Construction of the Berlin Wall
East Germany closed the border through Berlin on the night of 12 August 1961 with barbed wire and began building in concrete. The reason was emigration. Some 2.7 million people had left the German Democratic Republic since 1949, about a sixth of the population, and they were disproportionately young, educated and skilled — doctors, engineers and teachers walking through an open city and taking a train west. The state was losing the people it had trained. Khrushchev had spent three years demanding a settlement that would end the western presence in Berlin and had been refused, and the wall was the alternative to a crisis he did not want. Some 40,000 troops and police sealed 156 kilometres of boundary overnight, tearing up streets and blocking underground stations. Families were divided by a street. The wall as it developed was two walls with a strip between them containing watchtowers, dog runs, tripwires, anti-vehicle ditches and a raked sand bed, and the order to guards was to prevent crossings by any means. At least 140 people were killed attempting it, the first within days. Kennedy's private reaction was that a wall was a great deal better than a war, and no western government did anything. It stood for twenty-eight years and was opened on 9 November 1989 by a spokesman who misread a note at a press conference. The regime's own name for it was the anti-fascist protection rampart, which is the single least convincing piece of official language of the period. It was built to keep its own citizens in, and every East German knew which side the watchtowers faced.
- Year: 1961 CE
- Category: Political
