Berlin Wall
On November 11, 1958, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev declared the 1944 London Protocol invalid. The Western powers of France, Great Britain, and the United States had forfeited their rights to stay in West Berlin, he said, and the latter should become an “independent political unit, a free city.” Khrushchev issued an ultimatum: if Western powers would not comply with his proposal, then Moscow would sign a separate peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and pursue the eviction of any Allied presence from West Berlin.
Ensuing diplomatic contacts (a foreign minister conference in Geneva in 1959, U.S.-Soviet summits in 1959 and 1960) partly defused the imminence of the “Berlin crisis,” but tensions and military contingency preparations continued at a high level. Mainly due to U.S. initiative, in May 1961 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defined three nonnegotiable “essentials” from the Western perspective: the freedom of West Berlin’s people to choose their own political system; an Allied military presence in the Western sectors; and unrestrained access to West Berlin through the GDR by air, by land, and on water.During this period, the GDR’s implementation of socialism at various levels of East German society, peaking between the years of 1958 and 1960, had led to a constant flow of refugees to West Berlin and West Germany through open borders in Berlin. Between 1955 and 1961, more than 200,000 East Germans annually had left the GDR, among them many skilled workers and professionals in high demand. It became clear that the GDR might not survive as a state with open borders to West Berlin. Starting in the fall of 1960, GDR pressure on the Soviet Union to guarantee the ongoing existence of the East German “Socialist state” by closing the borders to West Berlin became ever more persistent. It eventually met Nikita Khrushchev’s approval in early July 1961 when the Soviet leader had felt the time for such a measure was ripe.
On August 7, 1961, GDR leader Walter Ul- bricht informed the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) on the forthcoming implementation of long-prepared measures along the sectoral border around West Berlin. During the night of August 12—13, 1961, GDR police and Kampfgruppen units (worker militias) began to set up barbed wire on East German territory and surrounded the entire city of West Berlin along an approximate length of 155 kilometers (97 miles). Over the next few weeks, those provisional devices were to be replaced with walls made of brick and concrete. Of formerly eighty-one street border crossings between East and West Berlin, just seven heavily guarded ones remained. Public transportation between both halves of the city was cut off permanently. GDR propaganda praised the sealed border as an “antifaschistischer Schutzwall” (anti-Fascist protection wall) against Western aggressiveness, thereby willfully ignoring how the wall’s fortifications were directed against the East German people to prevent them from leaving the GDR.The three Western Allied powers issued a note of protest to the Soviets but otherwise saw to the upholding of the “three essentials.” In fact, the erection of the wall seemed to have concluded a dangerously lingering crisis and diminished the possibility of a nuclear war over Berlin. John F. Kennedy was relieved that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war” (Beschloss 1991, 278). Nonetheless, the situation in
A woman stands at the Berlin Wall in west sector, after waiting three hours to see her East Berlin friends and relatives, 1961. (Library of Congress)
Berlin became extremely tense in late October 1961, when Soviet and U.S. tanks confronted each other across the Allied “Checkpoint Charlie.” Soviet nuclear forces had been put on high alert, and the Kennedy administration pondered nuclear war scenarios as well.
Eventually the GDR stopped its violations of Berlin’s four- power status, and efforts to prevent Western allies from entering East Berlin ceased.After his initial disappointment and irritation about Washington’s lackluster reaction in August 1961, West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt finally fell in line with Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been sent to West Berlin to assure its population of continued U.S. support. Later Brandt would note how the brutal reality of the cold war, manifested in August 1961, inspired him to move ahead with an Ostpolitik of reconciliation and accommodation with the East. Cold war confrontation had only deepened German division. The best way to overcome it was to accept realities first and work toward changing them later. Starting with the intra-German Pass Agreements from 1963 to 1966 and continuing with the GDR visa for Western citizens and tourists later on, the Berlin border became permeable at least from West to East.
The Berlin Wall itself and its vast and various hinterland fortifications became an almost insurmountable obstacle for attempts to flee into West Berlin. Only in the years immediately after 1961 did a significant number of escapes succeed, among them many attempts through underground tunnels and with the support of organized rings of Fluchthelfer (flight helpers). The
GDR border guard’s shoot to kill order against refugees resulted in about 250—300 deaths between August 24, 1961, and February 2, 1989.
In October 1989, the GDR regime gave in to massive demonstrations in all major East German cities and frantically started various kinds of late reforms to consolidate its crumbling power. When SED Politburo member Gunter Schabowski announced a revised version of the GDR’s Travel Law during an international press conference on November 9, 1989, thousands of East Germans streamed to Berlin border crossings and forced their opening. Within days, amid scenes of jubilation, people took hammers and chisled away the wall piece by piece.
City contractors began to remove large segments. Visa requirements to enter West and East Berlin were waived on December 22, 1989. Farcically, passport checks remained in place until June 30, 1990. Remnants of the Berlin Wall ended up as souvenirs all over the world. Larger chunks were shredded and utilized for road construction in Germany.Bernd Schaefer
See also German Unification (1990);
Halvorsen, Gail S.; West Berlin
References and Further Reading
Beschloss, Michael R. The Crisis Years:
Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960—1963. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Harrison, Hope M. Driving the Soviets Up the Wall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Hertle, Hans-Hermann, Konrad Jarausch, and Christoph Klessmann, eds. Mauerbau und Mauerfall: Ursachen, Verlauf, Auswirkungen. Berlin: Christoph Links, 2002.
Lapp, Peter Joachim. Gefechtsdienst im Frieden: Das Grenzregime der DDR, 1945—1990. Koblenz: Bernard and Graefe, 1999.
Uhl, Matthias, and Armin Wagner, eds. Ulbricht, Chruschtschow und die Mauer. Muenchen: Oldenbourg, 2003.