Inner German border

• 1. Introduction

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  The inner German border stretched 1,381 kilometres in an irregular L-shaped line from Dassow at the Baltic Sea to Eichigt at the border with Czechoslovakia. On one side sat the Federal Republic of Germany. On the other sat the German Democratic Republic. Between them lay something few borders in human history have matched: a continuous band of metal fences, minefields, tripwires, guard dogs, watchtowers, and armed soldiers instructed to shoot anyone who tried to cross without permission.

  This was not the Berlin Wall, which most people picture when they think of divided Germany. The Wall was a separate, shorter barrier more than 170 kilometres to the east. The inner German border was something else entirely. It was longer, more elaborate, and, in its full mid-1980s form, consumed more than six per cent of East Germany's total territory.

  For 45 years, from 1945 to 1990, this line carved through farms, rivers, villages, and ancient roads. It separated families. It killed more than a thousand people who tried to cross it. And when it finally fell, it fell in a matter of hours. What remains today is mostly green belt, parks, and memorials. How this border came to exist, how it functioned, and why it eventually collapsed is a story that touches the deepest conflicts of the twentieth century.

• 2. Origins of Division

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  The boundary that would become the inner German border was drawn not in peacetime but in the final months of the Second World War. Allied planners agreed to divide a defeated Germany into occupation zones, with the boundaries traced along the territorial lines of nineteenth-century German states and provinces, borders that had largely ceased to exist after German unification in 1871. Three initial zones were agreed upon: a British zone in the north-west, an American zone in the south, and a Soviet zone in the east. France was carved a fourth zone from the western portions of the British and American areas.

  Because Allied troops advanced faster than expected in the war's final weeks, British and American soldiers occupied territory that had been assigned to the Soviet zone. When they pulled back, many Germans fled west with them, trying to avoid Soviet rule. This was the first of many waves of westward movement that the border was ultimately built to stop.

  The division became official on the 1st of August 1945, confirmed by the Potsdam Agreement. For a brief period the four powers worked together under the Allied Control Council. That cooperation collapsed over disagreements about Germany's political and economic future. By May 1949, the western zones had merged into the Federal Republic of Germany, a democratic capitalist state. The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic, a communist state where voters could only choose between communist candidates.

  West Germany refused from the outset to recognise East Germany as legitimate, treating it instead as a temporary Soviet creation. Any East German who reached the West was automatically granted West German citizenship, full residence rights, and the right to work. East Germany, for its part, portrayed West Germany as enemy territory, a semi-fascist state seeking to reclaim the lost lands of the Third Reich. This mutual hostility set the stage for decades of confrontation along the line between them.

• 3. Building the Barrier

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  Between October 1945 and June 1946, 1.6 million Germans left the Soviet zone for the west. The boundary remained relatively porous well into the early 1950s; local farmers tended fields on the opposite side, workers commuted across, and refugees could bribe guards or simply slip through. But the East German government saw this movement as an existential threat to its economy and its legitimacy.

  On the 26th of May 1952, the GDR abruptly declared a "special regime on the demarcation line", claiming the measure was needed to keep out spies, terrorists, and smugglers. In reality, the purpose was to stop citizens from leaving. A ploughed strip 10 metres wide was cut along the entire border. A "protective strip" 500 metres wide was placed under tight control. A "restricted zone" five kilometres deep required a special permit to enter. Trees were felled to clear lines of sight. Houses were demolished. Bridges were closed. More than 8,300 East German civilians living along the border were forcibly resettled in a programme codenamed "Operation Vermin". Another 3,000 fled to the West before they could be expelled.

  Despite all of this, the flow of emigrants continued. Between 1949 and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, an estimated 3.5 million East Germans, roughly a sixth of the entire population, emigrated to the west. Most left via Berlin, which remained a comparatively open crossing. That changed when the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961.

  The inner German border was then upgraded in the late 1960s into what the GDR called a "modern frontier". Construction started in September 1967. Nearly 1,300 kilometres of new fencing replaced old barbed wire with expanded metal barriers whose mesh openings were too small for finger-holds and too sharp to grip. Anti-vehicle ditches were dug along 829 kilometres of the border. Prefabricated concrete watchtowers replaced wooden ones. The upgrade immediately cut successful escapes from around 1,000 people a year in the mid-1960s to about 120 per year a decade later.

