The fall of the Berlin Wall
Thirty years ago this week, the wall which divided both Germany and Europe came down
Why did they construct a wall?
It was built, says historian Tony Judt, “to staunch a demographic haemorrhage”. In the 1950s, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – the Soviet satellite state formed from the area occupied by the Red Army in WWII – was threatening to bleed dry. Between 1949 and 1961, some 2.5 million to 3 million GDR citizens (about one in six) left to take part in West Germany’s “economic miracle”. And though the GDR had sealed off its border with the West in 1952, there was a leak in Berlin. Berlin was deep inside East Germany, but under a 1945 agreement, its western zone was controlled by the US, Britain and France. By 1961, when the Wall went up, thousands of East Germans – particularly skilled professionals – were leaving every day.
Why did the GDR act in 1961?
In the 1950s, East Germans could just walk across to West Berlin, or take the U-Bahn; 60,000 people commuted over the border to work every day. “The presence in Berlin of an open and essentially uncontrolled border between the socialist and capitalist worlds unwittingly prompts people to make a comparison between both parts of the city which, unfortunately, does not always turn out in favour of Democratic [East] Berlin,” the Soviet ambassador remarked in 1959. In June 1961, the head of the GDR’s state council, Walter Ulbricht, was asked whether the border needed to be strengthened and replied with an infamous Freudian slip: “No one intends to build a wall.” That prompted at least 20,000 East Germans to escape over the next two months, before Moscow gave the go-ahead for the building of the Wall.
How was the Wall constructed?
Before dawn on 13 August 1961, some 40,000 soldiers and police officers moved through East Berlin and set a cordon at what had previously been a largely invisible border. By first light, thousands of kilometres of barbed wire had been erected, rail lines blocked and telephone wires cut. The Berlin Wall, or Berliner Mauer, would remain in place for 28 years – a symbol of a divided Europe and a rare case of a wall designed to keep people in, not out. In all, the Wall covered just over 100 miles, entirely encircling West Berlin. In the most heavily fortified 27-mile section dividing the city, barbed wire was replaced with breeze blocks: in time, there was an inner and an outer wall, with a “death strip” 300ft wide between the two, guarded by watchtowers, machine gun-toting soldiers, dogs, floodlights, trip-wires and trenches. Although some still tried to cross, the numbers were greatly reduced (see box).
Why did it come down in 1989?
The single most important factor in the end of the Cold War was the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. The early 1980s had seen US-Soviet relations reach new lows, but the Gorbachev era saw a major rapprochement: he abandoned the arms race, and in 1988 effectively renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine: the axiom, forged in Czechoslovakia in 1968, that the Soviet Union would use military force to intervene wherever socialist rule was under threat in eastern Europe. The effects were immediate: the summer of 1989 saw the fall of communism first in Poland, and then in Hungary – which began dismantling its section of the Iron Curtain on the Austrian border.
How did that affect the GDR?
It led to an exodus of East Germans via Hungary, which was quickly blocked by the GDR. This, in turn, led to mass demonstrations in Berlin and Leipzig, where crowds assembled to demand that the one-party state reform itself and allow its citizens to leave. The regime refused: the 77-year-old Erich Honecker, general secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, declared that those seeking to emigrate had been “blackmailed through enticements, promises and threats to renounce the... fundamental principles of socialism”. Gorbachev, visiting to mark the GDR’s 40th birthday, publicly warned Honecker that “life punishes those who delay”. The protesters’ determination was duly redoubled. The final straw came on 9 November, when the regime announced it would allow citizens to apply for passports to travel to the West. At a press conference, party spokesman Günter Schabowski was asked when the measure would take effect. He replied – mistakenly – “immediately”.
What happened as a result of the press conference?
West German news bulletins, watched by East Germans, declared that the Wall was open. By midnight, tens of thousands of East Berliners had gathered at the checkpoints. No one in the GDR regime would take personal responsibility for ordering the use of lethal force, so the vastly outnumbered soldiers eventually simply let a huge crowd of East German citizens pass. Soon afterwards, a large crowd of West Berliners came to join East German youngsters at the Wall. The Wall itself disappeared very fast: it was hacked at by protesters and later swiftly dismantled by GDR border guards, with the help of equipment from the Royal Engineers garrisoned in West Berlin.
When was Germany unified?
Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s West German government immediately pushed for reunification. Both Britain and France had deep reservations about the prospect of a united Germany; the Soviets had been committed to keeping it divided since Stalin’s time. In the end, Gorbachev accepted the inevitable after the US insisted that Germany would remain closely locked in to the Nato alliance. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, noted that: “the Cold War ended when the Soviets accepted a united Germany in Nato”. That happened in July 1990, but the falling of the Wall remains symbolic of the end of division in Germany, and Europe at large.