— Ch. 1 · Mass Exodus And Brain Drain —
Checkpoint Charlie.
~7 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Between 1949 and 1961, over two and a half million East Germans fled to the West. The numbers increased during the three years before the Berlin Wall was erected. One hundred forty-four thousand people left in 1959. Ninety-nine thousand departed in 1960. Two hundred seven thousand escaped in just the first seven months of 1961 alone. These 3.5 million East Germans who had left by 1961 totaled approximately 20 percent of the entire East German population. The emigrants tended to be young and well educated. They included many professionals such as engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers. This brain drain became damaging to the political credibility and economic viability of East Germany. By the early 1950s, the Soviet method of restricting emigration was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. However, in occupied Germany, until 1952, the lines between East Germany and the western occupied zones remained easily crossed in most places. Subsequently, the inner German border between the two German states was closed and a barbed-wire fence erected. Even after closing of the inner German border officially in 1952, the city sector border in between East Berlin and West Berlin remained considerably more accessible than the rest of the border because it was administered by all four occupying powers. So Berlin became the main route by which East Germans left for the West.
Checkpoint Charlie Establishment
East German leader Walter Ulbricht agitated and maneuvered to get the Soviet Union's permission to construct the Berlin Wall in 1961. He sought to prevent brain drain, emigration and defection from East Berlin and the wider German Democratic Republic into West Berlin. On the 13th of August 1961, a barbed-wire barrier that would become the Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin was erected by the East Germans. Two days later, police and army engineers began to construct a more permanent concrete wall. Checkpoint Charlie was a crossing point in the Berlin Wall located at the junction of Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße. It is in the Friedrichstadt district. The GDR had closed the border in Berlin ten weeks earlier and created a border crossing at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse. It was meant to be used exclusively by Western Allied military personnel, diplomats and people from abroad. The Western Allies protested against this restriction on their freedom of movement, which was guaranteed to them through the city's four-power status. But eventually they accepted it and set up their own checkpoint on the West Berlin side. The name Charlie came from the letter C in the NATO phonetic alphabet. Similarly for other Allied checkpoints on the Autobahn from the West: Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt and its counterpart Checkpoint Bravo at Dreilinden, Wannsee, in the south-west corner of Berlin. The Soviets simply called it the Crossing Point. The East Germans referred officially to Checkpoint Charlie as the Grenzkontrollpunkt.