The overnight move stunned Germans on both sides of the new border. As GDR soldiers patrolled the demarcation line and laborers began constructing a concrete wall, diplomatic officials and the militaries of both sides engaged in a series of tense standoffs.
Eventually, East Germany erected 27 miles of concrete wall through the city. People did try to escape. Initially, they fled from houses right along the Wall; later, those houses were emptied and turned into fortifications for the Wall itself. Others plotted riskier escapes through tunnels, on hot air balloons, and even via train.
Between and , over 5, people made successful escapes. Others were not so lucky; at least were killed or died while trying to cross the Wall. Over the years, the Wall became a grim symbol of the Cold War. By , many East Germans had had enough. They staged a series of mass demonstrations demanding democracy. Meanwhile, the Soviet bloc was destabilized by economic woes and political reforms. Meet the forgotten 'wolf children' of World War II.
Thousands of East Berliners flooded toward border crossings along the Wall, where confused guards eventually opened the gates. As East Berliners pushed through, tens of thousands of West Berliners met them in a massive outpouring of emotion and celebration.
As they celebrated with champagne, music, and tears, Berliners began to literally tear down the wall with sledgehammers and chisels. Less than a month later, the GDR collapsed entirely, and in , Germany reunified. Today, a double row of cobblestones marks the place where the wall once stood.
All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. To halt the exodus that was filling western transit camps to capacity, the East German communists were finally permitted by Moscow to close the border in August and build a physical barrier.
In a top-secret operation, observing radio silence, East German police and militia established a human cordon all along the margins of West Berlin. East German troops formed a second echelon and Soviet army units a third.
Assured by their Stasi forward observers in West Berlin that the western military presence would not react, the border forces went from erecting provisional wire-mesh fences to a more solid breeze-block wall, topped with barbed wire. The early wooden guard towers looked all-too like something from the recent past. Few were convinced. All told, the border installations around West Berlin zig-zagged for kilometres, or just over miles. Mines were sown in the ground or strung along certain sections of fencing, not removed until the s.
The Berlin Wall claimed the lives of at least people. One made it over, but year old Peter Fechter was shot in the back and collapsed. Western photographers leaned over, calling on guards to rescue the unfortunate teen, but he was left to bleed out at the foot of the Wall, the guards apparently afraid of retaliatory fire from the west.
Yet not all escapes were such clear-cut tragedies. One would-be escaper had been a part-time Stasi informer who missed his good times in the west. Failing a consolation entrance exam into the secret police, Werner Probst then decided to leave once and for all.
Slipping into the River Spree one night in October , close to the iconic Oberbaum Bridge, he was picked out in the water by a searchlight and shot just short of the far bank. Another nocturnal fire-fight three years later involved a tunnel that had been dug from West Berlin into a back yard on the far side. But their luck could not hold forever. Only after the Cold War did it emerge that he had been killed by friendly fire. Indeed, over half of the 25 border guards killed at the border were shot by their own side.
The last people killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall were Chris Gueffroy, shot in February , and Winfried Freudenberg, whose homemade hot-air balloon came to grief a month later. Yet far more persons escaped than were killed at the Berlin Wall. In the early sixties, escapers jumped from rooftops, abseiled from windows, burst through the Wall in improvised armoured trucks and steam locomotives, and hijacked ferries.
But the numbers escaping dwindled from the thousands in the early s to a handful each year by the s. New York hip hop-inspired artist Keith Haring became a coveted spray artist; Frenchman Thierry Noir specialised in colourful, primitivist Wall art. Many forgot to their cost that the five metres on the western side of the Wall also belonged to East Berlin!
Enclosed West Berlin became something of a mad, bad playground, attracting drop-outs and avant-gardists, who could enjoy a frisson of Cold War danger but with little actual danger. The Wall maintained its lure to the alienated as some late Cold War westerners no longer thought that the west was necessarily the best.
Punk band the Sex Pistols found their nihilistic match in it. The communist state still claimed to be exercising tough love for the common good. Living standards had risen by the mids, as the GDR was able to stabilise its workforce. East Berliners could be visited for the first time by West Berlin relatives at Christmas in , but the eastern authorities were taking no chances and tailed incomers with mass surveillance teams.
Freedom of travel remained an issue, however. Holiday destinations within the eastern bloc began to shrink in the s, when Poland became a no-go destination as the Solidarity movement blossomed there [a social movement that embodied the struggle against communism and Soviet domination, and ultimately helped lead to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe], followed by Russia under glasnost [Soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev which began the democratisation of the Soviet Union].
As Christian Honicke reports for German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel , developers tore down a section of the historic structure in Pankow, a borough in northeastern Berlin, to make way for luxury condominiums. Standing about 11 feet tall, the stretch of concrete had no special historical designations that would protect it from development. Few outside the Pankow neighborhood knew about the section, aside from graffiti artists looking to ply their canisters on its concrete.
Due to the absence of a special heritage designation, developers did not have to adhere to any specific procedures. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, , after an erroneous East German announcement that travel restrictions to West Germany would be lifted immediately.
Over the coming days, more than two million Berliners rushed to the border, some climbing the wall, others savaging it with sledgehammers and pickaxes.
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