Why was the Berlin Wall built?

A state emptying out

From 1949 to the middle of 1961, about 2.7 million people left East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Many were young and trained: doctors, engineers, skilled workers, exactly the people a new state could least afford to lose. In July 1961 alone, about thirty thousand reached the West. Leaving without permission was a crime the GDR called Republikflucht, flight from the republic, and still they went.

Most went through Berlin. In 1952 East Germany had fenced off its long border with West Germany, but Berlin, still run under the four-power agreements of 1945, stayed open. West Berlin, made of the American, British and French sectors, was an island inside East Germany. An East German could ride the city train into it, register at a reception camp such as Marienfelde and be flown out to West Germany. Tens of thousands of East Berliners also crossed every day to jobs in the West.

The night of August 12–13, 1961

Just after midnight on Sunday, August 13, police, soldiers and armed factory militia began stringing barbed wire across the streets where the Soviet sector met the Western ones. Trains stopped short of the border. By morning the open door was shut, and families found themselves on opposite sides of a single street. The operation’s code name was Rose.

It had been prepared in secret. Two months earlier Walter Ulbricht, East Germany’s leader, had denied any plan to build a wall, and on August 1 Nikita Khrushchev gave him the go-ahead: the denial and the decision have a page of their own.

Wire came first. Within days, workers laid concrete blocks along the line, and the tall slab wall most people picture came only in the 1970s, as the Wall’s length and layers show.

What East Germany called it

The GDR never described it as a wall to keep its own people in. The decree of August 12, 1961, spoke of border controls “customary at the borders of every sovereign state.” Soon the official name was antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the “anti-fascist protection rampart.”

The name made the West the threat. In the GDR’s telling, the barrier protected a socialist state from spies and saboteurs, from Western recruiters who lured away workers it had trained at its own expense, and from a West Germany it portrayed as run by former Nazis. Inside East Germany, that was the only version allowed in print.

What the West called it

In West Berlin, Mayor Willy Brandt called the closure “an outrageous injustice” and compared the barrier to the wall around a concentration camp. West Germans soon spoke of the Schandmauer, the Wall of Shame. Each side reached for the Nazi past to describe the same concrete.

The Western Allies protested and stayed put. The wire stood on the Eastern side of the line, and their own troops, their rights and their road into West Berlin were untouched.

As a barrier, it worked. The flow of people through Berlin stopped almost overnight. Even so, about 5,000 still got across in the next 28 years, and at least 140 died at the Wall, each of them now named.