Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Berlin Wall (Encore)

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

After the end of the second world war, Berlin was a divided city controlled by the four major allied powers. Despite the different zones of control, people could move freely between them. However, on August 13, 1961, the East German government decided to end the free travel of Berliners by building a wall around West Berlin.  For 28 years, the wall defined the city and served as a metaphor for the entire Cold War. Learn more about the Berlin Wall on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to Butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily at checkout to get $30 off your first box! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. After the end of the Second World War, Berlin was a divided city controlled by the four major allied powers. Despite the different zones of control, people could still move freely between them. However, on August 13, 1961, the East German government decided to end free travel of Berliners by building a wall around West Berlin. For 28 years, the wall defined the city and served as the metaphor for the entire Cold War. Learn more about the Berlin Wall on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. After the Second World War, the Allies divided Germany into four separate zones which were administered by the various allied countries. The British, French, Americans, and Soviets all had a part of Germany that they controlled. However, the German capital of Berlin was treated as a separate issue from the rest of the country. Berlin was completely within the Soviet sector of Germany. However, the city was divided into four administrative zones just like the rest of the country was.

The zones, controlled by the Americans, British, and French collectively became known as West Berlin, and the Soviet zone became known as East Berlin. This caused a huge problem for the Soviets. Right smack in the middle of their sector was an island of capitalism in a sea of communism. In 1948, the Soviets instituted a blockade of West Berlin. They completely blocked all incoming rail, road, and canal traffic to the city as well as electricity. The Soviets figured that the Allies would eventually just give up and abandon West Berlin to the Soviets. Instead, the Allies overcame the blockade by flying supplies into West Berlin almost non-stop for a year.

I previously covered this in my episode on the Berlin airlift. In 1949, the three sectors of Germany controlled by the Western Allies formerly became West Germany, and the Soviet sector followed suit by declaring itself the independent country of East Germany. However, there was still a hole in the middle of East Germany, West Berlin. West Berlin was technically never part of West Germany. Legally, it remained under the control of the Allied powers until Germany unified in 1990. West Germany claimed West Berlin, and for all practical purposes, West Berlin was a de facto part of West Germany, but on paper it was not.

The issue of West Berlin bothered the Soviets and the East Germans for years. While they were trying to tell the people of East Germany and East Berlin about the evils of capitalism and how wondrous their new communist state was, they had this giant contradiction sitting in the middle of the country. Everyone in East Berlin could easily go to West Berlin to buy products that they couldn't find in the East. More importantly, West Berlin offered a very easy opportunity to escape East Germany. You could just walk into West Berlin and from there you could travel anywhere in Western Germany or Western Europe. Indeed, between 1940s, in 1961, 3.5 million people, representing 20% of the population of East Germany, did exactly that.

Nikita Khrushchev said that West Berlin, quote, stuck like a bone in the Soviet throat. The Soviet East German ambassador, Mikhail Pravukin, said the quiet part out loud, what he noted, quote, the presence in Berlin of an open and essentially uncontrolled border between the socialist and capitalist worlds unwittingly prompts the population to make comparisons between both parts of the which unfortunately does not always turn out in the favor of Democratic East Berlin. End quote. While the general border between East and West Germany had been controlled since 1958, West Berlin was still a giant loophole. By 1961, it was the method by which 90% of those in East Germany fled to the West. You could literally just get out of a subway and have it take you to

West Berlin. Those leaving East Germany were disproportionately those who were educated, resulting in a massive brain drain for the country. There had been talk of a wall being constructed for quite some time, and as late as June 1961, the head of the East German Communist Party, Walter Olbrich, publicly stated, quote, no one has the intention of erecting a wall. On June 4, 1961, United States President John Kennedy met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a summit in Vienna,

where the subject of Berlin came up. Kennedy hinted that the United States wouldn't actively oppose the construction of a barrier which was a huge miscalculation he later regretted. After much hesitation, Khrushchev pushed Albrecht to build a wall to stop the flow of people leaving the country. On Saturday, August 12, 1961, East German leaders attended a secret meeting where the decision was made to close the border and erect a wall. The next day, August 13th, became known as Barbed Wire Sunday. At midnight, Easterman soldiers strung barbed wire along the border and began offloading construction materials. members of the East German secret police, the Statsi, were deployed along the border.

Seeing what was happening, 800 people managed to flee to West Berlin on Barbbed Wire Sunday, jumping over the barbed wire or jumping out of building windows. By the next day, the number had dropped to only a few dozen. Publicly, the East German government called the wall an anti-fascist bulwark designed to protect East Germany from the influences of the West. However, everyone could see that all of the defenses of the wall were pointed at East Germany, not the West. The wall was technically built inside the territory of East Berlin, so there was little that West Berlin could do other than object. In total, the Berlin Wall stretched for 140

kilometers or 87 miles, completely surrounding West Berlin. The actual borderline lay about four meters outside the wall, which technically allowed East German workers to go outside the wall to do repairs if necessary. The outer wall strip, while technically being east-jurban, German territory was never enforced, allowing graffiti artist access to the wall for years. The interior of the wall was another story. In 1962, a year after the border was closed and the wall was erected, a second interior fence was built about 100 meters from the wall. All buildings located between the wall and the fence were demolished, creating an open area known as the Death Strip. The Death Strip was mostly covered in sand, making it easy to see footprints and deny cover to

anyone who tried to make a run for the border. It also made it very easy for East German guards to fire on anyone who tried. The death strip was also lit at night and had anti-vehicle obstacles in place, including trenches, spikes, and metal barriers. The physical wall itself evolved over time. The last version of the wall, which most people remember seeing images of, was known as the Grenzmauer-75, which was built between 1975 and 1980. This version of the wall consisted of 45,000 sections of reinforced concrete. Each section was 3.6 meters or 12 feet high and 1.2 meters or 3.9 feet wide. A smooth pipe was placed on the top to make the wall more difficult to scale. There were officially nine border crossings between East and West Berlin, with several more

