Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - World War II & Cold War History: What to Know Before You Visit Berlin

Episode Date: May 19, 2018

For decades, Germany has been reckoning with and atoning for its dark past. Museums, monuments, and educational programs teach tourists and locals about World War II and the nazis, and the Cold War and Berlin Wall. In last week’s ‘What to Eat and Where to Go’ Berlin episode, we touched on how important historical tourism is in Berlin, and, today, Chloe Dalrymple, a British expat and tour guide for Insider Tour, and I are diving deeper into World War II and the Cold War (visit postcardacademy.co for show notes).   Obviously, these are huge topics. I’m currently listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on Audible and that alone is 57 hours long, so we’re only scratching the surface here. But hopefully this quick and dirty primer will help you get your historical bearings before you travel to Berlin.   You might not want to listen with little kids, as we will be talking about one of the worst human atrocities of all time, but I will spare you the most horrific details.    If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and forward this show to a friend. If you’re feeling especially kind, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This helps people discover the show. 🤗   Instagram, Twitter, Facebook       Thank you to Six Miles High Design for creating the brilliant Postcard Academy logo.Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to the Postcard Academy. I'm your host, Sarah Mikital. The last time we talked, I was busing it to Poland, and Krakow exceeded my expectations in every way. I will definitely do an episode on Krakow in the future, but today I promise to continue the conversation on Germany and cheers a mystery. So one of my best friends is German, from the eastern side of Germany, and she's actually the one I was visiting in Berlin recently. We met years ago in New York when she sublet from my flatmate who went off to India. And during one of our first conversations, she was horrified to realize that the only thing I learned in school about Germany was the Nazis. Since then, I have traveled around Germany, I know more about it, and it is a great country to visit.

And if you listen last week, you heard Chloe's excellent insider recommendations for its capital city, Berlin. As we mentioned, historical tourism is very important in the city. And so today, Chloe, who as you remember, is a British expat and a tour guide for insider tour in Berlin, we are giving a deeper dive into World War II and the Cold War. Obviously, these are huge topics. I'm currently listening to the rise and fall of the third rag on Audible, and that alone is 57 hours long. So we are only scratching the surface here. But hopefully this quick and dirty primer will have.

help you get your historical bearings before your trip to Berlin. You might not want to listen to this with little kids, as we will be talking about one of the worst human atrocities of all time. But I will spare you the most terrific details. World War II was not that long ago. It lasted from 1939 to 1945, and people who lived through it are still alive. Despite this, last month on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a survey came out saying that, 31% of Americans, and this goes up to 41% for millennials, wrongly believe that only 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust. 41% of Americans and 66% of millennials cannot say what Auschwitz was, and more than half of Americans wrongly think Hitler came to power through force.

In reality, it's estimated that between 11 million to 17 million people were murdered during the Holocaust. six million Jews, and the rest political dissidents, people with disabilities, gay people, Roma, Polish and Russian citizens, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other groups. Chloe deals with our collective ignorance on a weekly basis as a travel guide in Berlin and also nearby Saxonhausen concentration camp. This is something that I talk about a lot because there is often this kind of misunderstanding here when we talk about how Hitler was able to come to power, how the Nazis, came to power and gain this popularity.

What we need to do is kind of go back in time. We had to say, look, it kind of actually starts from World War I. It's like a snowball effect, you know, from World War I onwards, because, you know, they were made to sign the peace treaty of Versailles in Germany. And this was humiliating for Germany, where they had to cut back massively on the army, Air Force. They had to pay, well, you're going to hear different numbers on this. Whatever you look, you know, the 2.6 billion U.S. dollars is what I've heard is possibly the final debt

that they ended up paying off. there's probably more accurate figures out there. And this debt, it took them until 2010 to pay off. And, you know, and Germany started printing money to get themselves out of this debt. And we had hyperinflation where you have one US dollar was worth four marks, the currency at the time in 1919. It was just after World War I ended. And then you have, within a year, it goes to 50. Then it goes to 15,000. And by 1923, it was four million marks just to one US dollar. And by 1923, it reached a 4.2 trillion marks. So you can see that a rise kind of in the Nazi party,

they start to gain popularity around this time where they go up to about 6% of the votes and they start to drop down to about 3%. But then in the mid-20s, they really go nowhere because America starts lending money to Germany. We had something known as the Golden 20s, a culture of boom where everyone's successful, working, having a good and left life.

