The Berlin Wall (Episode 1): The Prelude to Division

‘The Berlin Wall is one of the most recognisable symbols of the Cold War, representing the division between East and West Germany, as well as the broader ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western allies. Erected in 1961 and standing until 1989, the wall not only physically separated families and communities but also came to symbolise the repression and lack of freedom experienced in the Eastern Bloc countries. Its eventual fall in 1989 marked a significant moment in history, leading to German reunification and signalling the end of the Cold War. This bite-sized episode is the first episode in a history buff series about the Berlin Wall. Over the course of five episodes, we are going to chart the course of the Wall that divided a city in the heart of a divided Europe. 

We’ll talk about what led to its construction, the actual building of the Wall itself in 1961, escapes and deaths at the Wall, life on either side of the Wall, how Berlin became a bastion of counterculture, and also how the Wall eventually fell in 1989. For most of these episodes, I’ll be joined by fellow tour guides here in Berlin to discuss these topics. But today, for talking about the background and context leading up to the building of the Wall, I wanted to explain it in a simple, bite-sized episode. In order to understand why, on earth, a wall could be built to divide a city, we first of all have to go back to 1945, to the end of the Second World War. The most destructive war in human history had ended in the total defeat and unconditional surrender of Germany to the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, namely the United States and Britain. 

This uneasy alliance between East and West had been bound together by a common enemy, Adolf Hitler, and his murderous Nazi regime. As soon as Hitler was dead, the Nazi regime had crumbled, and the end of the war was declared on 8 May 1945. The two sides then had to work together to rebuild Europe, and this is where the problem started. Now, unlike Germany’s surrender in the First World War, where Germany was forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Versailles and pay exorbitant amounts of money in reparations to the victors, Germany’s surrender at the end of the Second World War was unconditional, which meant the victorious powers could do whatever they pleased with Germany. 

The Soviets, Americans, and British had agreed in Yalta in February 1945 that Germany would be divided up into four occupation zones between the victorious powers: the Soviet Union and the Western Allies—the United States, Britain, and France. The problem arose because not only did these two sides have two completely opposing ideologies—Communism for the Soviets and Capitalism for the Western Allies—they also had two completely opposing visions for the future of Germany and Europe as a whole. The Western Allies wanted to bring Germany back onto its feet, pump it with money, rebuild its infrastructure, and install a capitalist democratic state in the Western mould. 

However, the Soviet Union wanted to keep Germany on its knees, strip out its infrastructure, take it back to the Soviet Union, make Germany pay for the devastating war it had just inflicted on them, and install a Communist dictatorship that would be subservient to Moscow. These two opposing ideologies and visions led to the Cold War, an extended period of tension between these two power blocs—the Western bloc, headed by the United States, and the Eastern bloc, headed by the Soviet Union—with a constant threat of escalation into the Third World War, which would not be fought traditionally on the battlefield. It would be fought using nuclear weapons: mutually assured destruction. 

This is why it was called the Cold War, because it never heated up due to the mutual deterrent effect of these nuclear weapons. On 21 June 1948, after three years of occupation, the Western Allies decided to introduce a new currency, the Deutschmark, in the western sectors of Germany and Berlin, as they knew this was the only way to bring Germany back onto its feet. However, the Soviets refused to take the Western currency because they knew this would lead to de facto American dominance. So then, they announced their own currency for the Eastern sectors the next day, on 22 June: the Ostmark. By this point, the Soviets were pretty sick of having the Western Allies in Berlin. 

They believed that Berlin was rightfully entirely theirs, as it was well within their sector, and they had sacrificed the most in the war. So they decided to try and get the Western Allies out of Berlin. However, they knew they couldn’t invade West Berlin and kick them out by force because this would lead to war. So they tried to get the Western Allies out indirectly. If you’re wondering how the Western Allies had access to West Berlin, it was through three corridors through the Soviet sector. So the Soviets sealed off these entrances, starting a blockade of West Berlin in order to try and starve West Berlin of goods and supplies, demoralise them, and get them to force the Western Allies out of their own accord. 

However, this ended up precipitating one of the greatest humanitarian feats in history, called the Berlin Airlift. This is where the Western Allies flew in all the supplies for West Berlin by air. At the height of the airlift, there was a plane landing every one minute, delivering food, coal, fuel, and everything the West Berliners needed. On average, over the whole course of the airlift, there was a plane landing every three minutes. By May 1949, the standard of living of West Berliners had actually gone up rather than down. So it was a huge embarrassment for the Soviets, who then called off the blockade in May 1949 and allowed the Western Allies to once more supply West Berlin by land. 

At this point, the Soviets and Western Allies realised that they weren’t going to get along. Their differences were irreconcilable, and so Germany was officially separated into two separate states. On 23 May 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, was formed in the Western sectors, which was a capitalist, democratic country in the Western mould. And on 7 October 1949, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was proclaimed in the Soviet sector, which was a Marxist-Leninist state in the Soviet mould. West Berlin, however, remained its own political enclave. 

In fact, it wasn’t even technically part of West Germany. One key difference with West Germany is that it remained fully occupied by the Western Allies, who wanted to stay in Berlin to maintain a presence in Eastern Europe, monitor Soviet activities, and symbolically not give up on the idea of German reunification. By the early 1950s, West Germany’s economy was starting to undergo an economic miracle, thanks to money being pumped into it by the U.S. However, East Germany’s economy was lagging quite far behind. Indeed, much of the East still lay in ruins from the war because the Soviets had stripped them of much of their infrastructure. 