between West Berlin and the rest of East Germany. The most famous border crossing was Checkpoint Charlie, located near the intersection of Friedrich Strasser and Zimmerstrasse. A famous standoff took place at Checkpoint Charlie in October of 1961, soon after the wall was constructed. The incident was the result of an American diplomat's documents being inspected when he entered East Berlin. The agreement amongst the Allied powers after World War II was that officials for the occupying powers could travel between the zones freely. For a week, Soviet and American tanks faced each other just across the border. Official travel across the wall was near impossible for those in East Berlin. Those in West Berlin, however,

could apply for a visa and day trips to East Berlin could be granted without prior approval. West Berliners had to pay a fee to enter and had to exchange their currency at an outrageous exchange rate, and they also couldn't take any East German currency back with them when they left. While the construction of the wall dramatically decreased the number of people leaving East Germany, it didn't stop it entirely. People still tried to make it over, under, or through the wall. In the 28 years, the wall was in place. At least 140 people were killed attempting to escape, and some estimates placed the number much higher. Seventy percent of those who are known to have died were shot.

There were also many successful escape attempts. There was incredible ingenuity shown in how people managed to cross the wall. One man took a Soviet armored car and just crashed through it. There were hot air balloons, hang gliders, the equivalent of zip lines and tunnels. There were 70 tunnels attempted, and 19 of them were successful. Perhaps the most famous escaped involved a low-lying sport. horse car. The owner of the car realized that most of the car fit below the barricades on the road, so they just went as fast as possible, ducked down, let the barricades take off the top of the car,

and drove into West Berlin. Over time, the Berlin Wall became a symbol of communist repression. By the late 1980s, the wall was a location for concerts by Western musicians, including David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen. In fact, just weeks after the wall fell, musician David Hasselhoff held a concert at the wall, which was attended by thousands of Berliners on both sides, proving the theory that Germans love David Hasselhoff. Politicians used the wall as a backdrop as well. In 1963, President John Kennedy appeared and uttered the famous phrase, Ichbin-Iin Berliner. And in 1987, President Ronald Reagan appeared and appealed to the Soviets to tear down this wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall came as a part of a series of events in 1989 that led to the rapid collapse of the Iron Curtain. The

story of how quickly communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell will be the subject of another episode. It all started on August 19, 1989, when Hungary opened its border with Austria and took down its border fence. This crack in the iron curtain allowed Hungarians to travel to Austria to buy things that were unavailable in Hungary. It also allowed East Germans who were able to travel to Hungary a way out. On August 19th, the day the border opened, over 800 East Germans on holiday in Hungary fled across the border to then travel on to West Germany. News of this spread and soon tens of thousands of East Germans were making their way to Hungary to cross the border via Czechoslovakia.

Previous agreements between the communist countries allowed for travel between them. As this happened, long-time East German leader Eric Hanuker stepped down due to health reasons on October 18th and was replaced by Egon Crenz. The flood of Germans into Czechoslovakia caused the border between the countries to be shut down temporarily. On November 4th, the largest protest in East German history took place on the Alexander plots, where between half a million and one million East Germans took part. On November 7th, the German Politburo revised its travel policies, allowing for direct travel between East and West Germany.

Things came to a head on November 9th. The head of East Berlin, Gunter Shabowski gave a press conference to announce the new travel policies, which was broadcast live on East German radio and television. Shibowski had not been part of the discussion, and was only handed information just before the press conference. During the press conference, he was asked when the new rules took effect, and he replied, quote, As far as I know, it takes effect immediately without delay.

He also reiterated that the new policies allowed for travel between East and West Berlin. Shibowski's information that he gave in the press conference was wrong. The policy was not intended to go into effect immediately. However, once he uttered it, the genie couldn't be put back into the bottle. He made his comments a few minutes before 7 p.m. And word spread rapidly. Within minutes it was being broadcast by West German news sources which were being picked up in East Germany. One West German TV anchorman said, quote, this 9 November is a historic day. The GDR has announced that starting immediately its borders are open to everyone. The gates in the wall stand open wide, end quote.

Technically, East Germany did not approve the removal of the wall. However, that didn't matter. Within the hour, tens of thousands of East Berliners were arriving at checkpoints demanding to be let into West Berlin. The soldiers at the checkpoints were overwhelmed and none of their superiors would take responsibility for an order to shoot the crowd. Finally, at 1045 p.m., one of the commanders of the Born Holmer Strasser Border Crossing gave an order to let everyone through. Throngs of East Berliners came into West Berlin, where West Berliners were there to meet them with open arms. November 9th, 1989 in Berlin has been called the greatest party in world history. Not only were people celebrating, but individual people immediately took to tearing down the wall with their own hands. That weekend, over 2 million people visited West Berlin.

If the Berlin airlift can be considered to be the start of the Cold War, then the fall of the Berlin Wall can be considered its end. Things moved rapidly after November 9th. Within a year, East Germany ceased to again. exist, and Germany was re-utified after 45 years. If you visit Berlin today, you can still see where the wall used to be. In many parts of the city, there's a line on the ground indicating the location of the wall. There are still a few small segments of the wall that were left standing for posterity, and other segments of the wall were sent to various institutions around the world. The Berlin Wall was, in the end, a symbol of the entire Cold War. It was a physical manifestation of the restrictions of freedom behind the Iron Curtain.

When the symbol was destroyed, then the people and the policies which restricted those freedoms fell quickly as well. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers.

Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere or daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.