These people don't necessarily need change. Until 1920, Berlin consisted of the Mita area. As more people came for factory work, Berlin incorporated other villages, and by 1925, it had doubled in size to 4 million people. The economy was calming down after the hyperinflation that followed World War I, which had made German money essentially worthless. And like Paris and New York, Berliners enjoyed new, artistic, intellectual, and sexual freedom. Women could work and vote, go out and party.

Gay bars opened, life was great. But this did not last. In October 1929, the stock market crash in the United States ruined the global economy. With the Wall Street crash, America had to pull out the money it was lending Germany to get them out of this debt. And we had, within four months, six million jobs were lost. And unemployment reaches its peak in 1931.

And this is kind of happening all over the world today and in recent years. And people become frightened. They place blame anywhere they can. They start to look at the government. for change, swinging to one extreme, really far left and really far right. But still, even after, you know, the Wall Street crash and, you know, millions losing their jobs in Germany, in 1928, the Nazis received it was 2.6% of the votes. Okay. And in 1930, it goes to 18.3%. And by 1932,

it's almost at 38%. But this actually drops in 1932, down to 33%. So even, you know, you know, you know, with the end of the 20s, the early 30s, they still haven't won the majority. And that's what a lot of people misunderstand. They think that, you know, everyone supported the Nazis. And, you know, and of course they had huge following, but we have the evidence to prove that that is not the case when you see that the percentage of votes for the Nazis

starts to drop at the end of 1932. Hitler also by the 30th of January, 1933, was appointed as chancellor. And he wasn't elected, which is also. very important to remember. He was appointed by Paul von Hindenberg, who was president at the time. And Paul von Hindenberg was, he was aging, you know, he was in his mid-80s, he was becoming seen-art. He was really sick and only getting worse as time went on. And he appoints Hitler as Chancellor, hoping to keep control with him and hoping to kind of use his kind of popularity to kind of

get the approval from the German people. So who was Adolf Hitler? Many people know he was actually born in Austria and that he was a failed artist. You might not know that as a young man, he was also lazy and entitled. He dropped out of school and refused to get a job even when his mother was sick. He moved to Vienna to try to make it as a painter, and there he ate meals at a soup kitchen. I don't think I have to point out that if anyone else lived this kind of life, Hitler would accuse them of leaching off the system. He was also obsessed with what he saw as the corruption of young Christian women by, in his words, repulsive, crooked-legged Jew bastards. German lawyer and journalist Rudolf Olden, who opposed the Nazis, theorized that this

had to do with extreme envy on Hitler's part, who did not have a girlfriend in Vienna. At age 24, Hitler left Austria for Germany with no job, and people accused him of evading military service. Long story short, he gets involved with the Nazis who like his passion and his ability to captivated audience. Hitler was a powerful speaker and he promised to make Germany great again. He was especially appealing to the poor and unemployed as well as young people. Hitler comes along promising, you know, in the late 20s, early 30s, these really basic things that the Germans have become so used to not having, like bread, jobs, promising them jobs

and a better life and things like that. And that's where you can start to see the swing towards the Nazi party. It's really basic things like that. You had all this instability where they had elections every six months or something like that. And that's all that other percentage voting for other political parties. So although they were the largest party at this point, they still hadn't yet won the majority. But they were, you know, appealing to those people who were becoming, you know, frightened, but also you have, you know, people wanting kind of, what's the word say, people basically want something to blame, or they want someone to blame for the mess that they are in and the mess that Germany is in. And one of those things is the peace treaty of Versailles and

Hitler's saying, look, we're going to wipe, we're going to try and wipe all these debts, okay? Another thing is that he's giving them the scapegoat, you know, the Jews. He blames them for the cause of, you know, the fact that Germany ended up losing the war. And of course, you know, it's important also to remember that 12,000 Jews lost their lives fighting for Germany in World War I. But he's offering these people, this scapego. He's offering them this, an excuse to kind of hate on the Jews, if you know what I mean? And he's, you know, so this is where it all starts.

