Greetings from Berlin a city that had a wall too!
Since we celebrated yesterday 3. of Oktober in
Germany Berlin its good to remind yourself
how great it is to live in a city, a country that was divided with Neighbors that were born in the Soviet Union part of Berlin Germany that did learn Russian in school, people that died fleeing at the Border, and people that were ordered to shoot at people trying to cross illegally the Border from the Soviet part of Berlin.
Now it's more important than ever to celebrate and remember the fall of the wall
SO GET YOUR BERLIN TSHIRT TODAY
In the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, the GDR government began to seal off the sector borders in downtown Berlin and the border around West Berlin with barbed wire. On the night of August 17 to 18, the actual construction of the "Berlin Wall" began. The reason: more than 2.5 million people had fled from the GDR to the Federal Republic between 1949 and 1961. The GDR was threatened with economic collapse. The GDR government therefore already had the inner German border with the Federal Republic closed on May 26, 1952, and on May 13, the border with the Federal Republic of Germany was closed. August 1961 close the Berlin sector and surrounding border to stop the movement of refugees and to seal off the way to the west.
In 1958, Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech in which he announced the end of the Potsdam Agreement, which regulates the post-war order in Germany. Khrushchev called on the Western powers to conclude a peace treaty with the GDR and also to negotiate with it about the fate of West Berlin, if there was still any interest in this at all. A provocation that triggered the so-called "Berlin crisis".
Until the construction of the wall, there were repeated military threats between the occupying powers. Therefore, there was no official permission for the wall from Moscow either. The construction by the GDR in 1961 took place under Walter Ulbricht's political responsibility, after he was finally able to convince the Moscow state leadership of the construction of a wall, which in his opinion was necessary, as a result of hard negotiations.
Who said, "No one wants to build a wall?"
With this famous phrase, Walter Ulbricht publicly denounced his plans to build a wall between the two divided German states. Ulbricht received approval to close the border between East and West Berlin on 3 August 1961. "No one wants to build a wall!" went down in German history as one of the biggest lies.
Erich Honecker is responsible for the practical implementation of the construction of the wall: on August 13 at 6 o'clock it is "done": the Berliners are awakening in a two-part city, east and west are now separated by a sharply guarded border. The Allied forces in West Berlin are taken by surprise, but their leaders do not want to risk a Third World War. With the perfect implementation of the plan, Erich Honecker impresses his political foster father Ulbricht and also the Soviet leadership.
How long did it take to build the Berlin Wall?
On August 13, 1961, the GDR government had the sector border in Berlin's inner city area and the border around West Berlin sealed off with barbed wire. On the night of August 17-18, 1961, the construction of a wall was started. Until 1989, the so-called "anti-fascist protective wall" for peace was expanded, modernized and perfected year after year. In total, the Berlin Wall was about 156 kilometers long. When did the Wall fall in the GDR? What were the consequences of building the wall?
The construction of the wall initially stopped - as intended by the GDR government – the mass flight from the east to the west. However, in the long run, people felt imprisoned. After the wall was built, West Berlin was considered a city with one of the highest suicide rates in the world. For East Berlin, however, the number of suicides and suicide attempts was even higher. It was only in the 1970s that the "German question" seemed to lose its importance. The world and more and more West Germans got used to the division of the country. But in the east it fermented. In May 1989, opposition members demonstrated fake local elections. In the summer, many East Germans traveled to Hungary, where the Iron Curtain on the border with Austria had become permeable, and occupy the German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. The already smoldering protest turned into a mass movement. Greetings from Berlin !!
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