Not just in East Germany, but in all the countries in the Eastern Bloc that had had Communist dictatorships installed by the Soviets after the war, such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, etc., a lot of people did not want to live under Communism. It was totalitarian in nature. There was forced collectivization of agriculture and nationalisation of industry. But there were also higher living standards and better wages in the West. Therefore, many Eastern Europeans were emigrating to the West in general. Therefore, in 1952, the Soviets brought down the Iron Curtain, uh, which divided the Communist Eastern Bloc from the capitalist Western Bloc. 

So, if you were an East German, you could now no longer go over the inner German border. However, there was still a hole in the Iron Curtain, and that was West Berlin. And it’s a hole through which millions of East Germans would flee to the West over the coming years. In June 1953, the East German government declared that all workers would have to increase output by 10%, but without any extra pay. This sparked an uprising on 17 June that had to be brutally suppressed by Soviet tanks. About 125 people were killed, and 15,000 were arrested. After this, East Germany significantly bolstered its regime of surveillance against its own population with the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi.

After this, there was a rapid increase in the number of East Germans fleeing to the West through West Berlin. They would cross into West Berlin from East Berlin and be welcomed at the Marienfelde transit camp, where they would be registered as refugees and then flown across to West Germany. They would always be flown because, if they went overland, they could be stopped at a checkpoint by East German authorities and made to stay in the East. Upon arrival in West Germany, East German refugees were welcomed with open arms, a place to live, a job, and 100 Deutschmarks’ welcoming money. 

By 1961, almost 3 million East Germans had fled to the West, mostly young, educated people who had been educated at East Germany’s expense and who were now taking their very valuable skills to the West. So, doctors, engineers, architects, lawyers, teachers—all highly skilled people. So, it was a brain drain which would be unsustainable for East Germany if it was allowed to continue. So, something had to be done. The mass emigration of East Germans to the West through West Berlin was a major source of tension during the Cold War between the Soviets and the Americans. 

The Soviets also still wanted the Western Allies out of West Berlin. East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht pressured Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev into signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany. By signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany, the Soviet Union would effectively transfer its rights and responsibilities regarding East Berlin and the access routes to West Berlin to the East German government. This would undermine the four-power status of Berlin agreed upon by the Allies after the Second World War and give East Germany greater control over the city. 

Ulbricht also wanted to seal the border between East and West Berlin, but Khrushchev was worried about how the West would react. The tension continued to increase, and this eventually led to a summit between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev in Vienna on 4 June 1961 to try to resolve the issue. The meeting is generally regarded to have resulted in a stalemate with no resolution of the issues that were discussed. All the while, Ulbricht continued to pester Khrushchev to allow him to seal the border and build a wall around West Berlin. 

On 15 June, Ulbricht gave a famous press conference where he was asked directly by a journalist if his plans included closing the border and a wall at the Brandenburg Gate, to which he replied, “No one has any intention of building a wall.” This was obviously a complete lie, as he had already meticulously planned the building of such a wall with his security secretary and future leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker. All he needed now was a green light from Moscow. The green light was eventually given by Khrushchev on 1 August, after he acknowledged that West Berlin was “a bone in our throats” that needed to be dealt with. 

Twelve days later, the Berlin Wall was built within two days, sealing off the last remaining hole between East and West and trapping East Germans in East Germany. But more on that in the next episode. For now, there is one more part of the Berlin crisis after the building of the Wall. This stabilised the relationship between the East and West because the source of tension, the mass migration of people through West Berlin, had been dealt with. However, one event brought the nature of the relationship between the occupying powers in Berlin to the fore and almost led to the Third World War. 

At the 1945 Potsdam Conference, the four Allied powers—the Soviet Union, United States, United Kingdom, and France—agreed that Allied personnel could move freely within any sector of Berlin. However, on 22 October 1961, two months after the Berlin Wall’s construction, U.S. Chief of Mission in West Berlin, E. Allen Leitner, was stopped by East German police at Checkpoint Charlie while crossing into East Berlin. President John F. Kennedy, working with retired General Lucius D. Clay, who had overseen the Berlin Airlift, decided to demonstrate American resolve. Although there was a consideration to remove the barriers by force, it was overruled.

The U.S. Commandant in Berlin, General Watson, was outraged by East Berlin’s attempt to control American military movements and demanded that Soviet authorities intervene. Soviet Commandant Colonel Solovyev argued that requesting identification was a reasonable control measure and warned that continued provocations would lead to reciprocal actions. On 27 October 1961, under General Clay’s direction, U.S. tanks and troops were positioned near Checkpoint Charlie. In response, 33 Soviet T-54 tanks moved to the Brandenburg Gate, with 10 advancing close to Checkpoint Charlie. 

For 16 hours, U.S. and Soviet tanks faced each other, both loaded with live ammunition, escalating the crisis. To de-escalate the situation, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Soviet Premier Khrushchev communicated through back channels. They agreed to withdraw the tanks, with Soviet tanks pulling back first, followed by the Americans. This mutual de-escalation marked the resolution of the standoff, but it was the closest we’d come to the Third World War apart from the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy acknowledged that while the Berlin Wall was not ideal, it was preferable to war. 

The incident highlighted the precarious balance of power during the Cold War and the importance of communication in averting military conflict. So, there you have the prelude to the building of the Berlin Wall. Join us on the next episode, where I will be joined by a fellow tour guide here in Berlin. We will talk about the building of the Berlin Wall on that fateful night in August 1961 and how it was constantly improved over its 28-year existence. 

Many thanks for joining, and see you next time. Goodbye.’