And also he was kind of feeding into the anti-Semitism. that was already very much in existence at this point, which it had been for, you know, hundreds of years before this. In February 1933, one month into his chancellorship, there was a fire at the Reichstag, which was Parliament, and Hitler blamed the communists. There are theories that the Nazis themselves caused this fire to suspend civil rights and arrest political opponents, which they did. Whether or not they started the Reichstag fire, they certainly used it to their advantage,

because then we have Hitler going to Paul von Hindenberg. Look what these communists have done. They've now set fire to our right stag. Our parliament has got up in flames. We need to do something to keep control of this, which leads to the Reichstag fire degree, which then leads to the Enabling Act. It gives Hitler all emergency powers

to arrest anyone that he sees as a threat without trial. And that's where you see in the next few months, 22,000 political prisoners being sent to these concentration camps. You know, we have the Dachau, which was officially the first concentration camp to open within Nazi Germany. We have camps being opened all over. We have wild camps.

These are camps being made out of old factories. You know, water towers, as one of the friends, Lowellberg. There was old wild camps around the corner from where I live now. And because they've got all of these people being arrested and there's no place for them to go. And they're just throwing them into anywhere they could. The next thing you know, but it was more public then. And the people could actually hear the cross. of these politicians and others being tortured throughout the night.

But of course, they had to start closing these wild camps down and then more secretly start opening these much larger ones around, but they weren't exactly these, the ones that opened first in Germany, these would have been for political prisoners, but not for extermination purposes, which is what they ended up being for. So they would have been for political prisoners and then eventually all others as well.

things are moving so fast Hitler had only just come to power and yet he and the Nazis managed to suspend civil rights they jailed and set up special courts for political opponents turn their country into a one-party state created the Gestapo which was the secret police built concentration camps dissolved trade unions boycotted Jewish businesses censored the media gave Hitler the power to make his own laws without parliament approval and burned so-called banned books, including works by American authors like Ernest Hemingway and Jack London, in huge public bonfires. How long do you think it takes to dismantle democracy? The Nazis achieved all of that within months, without the help of surveillance cameras or social media

or much of the technology we use today. Some media outlets were sympathetic to Hitler, because they saw him as a check on the spread of communism. In 1933, the UK's Daily Mail had an editorial that said, Hitler won his majority cleverly, and if he uses it prudently and peacefully, no one here will shed any tears over the disappearance of German democracy. The Nazis didn't start out saying they wanted to murder all the Jews. Yes, they blamed Jewish people and minorities for all the problems in the world, but they needed more than that to gain support.

They created something called the Volk community, Volk, V-O-L-K, the people's community. And their guiding principle was that actually, all men are not created equal. Only the racially pure Germans could be part of this community, and the Nazis pledged to help them have a better life. More food, more jobs, the opportunity to own a car. Volkswagen, which means the people's car, was actually founded by the Nazis at the request of Hitler. Hugo Boss designed the uniforms for the Hitler youth. As Chloe mentioned in last week's episode, it's hard to find a legacy German brand that wasn't involved with the Nazis in some way. And the Nazis achieved economic success, so the majority of Germans went along with them.

Eventually, if you didn't support them, you would be branded an enemy of the state and publicly humiliated or worse. As Chloe mentioned, concentration camps were first set up in 1933 as detention centers for enemies of the state, especially communists and socialists and other political prisoners who were against the Nazis. The camps were also for the Sinti and Roma, also known as gypsies, gay people, people with disabilities, and so-called as as socials. This included people who didn't work, the homeless, criminals, prostitutes. These groups were dragged off to concentration camps and forced sterilized and later straight up murdered as time went on. Young people who committed deviant acts, such as listening to swing and jazz, which the Nazi said was black music, were sent away to special camps. And these camps weren't just jails or death centers.

They were slave labor camps. Prisoners were forced to work on Hitler's mad scientist idea of tearing down Berlin and rebuilding it as the biggest and most glorious city on Earth. Hitler really hated Berlin, from my understanding. He found it dirty, seedy, very grimy, which I must admit hasn't changed so much today, but that today is part of Berlin's charm. Hitler hated it for that reason, though. And what he planned to do was destroy all of Berlin and build his world capital city.

