The Wall rose after 3.5 million East Germans walked west
East Germany began the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961, a guarded concrete ring around West Berlin meant to stop the bleed of citizens into the West. Propaganda called it an Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart; Westerners saw a prison wall. It stood until peaceful 1989 upheavals cracked the Iron Curtain.
After Germany's defeat in 1945, the Potsdam Agreement carved the country west of the Oder-Neisse line into four occupation zones run by the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Berlin, seat of the Allied Control Council, was split into four sectors too, even though the whole city lay inside the Soviet zone. Within two years the Soviets had fallen out with the others over reconstruction and over accounting for industrial plant, some of which they had already removed, and the Western powers moved to merge their zones and extend the Marshall Plan.
Moscow installed communist governments across the lands its armies held, from Poland and Hungary to its own German zone, which became the German Democratic Republic. Yet the GDR leaked people. Before 1961 about 3.5 million East Germans, some 20 percent of the population, slipped around emigration controls, many simply by crossing from East to West Berlin and travelling on from there.
On 13 August 1961 the GDR began building the Wall around West Berlin. It grew into concrete barriers and guard towers backed by a wide death strip laced with vehicle trenches and beds of nails. Official propaganda called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart; West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt called it the Wall of Shame. Deadly force ended nearly all emigration. More than 100,000 people tried to escape and over 5,000 made it, while estimates of those killed by East German authorities in and around Berlin range from 136 to more than 200. With the longer inner German border, it became the physical face of the Iron Curtain.
The end came peacefully. Revolutions in Poland and Hungary and the Pan-European Picnic in 1989 cracked the Curtain and put Eastern rulers under public pressure. After weeks of unrest, East Germany announced on 9 November 1989 that its citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds crossed and climbed the Wall, and souvenir hunters chipped at it for weeks. The Brandenburg Gate crossing reopened on 22 December 1989, demolition began on 13 June 1990 and finished in 1994, and the Wall's fall opened the road to German reunification.
Source: Berlin Wall
