THE WALL RISES

One week after Titov’s mission, on 13 August 1961, East German troops sealed borders inside Berlin and began the construction of what would become a permanent barrier around the three western sectors of the city. Since the end of the Second World War, the former territory of Nazi Germany had been divided into four occupation zones – controlled, respectively, by the United States, Britain, France

and the Soviet Union – and, although it lay deep within the Russian sector, the old capital was itself divided into four areas. Within the next few years, increasing tensions led the American, British and French sectors to become consolidated into the Federal Republic of Germany, together with ‘West’ Berlin, while the Soviet region became known as the German Democratic Republic, with ‘East’ Berlin. Under the direction of Joseph Stalin and his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, East German border defences were substantially improved during the Fifties, ostensibly to prevent the free movement of western agents in the GDR, and a barbed-wire fence was erected. However, the border remained open, albeit with restrictions, to traffic.

The closure of this border with a more permanent barrier in August 1961 was carried out by East German authorities, with no direct Soviet involvement, although some observers have seen Nikita Khrushchev’s insistence on launching his nation’s second cosmonaut only days earlier as propaganda cover for constructing the wall. It was built slightly inside East German territory to ensure that it did not intrude on any sector of West Berlin and such was the tenacity with which it was assembled that streets were torn up and rendered impassable, railway stations closed and tram lines cut. The result was that West Berlin, now completely surrounded, became an isolated enclave in the hostile territory of the Russian zone. Officially, the East German perspective of the wall’s purpose was as a means of protecting the ‘‘new and more beautiful life’’ of the socialist republic from western “imperialists and militarists”. In reality, it was a means of forcible separation and ensured that defections would be eliminated; if necessary, by deadly force.

Indeed, East German guards were encouraged to regard anyone attempting to escape as a traitor and shoot them, ‘‘even when the border is breached in the company of women and children’’. Despite these risks, as East Germans saw the barbed-wire monstrosity rise, some took their chance. On 15 August, a young guard named Conrad Schumann leapt over into West Berlin and was driven away at high speed by a waiting car. Other escapees jumped from apartment windows, used hot­air balloons, dug tunnels, flew ultralights and slid along aerial wires. One even drove a sports car at full speed through the barrier.

Inside West Berlin, meanwhile, mass demonstrations, led by Mayor Willy Brandt, who vehemently criticised the United States for failing to respond, achieved little. President Kennedy, speaking a few weeks earlier, had acknowledged that he could only hope to protect West Germans; to attempt to do the same for East Germans would lead to an embarrassing failure. In spite of the fact that the wall’s very presence violated the post-war Potsdam Agreement, Kennedy’s administration later told the Soviet government that the barrier was now ‘‘a fact of international life’’ and refused to challenge it by force.

Nonetheless, a show of force to provide at least some visible reassurance for West Berliners was needed. On the afternoon of 19 August, General Lucius Clay – Kennedy’s special advisor and mastermind of the 1948 Berlin Airlift – and Vice­President Lyndon Johnson arrived in the city. Early the following morning, a column of nearly 500 armoured vehicles and 1,500 troops left the Helmstedt – Marienborn checkpoint, arriving in Berlin just before midday, under the wary watch of East German police. Clay and Johnson met the force, which paraded through the streets, and duly left the city on 21 August under the command of General Frederick Hartel and a 4,200-strong brigade. For the next three and a half years, American battalions would rotate into West Berlin by autobahn at three-monthly intervals to demonstrate Allied rights to the city.

The wall, however, remained… and grew. In June 1962, shortly before two more cosmonauts pulled off the Soviet Union’s next space spectacular, work started on a second, parallel fence. This lay slightly further inside East German territory and effectively created a no-man’s land between the two barriers. It would become notorious as the wall’s ‘death strip’: paved with raked gravel to make footprints easy to spot, it afforded would-be defectors no cover, was filled with tripwires and provided a clear line of fire for the ever-watchful East German guards. Two months later, on 17 August, the new wall claimed its first victim. In full view of hundreds of witnesses, together with the western media, 19-year-old bricklayer Peter Fechter was shot as he tried to escape into West Berlin. It was only the beginning. By the time the wall finally fell in November 1989, 133 ‘official’ – and probably far more – defectors would be murdered attempting to gain their freedom.