The Fall of the Berlin Wall

At two in the morning on August 13, 1961, East German soldiers began unrolling barbed wire across the streets of Berlin. By dawn, they had sealed the border between the Soviet-controlled eastern sector and the Western-allied western sector. Within days the wire gave way to cinderblocks, and the cinderblocks gave way to reinforced concrete slabs topped with a smooth pipe designed to prevent anyone from getting a grip. Guard towers went up. A "death strip" was cleared between parallel walls: raked sand to show footprints, tripwires connected to automatic guns, dogs on running cables.

The A fortified barrier dividing West Berlin from East Berlin and the surrounding East German territory, built in 1961 and standing until 1989. The Wall was constructed by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) to stop the mass emigration of its citizens to the West. It became the defining physical symbol of the Cold War's division of Europe, with at least 140 people killed attempting to cross it. was not a wall between two countries. It was a wall through the middle of a single city, separating families, cutting off neighborhoods, severing subway lines mid-route. People who had walked to work across the sector boundary on Friday found themselves imprisoned on Monday. Some jumped from upper-story windows of buildings that straddled the border before those windows were bricked shut.

The East German government called it the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" and claimed it existed to keep Western spies and saboteurs out. Nobody was fooled. The Wall existed because too many East Germans were leaving. Between 1949 and 1961, roughly 3.5 million people, about a fifth of the population, had fled East Germany through the open border in Berlin. The hemorrhage was gutting the country of its young professionals, its doctors, its engineers. The Wall was an admission that the state could not retain its own citizens by persuasion. It could only do so by force.