The Berlin Wall

After World War II in 1945 Berlin, badly damaged during the war, was situated within the German Democratic Republic(GDR) or east germany. The city was subsequently partitioned into East Berlin and West Berlin. The divided city symbolized the collapse of the German Empire of which it had been the capital and became a focus of Cold War tensions between the communist nations led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the group of Western nations led by the United States.

Initially many East Berliners worked in the west and attended films, concerts etc returning home at night. But the more prosperous west berlin allured up to 20,000 East Germans a month. Nikita Khrushchev's decision to give responsibility for security in Berlin's Soviet sector to the GDR leader Walter Ulbricht and his Socialist Unity Party earlier that year led to the east germans building the wall on August 13, 1961. The so-called 'Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier' was meant to keep workers in and the GDR economy from crashing. The concrete and barbed wire kept tens of thousands of people separated from jobs,family and friends. During the time it stood, more than 100 people died attempting to cross from East to West Berlin.

The Wall stood for more than 28 years, some 165 km of prefab slabs which was protected by a no-man's-land of barbed wire, land mines, watchtowers and attack dogs on the east. On August 24th 1961, the GDR border police shot and killed a person trying to run away. The full extent of the system's cruelty became apparent when 18-year-old Peter Fechtner was shot during his attempt to flee, then left to bleed to death with the East German police looking on.

Initially, the GDR tried to completely seal itself off from the west, but over time restrictions for travel into East Berlin were loosened. In December 1963, the first West Berliners were allowed to visit friends and family in the east. Nine months later, senior citizens got permission to cross the border into the city's western section. Within a year, the GDR began levying an 'admission fee'. But in the end nothing could prevent the collapse of the Wall. On November 9th, 1989, thousands of East Berliners chiseling off chips of the Wall, streamed into the west. Soon after most of it was taken down and, in some cases, sold off to museums and private collectors. However, some stretches still stand, silent symbols not just of an era of division but also of the triumph of freedom over an oppressive political system.

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