So for the capital city of the world that he would eventually have taken over. And he planned to build the Great Hall. And this Great Hall would have been in the place of where the Reichstag was. And it would have gone all the way over towards Hot Banhof, which would be the Central Station. And in Berlin, I mean, you can't miss it when you're standing at the Wright Stag. You can see how far away it is. And this Great Hall could have been 250 metres tall.

The Eiffel Tower is 280. so it gives you an idea of how large this great hall would have been. It was able to fit in. I've heard 250,000, up to 500,000. And also Albert Speer, who was designing the World Capital City, his father, who was an architect as well, they're a family of architects, heard about this. And he said, you've all gone absolutely crazy.

His father was like, you've all lost your minds. This is actually not possible. So, yeah, the new right-chancey building was finished in 1939 for the plans for the World Capital City. and how they were going to be able to afford this was free labor from camps. They didn't have to pay anyone or anything like that. And you had the prisoners from Saxonhausen, especially going there to make the bricks,

to send down the canal to build the New Wright Chattelaghler's new right tentsry building. But it would have been all these buildings, grand buildings like that, going to show how powerful Hitler's third empire was and that his empire was going to last for a thousand years and they would eventually be the ruins of his thousand year empire. When you go to Saxonhausen, it becomes more reality of Hitler's plans. you know, to take over the entire world and build his world capital city and all this free labor

and things like that. You really get a sense with Saxonhausen rather than the other camps, you know, of the hard labor that they had to go through to build Hitler's world capital city, Gomania or in English, Germania. And the fact that many people died to build these buildings, you know, and it kind of makes it more reality because for a lot of people, Hitler's world capital city was just an idea, you know, and it was never really going to happen, okay? But the new right chancery building that was finished designed by Albert Speer in 1939 was built by the prisoners from Saxonhausen, you know, and Saxonhausen had its hundred subcamps as well,

and they were bringing in these prisoners from all over. They had 4,000 workers working to build the new right chancery within one year, you know, and they were working in 12-hour shams. 24 hours a day. As the Nazis conquered other countries, they set up similar camps, forcing people to work as slaves in very poor conditions with barely enough

food to keep them alive. In fact, many of them died. Most prisoners were from other European countries, especially Poland and the Soviet Union. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, there were more than 40,000 camps and incarceration sites from 1933 to 1945. It was in 1930,

that German Jews were sent en masse to the camps. November 9th and 10th, 1938, was the night of broken glass, during which the homes and shops of Jewish people in Germany were broken into, looted, and destroyed while the Gestapo, the secret police, sent 30,000 Jews to concentration camps. Neighbors were reporting on each other, casually participating in looting, and the Nazis ramped up their plan for the final solution, which was the extermination of all Jewish people in Europe. extermination meaning murder.

Specific death camps like Auschwitz were created in the 1940s as a more efficient way to kill all the Jews in Europe. By now, artists and intellectuals who had been called anti-German and were fired from their jobs were leaving Germany. The freedom that gay people enjoyed in the 1920s had ended after Hitler became chancellor. The Nazis wanted to grow a master German race, and since gay people weren't having kids, they weren't worth having around.

A special unit of the Gestapo was set up to find and deport gay people to the camps, where they were forced to wear pink triangles to identify why they were there. All the prisoners were identified by a symbol to categorize them as Roma, Jews, gay, communist, or some other mix. In 1939, Hitler ordered the deaths of disabled people, because under Nazi ideology, those who don't work should not be able to eat. The Nazis tried to play off these killings as a compassionate act to put these people out of their misery. The families protested and eventually the program was shut down, but the practices continued in secret, and an estimated 300,000 patients were killed by the end of the war.

Last week, Chloe mentioned that you should visit the topography of Terror Museum in Berlin, and I agree that it's an absolute must. One of the things they say is that the willingness of most Germans to adapt meant that many not merely shared the aims of the Nazi leadership, but also actively supported them, often at the price of denouncing others to the Gestapo. And the Gestapo had informants everywhere. They tortured prisoners during interrogations, they sent them to concentration camps, or simply murdered them. They could do whatever they wanted, and they went after anyone against the Nazi regime. They were incredibly organized, and hundreds of officers could be mobilized