• 4. The Mechanics of Fear

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  A person attempting to cross the inner German border around 1980, travelling from east to west, would first encounter the restricted zone, a five-kilometre band of land where inhabitants needed special permits to enter or leave their own homes, were forbidden to travel to neighbouring villages, and were subject to overnight curfews.

  Beyond that lay the signal fence, a continuous expanded metal barrier 1,185 kilometres long and 2 metres high, lined with low-voltage electrified barbed wire. Cutting or touching the wire triggered an alarm. On the far side of the signal fence ran the protective strip, 500 to 1,000 metres wide, monitored from nearly 700 concrete watchtowers built by 1989. The larger towers were fitted with a 1,000-watt rotating searchlight and firing ports so guards could shoot without stepping outside. Around 1,000 two-man observation bunkers supplemented the towers.

  Dog runs stretched up to 100 metres along high-risk sections, with large dogs chained to suspended wires. An all-weather patrol road ran beside the border for around 900 kilometres, made from perforated concrete blocks. Alongside it ran two control strips of bare earth; any footprints left by a crossing attempt were quickly spotted by patrols, allowing guards to map patterns of escape activity and reinforce vulnerable points.

  The outer fence rose between 3.2 and 4 metres, constructed from expanded metal mesh panels that overlapped so they could not be pulled down, and whose lower edge was buried in the ground to prevent tunnelling beneath. Anti-personnel mines were installed along approximately half the border's length from 1966; by the 1980s around 1.3 million Soviet-made mines had been laid. From 1970, some 60,000 SM-70 directional mines were fitted to the outer fence, triggered by tripwires and designed to spray shrapnel up to 20 metres. International condemnation eventually led the GDR to remove the SM-70s by the end of 1984.

  In 1988, the GDR leadership considered replacing all of this with a high-technology system codenamed Grenze 2000. It would have used infrared barriers, radio beacons, vibration detectors, and centralised networked computers to automate border control. The plan was never carried out.

• 5. The Guards and the Watched

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  At its peak, the Grenztruppen, the East German Border Troops, numbered up to 50,000 personnel. Around half were conscripts, a lower proportion than in other branches of the East German armed forces. Potential recruits were screened for political reliability; actively religious individuals and those with close relatives in West Germany were often turned away.

  The Stasi secret police maintained covert operatives within the Grenztruppen between 1968 and 1985, posing as regular guards to identify potential defectors. One in ten officers and one in thirty enlisted men were said to have been recruited as Stasi informers. Passport control at crossing points was handled by Stasi officers in Grenztruppen uniforms.

  Guards were not permitted to patrol alone; watchtowers were always manned by two or three people who were not allowed out of each other's sight. If a guard tried to escape, his colleagues were ordered to shoot him without hesitation or warning. Despite this, 2,500 guards successfully escaped to the West. Another 5,500 were caught and imprisoned for up to five years, and a number were shot and killed attempting to flee.

  The total annual cost of the border troops rose from 600 million East German marks in 1970 to nearly 1 billion marks by 1983. By early 1989, East German economists calculated that each arrest cost the equivalent of 2.1 million marks, three times the average state-assigned "value" of a working person.

  On the western side, responsibility was divided among several organisations. The Bundesgrenzschutz, established in 1951 with 20,000 personnel, policed a zone 30 kilometres deep. The Bundeszollverwaltung manned the actual crossing points. The Bayerische Grenzpolizei covered the 390 kilometres of the border in Bavaria. The British Army by the 1970s conducted only one patrol per month in its sector. The Americans maintained a more continuous presence, with the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment based at Nuremberg and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fulda monitoring Warsaw Pact movements from observation posts along the line.

• 6. Escape and Death

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  Between 1950 and 1988, around four million East Germans migrated to the West. The great majority left legally or through third countries. During the 1980s, only about 1% of those who left did so by escaping across the border itself.

  An East German army study of attempted border crossings between the 1st of January 1974 and the 30th of November 1979 recorded 4,956 attempts. Of those, 80.4% were arrested in the outer restricted zone before even reaching the fences. Just 4.6% of those who tried, fewer than one in twenty, made it across.

  Refugees used every method imaginable. In September 1979, eight people from two families escaped in a home-made hot-air balloon, ascending to more than 2,500 metres before landing near the West German town of Naila. In 1971, a doctor swam 45 kilometres across the Baltic Sea from Rostock, nearly reaching the Danish island of Lolland, before being picked up by a West German yacht. In 1987, one escapee used meat hooks to scale the fences. In September 1964, fourteen East Germans, including eleven children, were smuggled across the border in a refrigerated truck, hidden under the carcasses of slaughtered pigs.

