was handed a note about the new regulations shortly before a press conference that evening, with no instructions on how to handle it. When a reporter - ANSA's Riccardo Ehrman - asked when the rules would take effect, Schabowski hesitated briefly, then said: "As far as I know, it takes effect immediately, without delay." He later repeated this to American journalist Tom Brokaw. Excerpts aired as the lead story on ZDF's Heute at 7:17 p.m. and on ARD's Tagesschau at 8 p.m. ARD and ZDF had broadcast to nearly all of East Germany since the late 1950s.

  Crowds gathered at the six checkpoints between East and West Berlin. Border guards made frantic calls up the chain of command. At 10:45 p.m., Harald Jager, the commander of the Bornholmer Strasse crossing, ordered the gates opened. The Brandenburg Gate section reopened on the 22nd of December 1989. Formal demolition began on the 13th of June 1990 and concluded in 1994. German reunification took place on the 3rd of October 1990. The watchtower at the former Kieler Eck on Kieler Strasse in Mitte now houses a memorial named after Gunter Litfin, run by the initiative of his brother Jurgen Litfin.