quickly to terrorize a target. There were some people who resisted, though, and I will link to some photos of these heroes in the show notes. You know, as children, when we hear about the horrors of the world, we think that we would have stood up and said something. We would have been braver than these hateful conformists. But would we have been? Looking at the photos of the thousands of people with their arms in the air saluting Hitler as he whipped them into a frenzy, I wonder what I actually would have done. Would I have crossed my arms in defiance at the risk of being sent to a concentration camp? Would I have stayed in Germany at all? And then when we hear about the atrocities committed against the Syrian people or the Rohingya or what's going on in Yemen, we all say, yes, that is

terrible, but what can we actually do? And that's what people all over the world said about what was going on in Nazi Germany. After the war, people around the world said that they did not know about the concentration camps. But that's what they were. That's not true. Brave reporters who were jailed and expelled from Germany for their so-called fake news had been revealing these stories for years. Fast forward to the end of the war in 1945, the Allies led by Great Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union defeat the Axis Alliance, led by Germany, Italy, and Japan. Hitler kills himself. Other high-ranking Nazis go into hiding. As you'll see if you visit the Topography of Terror Museum, that while, there were war tribunals to try Nazi leaders. Most Nazis were never punished. Doctors who killed patients continued to practice medicine. Judges kept their jobs. Even members of the SS and Gestapo were

recruited by intelligence services. But Germany did change in a big way. After the Allies defeated the Nazis, the world wanted to prevent the Germans from going on another murderous rampage. So the country was divided into East and West. Germany surrendered on the 8th of May, 19th of May, And they discussed at the Potsdam Conference after the war, well, we're going to divide Germany into four different sectors. So we had the Soviet sector. Then we would have had the British sector, French sector and the US sector. The only thing is you have Berlin, which falls right in the Soviet sector. And back then, what they would have said is that whoever has power over Berlin has power over the rest of Europe.

And Stalin being communist, the West being capitalist, the West feared that, you know, they allowed Stalin to have control over all of Berlin. And, you know, he's going to have control over all of Europe and have all of Europe run under a communist regime. So they actually came forward to Stalin. Tension was pretty high at this point. So Stalin had not really much choice but to divide Berlin. And they decided to split Berlin into four different sectors. So we would have had like a mini Germany in Berlin, except the difference is the Soviets actually had half of Berlin pretty much, almost half of Berlin. And the reason why the West said, we're going to give you half of Berlin because we're in your sector.

Okay. So they kind of made this little deal. And then with East and West Germany, by 1948, we would have had two different currencies. The Deutsche Mark would have been in the West. The Ostmark would have been in the East. And then by 1949, two different states were formed. So we would have had the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East. Then, you know, people were able to kind of pass through Berlin.

We had the inter-German border which led between East Germany and West Germany, which became a closed border by 1952. you wouldn't have found a wall like you would see in Berlin there. You would have had like a barbed wire fence, watchtowers, guards, dogs as well in some parts. That's where they would have had the landmines, but not in Berlin. And that becomes a closed border from 1952. But you have East and West Berlin where people could live in the East, work in the West. They could come on by, they could, you know, they could cross through quite easily. From 1961, we have the Berlin Wall, which was built 13th of August, 1961, which came

up overnight. Backing up for a sec, West Germany was becoming a capitalistic success, enjoying the economic miracle thanks to the reconstruction money from the Marshall Plan, the introduction of the Deutsche Mark, and also from the U.S. soldiers spending cash over there. Meanwhile, in East Germany, kids were studying Marxism-Leninism. My friend's brother and sister actually learned Russian as a foreign language, not English. But capitalism and freedom, do not lose their appeal overnight, and the GDR experienced a real brain drain before they put up the wall. From 1945 onwards, daily you have people leaving for West Berlin or West Germany. And from 1952, with the closed border of the Inner German border, people can't get across to West Germany so easily.

They're going into West Berlin, that tiny island right in the middle of East Germany. And thousands daily were leaving. The number of people that fled from 1945 until 1961 when that war came up from East Germany, these were young and educated people. These people were fit to work. They didn't want to live under communism. They didn't want to train for seven years to become a doctor and then get paid the same or even less as someone who was cleaning the bins.

And the number would be about approximately three million. Up until 1949, it's Soviet-occupied territory. And then it's East Germany, it's like the satellite state. of the Soviet Union, not officially part of the USSR, but it was a satellite state. And they have their own government and everything. They're making these decisions themselves, but they actually had to get the go ahead from the Soviet Union to build this wall. They chose a Sunday to get this wall up, which was in the first four days a barbed wire fence,

and it tore 43 kilometers through the middle of Berlin and around the west as well. And kind of creating this island, if you imagine it like an island and is swimming in a sea of communism, except from the 13th of August, 1961, this barbed, wire fence, comes up through the city, traps these people in West Berlin, two million people. It's actually the two million people who are in West Berlin that are free. It's everybody on the outside that is trapped, if you imagine it kind of like that. And from this moment on once, you know, people couldn't pass. You know, that was it.

You had children who were stuck over in the east away from their parents, you know, about 2,000 children who were stuck in the east, visiting grandparents or having a sleepover on that Saturday night with their friends over in the East and they can't get back to their parents. Volta Oldbrick, who was the leader of the Socialist Unity Party at the time when the wall came up, he said two days before on the radio, nobody is intending to build a wall. And everyone stops and is like, what wall? Why are you talking about a wall? And they had all the bricks and things like that coming into the city beforehand. And no one quite saw yet what was coming.

People had to make a quick fast decision, walk out their front door to the east, jump out their back windows, risk their life and escape to the west. You know, the first death at the Berlin Wall was Ida Ziegmann, who died falling from her fourth floor building near Bernouwester. And she was trying to escape to the west, and she didn't make the fall, unfortunately. And so you've got people actually risking their lives, jumping out their back windows to the west. One fifth of East Germans left for the West before the Berlin Wall went up. The wall was actually two walls, an inner and outer wall, guarded by men with guns, and they would use them if anyone tried to escape. By 1961, the people in East Germany were stuck. Families from the West could visit their eastern relatives, but they couldn't bring them back,

and so they had to say their tearful goodbyes at the Friedrich Strasser railway station, the east-west border, otherwise known as the Palace of Tears. If you go to the DDR Museum in Berlin and the Germans use the abbreviation DDR, not GDR, you will see photos and stories of how the East Germans live. and even see replicas of different rooms of a typical house from East Berlin. People were not living in horrific poverty like, say, North Korea. In my German friend's hometown, people today don't seem to have any ill will toward the Soviets who occupied them before they handed authority over to the German communist leaders.

In fact, my friend's grandmother claims that having Russians run things after the war had no impact on their life. If anything, she says, they brought order to the chaos and helped them get their lives back to normal. So it seems that after the initial post-war rape and pillaging, the East Germans accepted their fate and got on with it. And many of the older people here are nostalgic for that life, when people knew their neighbors and everyone had a job. They could go abroad on vacation, at least to a brother communist date like Hungary or Poland. The most popular holidays where camping are going to a nudist beach. That's right, four out of five East Germans like to swim

around naked. A little bit of freedom hearkening back to the 1920s. It's not as black and white. There's a gray area here because, you know, we're looking at people who grew up in the East, who didn't want this wall to fall, who actually preferred life in East. And I've met some of these people as well today who actually say, no, we preferred life in the East, you know, everything was kind of set up for us. I mean, not everybody, but there's enough people that feel that way that we should talk about them. And there's a word for it. So nostalgia or nostalgic and then Ost and you replaced that with nostalgia. So Ost meaning East. And, you know, and this this wall was called, you know, from the East,

it was kind of labeled as the anti-fascist wall, the protective wall. And when this wall fell, you had people in the East who believed this wall was there to protect them. And now suddenly this wall has disappeared and they have to merge with these people from the West that they had been told were fascists and so on and they were being kept safe from them and suddenly they're like we don't want to come over to the west you know and not everyone saw it as reunification and that's why there's a word for it nostalgia fond memories aside east germany was an affected dystopia in the sense that you would be shot if you tried to leave the stasi the state security service had 91,000 officers who spied on everyone and blackmailed others to spy on their neighbors there were a

189,000 unofficial Stasi collaborators and spies. And there were other problems, too. My German friend's mother was at the top of her class, but was denied university admission because she was Catholic. Another friend's father was not allowed to go to university because his mother was a professor, and the social engineering in the GDR wanted to mix up opportunity and encourage more people to pursue a craft.

It could take a family more than a decade for the chance to buy a crummy East German trabby car, while the elites drove around in Balvos and had access to products from the West. So in theory, everyone is equal under communism, which is supposed to be a class-free society, but this has never actually worked, at least not yet. Anyway, after years of subsidizing work,

housing in other parts of the economy, by the 1980s, the GDR was running out of money, and the world was changing. We have Gorbachev is trying to kind of make peace with the west, you know, and we have, he's, I mean, we've got East Germany, which is, it's satellite state, which is kind of really misbehaving at the time. And, you know, and the Soviets are actually saying to East Germany, like, hey, you know, you need to calm down a little bit here. You need to start treating your people better because we're trying to look

good now to the West, you know. And in the summer of 1989, you have all these East Germans driving down in their trappies, you know, thousands, flotting. on through and they were going, you know, camping out originally at Hungary at the border to Austria. So this is, we've got the Eastern Block and the Western Block and they're camping right at that border. Hungary says to East Germany, look, we're not going to become one massive refugee camp. In fact, what we're going to do, we're just going to open our borders. And that meant that those East Germans coming down to Hungary because you can go and visit the other countries within the Eastern Block. They were going on to Austria and they're going

back up to West Germany. And already East Germany is starting to lose control of its people. And we had in Leipzig a church called St. Nicholas Church, where many East Germans have been meeting for years, discussing in this church, what are we going to do with our government? How are we going to have democracy? How are we going to have freedom to go to the West for longer periods of time? Because, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands would apply for visas, and you would only get 24 hours maximum in the West. And out of those hundreds of thousands that would apply, it would be something like 25,000 maximum that would be given their visas. And these people are like, we just want a bit more freedom, you know, to go to the West for longer periods of time.

And, you know, and they were given encouragement by the fact that Hungary has now opened its borders to Austria. And they went out there on the 9th of October, 1989, and they protested in Leipzig. They took to the street 75,000 of them. But what they did differently this time is they left violence behind. There had been many violent protests in the past, especially in the 17th of June, 1953. the uprising, the workers uprising, where you had 125 people who were open fired at by the government and by Soviet tanks throughout Berlin on the streets leading up towards Brandenburg Gates and 250, you know, by the evening, many meant missing after this point actually,

so that final number is still unknown. And they left that violence behind. They brought flowers, they brought candles, they brought peace. And it meant that the numbers kept growing. And these were the Monday demonstrations, the peaceful demonstrations, where 125,000 people, you know, took to the streets the next week, the next Monday after that 300,000, 500,000. And then we have Alexandra Platt, you know, on the 4th in November, 1989. And so we're coming right up to the end of the fall of the wall now, okay, so it was in Alexander Plats about, they say between 500,000, but satellite would suggest it would be 1 million people that came to Alexander Platt to protest. So by the 9th of November, we had a meeting, okay? And this meeting was held by the higher politicians of the East

German government, and there was someone who was in control of the media called Gunter Shabowski, and he misses this meeting. And he says to his colleagues after the meeting, I've got a conference later today, you know, and I need to find out some information from this meeting, and they give him some notes, right? He doesn't have that much time to look through these notes. And what he does understand is that they decided in this meeting, East German citizens are now able to go to the West for longer periods of time. Okay. It's giving them a little bit more freedom. There's a kind of trick with this though because not many East Germans would have had passports and these past, they would need their passports to be stamped with visas from the West. Okay. So it's kind of

giving them freedom, but not quite yet, if you see what I mean. Right. And what they meant is that, you know, we're going to, as long as they have all the right paperwork, Gunter Shavowski goes to a conference with absolutely no information. People asking questions and someone says so, what did you discuss? And he says, East German citizens are now able to go over to the West given that they've got the right paperwork. And somebody says, sorry, from when? And he says, from my knowledge, effective immediately. Well, that means immediately. There's no other meaning for that. And then he goes on the radio later that evening just to make things more complicated for himself and says the same thing again from my knowledge effective immediately. Okay, so that means that we have thousands of people

in the evening of the 9th of November, 1989, running at border crossings all around. Boholmastrasa was the major one where you had thousands of people all down the streets below. And they're demanding entry to the West and these guards are like, what are you all doing here? You know? And they say, haven't you heard it's all over the news, but the guards didn't really have much information. But people started to get crushed at the front. That's how many people were turning up from behind. That these guards had to start giving visas. And they start stamping a few visas here and there. And then they give 20, 50. But thousands more are piling up from behind. They can't handle the numbers. So what they have to do by 11 p.m. is open the gates. Just for a bit

of room to those people at the front. But these people run on through to the West, reunited with family members, friends that someone hadn't seen for the entire 28 years that the war was up. And, you know, of course it's important to remember those people that didn't want the fall of the wall, but those people that did, you could imagine how happy they would have felt, you know, the energy of that weekend. It was a Thursday evening when the wall fell. And these people ran on through from the east, running at the wall from the west side with any tools they could find,

coming at the wall like woodpeckers, chipping, taking chippings on this wall, where it gets his name from, wallpeckers. And they dance by the wall. They dance on top of the wall at Brandenburg Gate. People are popping open champagne all over Berlin, in Germany, you can just imagine, you know. But there's a lot more to it than that, but that's basically the general idea of how the

wall fell. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German government has spent nearly two trillion dollars to help the ex-communist areas develop, which they did rather quickly in the 1990s. But despite this incredible financial investment, Eastern Germany is still a lot less wealthy than its Western side. Wages and productivity are lower, unemployment is higher, and most of the money. of Germany's large companies are still in the West. When communism collapsed, so did inefficient factories, and also efficient ones. As the Guardian reported, West German industrialists

bought factories in the East and deliberately ran them into the ground to kill competition. Millions of people lost their jobs, and not just factory workers, but also researchers, teachers, and other professionals. This past September, the right-wing alternative for Germany party when about 20% of the vote in former East Germany, really infuriating people who don't support the anti-immigrant anti-EU party. As with Trump and Brexit and France's National Front, academics theorize that those who voted for the AFD don't necessarily support the party, but they're angry at being left behind and in this case want to stick it to the arrogant Western Germans.

Stefan Berg from the publication Der Spiegel said, From their days behind the iron curtain, they are still carrying the baggage of political expectations that today cannot be fulfilled. The hate is probably also the result of jealousy of the Chancellor's personal devotion to the refugees. End quote. Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany and worked as a physicist in the GDR, but some view her as a traitor who cares more for immigrants than those in the East. An anti-Semitism is actually on the rise in Germany.

Felix Klein, Germany's first commissioner for anti-Semitism, told the Washington Post that this is due, and I will quote, in part to far-right rhetoric, but also due to the influx of the 1.4 million migrants and refugees, who were raised in countries that have certain perceptions of Jews in Israel that are totally unacceptable to German society, end quote. Despite these realities, when you're traveling through Germany today, especially Berlin, the pace of positive change seems like an absolute miracle. Decades before Germany reunited, West Germany set up a federal agency to help its people learn from and reckon with its past,

so they don't fall victim to another totalitarian regime. You will find all sorts of museums and monuments and educational programs on the Nazis in World War II, and also the Cold War in Berlin Wall. I really believe that it's our duty as citizens of the world to remember the peasantal. to visit these historical sites and to honor the people who risked their lives and also died for our freedom. As Mark Twain supposedly said, history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes, and it's our responsibility to never forget. I don't want to leave you feeling completely down. As I said, Germany is a fantastic place to visit these days, and the historical tours like the one Chloe does

for Insider Tour are such a great way to learn, and to also keep your own. own life and perspective. All right, I hope you got some value out of this episode and are perhaps inspired to do some history-related travel. Right now, I'm in Rome, and for me, life doesn't get much better than wandering these ancient streets. May is one of the best months to be here. It's not too hot. It's just perfect for sitting outside, having a cappuccino or maybe drinking a glass of wine, or both. If you haven't listened to the Rome episode of a lot, it's not too hot. If you haven't listened to the Rome episode of the podcast yet. Definitely go back and listen to that one. My guest, Katie Parla, shared some fascinating Italian history, and of course, we talk all about food. Visit postcardacademy.com

for photos, links, and more, and please subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. We will be catching up with my friend Ting in New Zealand. You don't want to miss it. That's all for now. Thanks for listening, and have a beautiful week wherever you are. ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmicatel.com slash blank no more.