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Fortifications

Initial Construction of the Berlin Wall

The Iron Curtain

Impact

FAll of The Berlin Wall

*November 9, 1989-The East German government announces that visits in West Germany and West Berlin will be permitted. Thousands of East Berliners pass into West Berlin as border guards stand by. People begin tearing down the wall which is opened.

*December 22, 1989-The Brandenburg Gate is opened

*June 15, 1961-First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of the GDR and Staatsrat chairman Walter Ulbricht states at an international press conference: "No one has the intention to erect a wall!"

*August 13, 1961-The Berlin border between East and West Berlin is closed. The zonal boundary is sealed in the morning by “Shock workers” from East Germany and Russia with a barrier of barbed wire and light fencing that eventually became a complex series of wall, fortified fences, gun positions and watchtowers heavily guarded and patrolled. The August 13 operation lasted 24 hours.

*The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and defused the crisis over Berlin.

-President Kennedy said that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

*From 1961 until the wall came down in 1989, more than 5,000 East Germans (including some 600 border guards) managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds.

*The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

*The Berlin Wall impacted pop culture, world views, and symbolized the struggles of the Cold War.

* The Iron Curtain divided Post-WWII Europe into two spheres of influence

* The eastern part of Germany went to the Soviet Union, while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and (eventually) France.

*Despite this division, between 1949 and 1961, 2.7 million people left the GDR.Roughly half a million people crossed the sector borders in Berlin each day in both directions, enabling them to compare living conditions on both sides.

* GDR headed for economic and social collapse.

*The Wall was not able to completely stop the westward migration because it separated friends and relatives in Berlin, the pressure on East Berliners and people living on the outskirts of Berlin to flee became even greater.

*This led to the increase of border fortifications.

* Similar to the Maze Runner- keeps them in

*Initially, after every successful escape, border soldiers and pioneer units added temporary, individual barriers behind the border wall.

*200 people are believed to have died at the wall

*In the mid-sixties the SED tore down buildings to make room for a uniform border strip that would provide border soldiers with an “unobstructed view and clear field of fire.” Over the following years more and more barriers were installed within this “death strip.”

“It is your duty to use your combat ... skills in such a way as to overcome the cunning of the border breacher, to challenge or liquidate him in order to thwart the planned border breach. ... Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past.”

*August 15, 1961- The first concrete elements and large square blocks are used on this date. Within the next months the first generation of the Berlin Wall was build up: a wall consisting of concrete elements and square blocks.

*August 24, 1961- The first person to be killed trying to cross the wall was Gunter Litfin.

* October 1, 1973- An explicit firing order is issued to a special team of Stasi agents tasked with infiltrating regular units of border guards to prevent their colleagues from defecting.

*1975-1976- Construction of 75 (Border Wall ’75) begins. This new installation penetrated deeper into East German territory and included a touch-sensitive, self-firing fence. The product of a large-scale development and testing program, it was made of L-shaped sections of pre-cast concrete used by farmers to build open silos. Each section was 3.60 meters high and 1.20 meters wide and was topped off by a smooth asbestos-concrete pipe 40 centimeters in diameter.

*In the first 11 days of August, 16,000 East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin, and on August 12 some 2,400 followed—the largest number of defectors ever to leave East Germany in a single day.

http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall

http://www.the-berlin-wall.com/

http://www.berlin.de/mauer/geschichte/index.en.html

http://www.coldwar.org/articles/60s/BerlinWallTimeLine.asp

The Evolution of the Berlin Wall

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