  Estimates of the death toll have risen steadily since reunification as East German records were opened. As of 2009, unofficial estimates put the number at up to 1,100 people killed on the inner German border across its 45-year existence. A further 189 people are estimated to have died attempting to flee via the Baltic Sea alone.

  Not all who died were escaping. On the 13th of October 1961, journalist Kurt Lichtenstein was shot near the village of Zicherie after he tried to speak with East German farm workers. In August 1976, Italian truck driver Benito Corghi, a member of the Italian Communist Party, was shot and killed at a crossing point; the GDR government, unusually, offered an apology. On the 1st of May 1976, former political prisoner Michael Gartenschläger was ambushed and killed by a Stasi commando squad near Büchen; the Stasi reported he had been "liquidated by security forces of the GDR".

  More than 75,000 people were imprisoned for attempting to escape, serving an average of one to two years. Guards who attempted escape received an average of five years.

• 7. The Ransom Economy

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  Between 1964 and 1989, the West German government paid to free 33,755 political prisoners from East German jails through a process called Freikauf, literally "the buying of freedom". A further 2,087 prisoners were released under an amnesty in 1972. Another 215,000 people, including 2,000 children cut off from their parents, were allowed to rejoin their families in the West.

  In exchange, West Germany paid over 3.4 billion Deutsche Marks, the equivalent of nearly 2.3 billion US dollars at 1990 prices, in goods and hard currency. The value placed on each prisoner varied by occupation. A worker was priced at around 1,875 DM; a doctor commanded around 11,250 DM. East Germany justified this sliding scale as compensation for state investment in the prisoner's training.

  For a period, payments were made in goods rather than cash, using items in short supply in East Germany: oranges, bananas, coffee, and medical drugs. The average prisoner was worth around 4,000 DM worth of goods. The scheme was deeply controversial in the West. Critics called it human trafficking. Defenders called it an act of humanitarianism. The West German government quietly listed the expenditure in its budget under the heading "support of special aid measures of an all-German character."

  In 1975, East Germany signed the Helsinki Accords, which included provisions on freedom of movement. East German citizens increasingly used the Accords to apply for exit visas. By the late 1980s, over 100,000 applications were being submitted annually, with between 15,000 and 25,000 approved. The process of applying was deliberately made slow and humiliating; applicants were demoted, sacked, excluded from universities, and subjected to social pressure. Over 10,000 applicants were arrested by the Stasi between the 1970s and 1989. A report for the Central Committee noted that the emigration problem "threatens to undermine beliefs in the correctness of the Party's policies."

• 8. The Fall

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  The border's collapse began not in Germany but in Hungary. In May 1989, a reformist communist government in Budapest began dismantling its fortifications with Austria, partly supported by a secret West German hard-currency loan of 500 million Deutsche Marks in exchange for allowing East German citizens to emigrate freely. Images of the barbed wire coming down were broadcast into East German homes by West German television. By September 1989, a mass exodus had begun.

  Tens of thousands of East Germans climbed the walls of West German embassies in Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest. When Czechoslovakia closed its border with East Germany to stop the flow, 1,500 East Germans stormed the main railway station in Dresden in a bid to board trains leaving the country. Small pro-democracy demonstrations swelled into crowds of hundreds of thousands across East Germany. The GDR leadership considered a violent response but lacked Soviet support for a military crackdown. Hardline party chairman Erich Honecker was replaced in October 1989 by Egon Krenz.

  On the evening of the 9th of November 1989, Politburo member Gunter Schabowski appeared at a press conference in East Berlin. He had been handed a note about plans to ease border controls from the following day. Misreading its scope, he announced the border would open "immediately, without delay." Asked by NBC reporter Tom Brokaw whether this applied to tourism, Schabowski clarified that "it is no question of tourism. It is a permission of leaving the GDR permanently." Within hours, thousands gathered at the Berlin Wall. The guards, unable to reach their superiors, opened the gates.

  While those iconic scenes played out in Berlin, the same process of border opening was unfolding along the entire 1,381-kilometre length of the inner German border. Within the first four days, 4.3 million East Germans crossed into the West. The border was not formally abandoned until the 1st of July 1990, exactly 45 years to the day since it had been established, just three months before German reunification ended the GDR entirely. Today, its path forms part of a European Green Belt linking national parks and nature reserves from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea.