Stuff You Should Know - How the Berlin Wall Worked

Episode Date: August 21, 2014

It's hard to believe now, but just over 25 years ago there was a giant concrete wall separating East and West Germany. In this episode, Chuck and Josh get into the fascinating story of the Berlin Wall. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry and this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. Tear down the wall, tear down the wall, can you say it in German? No.

It would be more authentic. Yeah, I would say that. Tear down the wall, the wall. Yeah, I think that's it, yeah, that's right. I should know what that is in German. It's tear down the wall. Yeah, I remember this stuff man, I was, you do too, to a certain degree. Oh yeah, we both grew up in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, but several thousand miles

west. Yeah, it's crazy though to think about it now. If you're of a certain age, the concept of walling in a city seems probably really strange and unlikely. Yeah. You know, if you're like under 30. Right. Probably like what?

One of the things, and this is a Grabster article, so it has the stank of quality on it. Yes it does. That I learned from this article was that there were a lot of people in power at the time who were very relieved when the Berlin Wall went up. Yeah, quietly relieved. Because things were coming to a head between two nuclear superpowers in the city of Berlin. Yeah, even they couldn't really say it out loud, but even Western leaders were like,

oh, all right, well, that's maybe not the worst thing for now. Do it. Yeah, exactly. Give me a Scotch. Because world leaders drink Scotch. Sure they do. Yeah. And they were dark socks.

Yeah. Stuff like that. I don't know. So you want to get down to business here about the Berlin Wall? Sure. There was a, there was long a discrepancy over how many people were killed at the Berlin Wall. Yeah, trying to defect or escape, depending on which way you want to look at it.

Yeah. And the exact number stands right now at 136, that's how many have been confirmed. Plenty have been denied, I guess. There were some people said like as many as 300 were killed. Some people said as low as 98, but definitely 136 people were killed at the Berlin Wall, either trying to escape, or that included border guards who were killed by people who were escaping. And it also sadly included 30 people who were just trying to cross the border and weren't

trying to escape, but were killed accidentally. Yeah, it doesn't sound like a super high number, and I guess it's not in the grand scheme of things, but it didn't need to be, like when those first people, and we'll get to who they were, when those first people were killed, send a very strong message, like do so at, try it at your own risk. Right. You know, because you might get shot in the back. Exactly.

And there were trials, the exact numbers for the people who were killed at the Berlin Wall came out of documents that were used in trials to try people who were responsible for basically issuing shoot to kill orders. And yeah, it wasn't clear from the get go just how porous the border was, even though there was a wall, but yeah, when they started shooting people and putting in landmines, it became clear like this is a, you try to cross this border now at the risk of your own life. Yeah.

They're not messing around. Apparently a pregnant woman was shot and killed, trying to defect. So yes, we'll talk about them, but there's plenty of this wall, the Berlin Wall that I didn't understand. And I guess I didn't really understand the context. And again, the Grafster did a really good job of like getting down to the nitty gritty of like where the whole thing started. And it finds its roots back in World War Two, at the end of World War Two specifically,

after Germany surrendered on May 7th, 1945. Are we getting in the wayback machine? Oh, you want to? Yeah. We got to blow the dust off of this thing. This is the dangerous time we're going back to just before one. We have to go prime the engine as well, pump that little bubble, because it's been a while. Start it up.

Sounds like it's working. All right, so yeah, it is a little scary where we are in the end of World War Two. Yeah. Very uncertain time. We're in Berlin. That's right. Germany has surrendered, but things were a little dodgy before that because Russia was initially against the Allied forces, which were the United States and France and Britain.

Yeah, they had a treaty with Germany. Yeah, but then Germany, like Hitler was one to do, changed his mind, said, you know what, I'm going to invade you guys too. Which is pretty stupid because as everyone knows, you don't start a land war in Russia. It didn't work out too well in the end. But what it did was it flopped Russia, not super willingly, but it kind of flopped them over to the Allied side, even though things were so different in our two countries. It was a little bit weird that they did that.

Right. We forced their hand. It was one of those, the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing. Yes. So the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was like, hey guys, remember how we were just fighting on the same side? Well, my teammate just attacked me. So can I come over and hang out with you dudes for a while?

What was weird was that this is a totalitarian communist regime asking democratic countries to come fight on their side. They were probably like, but how about that Hitler guy, forget about us for a minute. We should all get together and stop him. It says a lot about how much everybody hated Hitler. But like we said, in 1945 Germany did surrender and oddly, and it's still strange to think about it, they decided to divide Germany up into four zones. And then within one of the communist zones, the East German zone, they divided the city

of Berlin up into four zones. Right. Such an odd idea. Well, the thing is, is the Soviets had a seat at the table at the Yalta conference because they were one of the victors, one of the allied victors at the end of the war. And even though the allies knew, like this is really weird having the Soviets there, who knows, maybe it can generate goodwill, we don't know what's going to happen. So they get an even piece of the pie.

And that's what they did. They divided Germany up into four zones and France, Britain, and the US eventually merged their zone. And that became the Federal Republic of Germany, also known as West Germany. And the Soviets said, we're just going to keep total and complete control over our side of Germany. We'll call it the German Democratic Republic, and we're going to start a puppet state in there.

I think the thing that really surprised the allies, though, was that the Soviets took the chaos at the end of World War II as an opportunity to invade and occupy a bunch of other formerly independent countries. That's what really caught everybody by surprise. Yeah, and they basically formed what was to be known as the Iron Curtain, this isolation that they basically put on all these countries that they invaded. They just cut them off from the rest of the world. And that was the Eastern Bloc, and America and everyone else was like, huh, didn't see

that coming. Yeah. But there was an anomaly to the Iron Curtain, like it was sealed, like all the borders in all of the Eastern Bloc countries were closed and guarded. And so there was this Iron Curtain between the Soviet Bloc and the West. But there was this one little pocket, like as part of the Yalta Conference, Berlin, which is totally in East Germany, was also divided up into four quadrants. And Britain, France, and the US merged theirs together, and that was West Berlin.

And there was also East Berlin, Soviet-controlled East Berlin. So within Soviet-controlled East Germany was a little island called West Berlin that was controlled by the, well, the West German government, the Allies, and there you have it. I don't think it wasn't a recipe for long-term success. No. And I don't think anyone thought it would be. I don't know. I mean, why would you go to the trouble if you thought it wouldn't be?

I don't know. Maybe just to temporarily quell things, I mean, surely they didn't think that would be like that forever. Well, it's almost like they went in after Yalta whistling with a powder keg and just set it down in the middle of East Germany and paid out some fuse and whistled as they walked away. That's what they did when they divided East in West Berlin. Yeah.

And there wasn't like the Western nations weren't thrilled with all this, but there wasn't much we could do because they had nuclear bombs and we had nuclear bombs and no one wanted that to happen. So there was a lot of spying and a lot of name-calling, a lot of speeches and rhetoric. There was also a lot of kidnaps, a lot of bureaucratic delays, a lot of feet-dragging. Yeah, but in the end there was no, it wasn't going to lead to another war. No, because like you said, both sides had nukes. So nobody could step up and provoke one another militarily, right?

No, I mean, not to that degree. So life was really weird in Berlin, in West Berlin in particular. In East Berlin it was just part of the rest of East Germany, but again, West Berlin was this little island in East Germany and there was rail and highway connections to the West. Well they shared an infrastructure. Yeah. It's a weird thing to do, like a mail system, trains, it's like, it's a hard thing to divide a country like that, a city within a country.

Right. It's even weirder. And I guess it carried on like that for a little while and then the Soviets were like, yeah, we really didn't mean anything when we agreed to this. So we're going to cut off all this transportation in and out of the city. And they basically blockaded West Germany from being helped by the West through rail and through car. But the Allies could still land planes in and out of West Berlin.

Yeah, well they were trying to choke them out basically and just say good luck without food and supplies. Yeah, we're going to take over the city now. And the Americans said, oh yeah, how about the Berlin Airlift, buddy? How about sorties landing every two minutes, 24 hours a day, bringing in all the supplies you need through a very tight corridor. It's difficult, but we're the USA and we can do it because we can fly planes. Right.

And it worked. Yeah, apparently the Allied forces who were supplying West Germany just enough to keep the city going were bringing in more than 200,000 tons of cargo a month at the peak of the Airlift. And they kept it going for almost a year. They were basically like, you're not going to, you're not taking over West Berlin. Yeah, we had planes and we got lots of gas, lots of pilots, and eventually the Soviet Union was like, oh, all right, well, I guess that didn't work.

So let's go ahead and open up the rail traffic and the roads again. Right, they lifted the blockade. So things were cool for a little while, but the Soviets hadn't really forgotten anything. Tensions were just increased more and more after the Berlin Airlift. And I think things were getting just more, I get the impression that we were getting closer and closer to the threat of nuclear war right there in the middle of East Germany. And apparently no one knew what to do about it. One of the biggest things that was provoking these tensions was the massive amounts of defection

from East Germany to West Germany, because if you were an East Berliner or an East German, all you did was trot right into West Berlin, there's nothing to stop you, catch a plane out of West Berlin and fly out to wherever you wanted, and a lot of people did it. Yeah, and it was a real divide between the old guard and the new guard. It was mostly young professionals that saw the writing on the wall. East Germany finally realized they were in big trouble when they started looking at the number of doctors leaving and realized they couldn't train enough doctors to support the country that were exiting.

So by 1961, more than 200,000 East Germans had left and East Germany knew they were in trouble and West Germany didn't love it either because there was a big economic strain put on them by having all these people to show up all of a sudden and say, hey, we're here now, help us out, take care of us. Right, exactly. And not just take care of us, but help us take care of ourselves. Sure. Some of them wanted to stay in Berlin, I'm sure plenty of them wanted to just leave Germany

altogether, but the point is in the West you have this infrastructure that's being tested by the number of defections, and then in the East you have this huge brain drain going on. And so it was causing more and more tension because the Western forces, the United States and all weren't doing anything to stop these defections and probably were being a little smug about the whole thing because it suggests like, oh, why do all of your people want to leave in droves, maybe you're doing something wrong, maybe you should just give up. And the Soviets said, we're not going to give up, nice try, Uncle Sam, but we're not going

to do that. Instead, we're going to wait till night falls on August 12, 1961. And we'll get to what happened there right after this break. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Josh, it's August 12, 1961, codename Wall of China from the orders of Nikita Khrushchev,

but spoken by what some call a puppet leader, Walter Ulbricht. Other people say he wasn't so much a puppet, and it was his idea. I'm not really sure what the truth is there, actually. But at any rate, they said, you know what we're going to do? In the dead of night, turn off all the street lights, and we're going to start building the wall out of concrete, post and barbed wire. And when people wake up all over the world, they're going to be surprised to see about five miles of wall through central Berlin.

And everyone was surprised, including President Kennedy, who was like, a wall? Right. And at first, it was kind of a skimpy wall. I mean, not just symbolic, like there were coils of razor wire and that kind of thing. It was intended to block people, but it was nothing like the construction that would follow. And a lot of East Berliners saw the writing on the wall and said, we now have a narrow chance of escaping, so we're going to try it. Yeah, and at that point, the initial few days, they closed 67 of the 81 checkpoints, sealed

those off, put armed guards at the rest of them. And they closed the train stations? Yeah, closed the train stations. And then they began in earnest what was called the first generation wall was the initial phase. And it was crude and didn't even have a foundation. They basically used bricks from bombed out buildings and mortar. And just kind of started putting up whatever they could to form the initial wall.

Right. And then how long after that until they started to build what we came to understand as the Berlin Wall? I think a few years, I mean, they had to get that first initial phase fully built. And then I think a few years later, they started work on fortifying it and making it like a real wall. So like when we say this happened overnight, it literally happened overnight. And there were some unfinished parts here, there and some pockets that you could conceivably

like make a run for it. It took a while. A literal last-ditch attempt to run through. But it was put up fast enough in a substantial enough amount that people were trapped on either side overnight. If you had a one night stand with a lady on the other side of the wall and you woke up and you're like, I got to do the walk of shame back over to my apartment, you were met with barbed wire fence and guns.

And that was that. And you married that lady? There was a woman who gave birth to a son and ended up on different sides a few weeks after her son was born and he was basically raised in West Germany and she was thrown into a prison in East Germany for a while. There were a lot of stories of people who were just separated overnight from their families. A lot of parents suspected that some sort of border enforcement was going to be put up at some point.

Yeah. So they're like, well, we need to get over to West Germany. But they tried to do it right. They went over and they rented an apartment, left their kids back there, got jobs, started to save money until they could move their kids over. And some families were cut off because they didn't get their kids over in time. Yeah. And again, this was all violated the Yalta Agreement.

I mean, all these treaties were completely violated and it was illegal. But once again, quietly, a lot of like, it was a burning kettle, a boiling kettle, burning and boiling kettle. And things were not looking good. So everyone was kind of like, all right, maybe this will at least quell things for now. And it's not the worst idea in the world. Yeah. But don't quote me on that.

No. And if you were a West Berlin or an East Berlin, but especially a West Berlin, you did think it was the worst idea in the world. And when it became clear that America and NATO weren't going to do anything about this, there was a deep sense of betrayal by West Berliners. Yeah. They were like, come on, America. But this spot in East Germany where the Soviets had been hemorrhaging face had been cauterized

for now. And like you say, the West was secretly relieved. One of the things about this wall that I didn't know until this article was that it wasn't just a straight line, it was a circle. Yeah. The actual, the one that enclosed Berlin, enclosed fully in a circle West Berlin. Yes. And the reason why is because remember West Berlin was an island in the middle of East

Germany. So you couldn't just cut off East Berlin from West Berlin. You had to cut off all of East Germany from West Berlin. And the only way to do that was to encircle West Berlin with a wall. That's right. Like a prison almost. Yeah. All right.

Well, I guess we should talk a little bit about the wall, the physical wall and what it was like. Eventually, when it got to the fine, well, it evolved over the course of many, many years. But the second phase was when they had the legit 12 to 15 foot concrete studded rebar walls with guard towers and guns. They were topped with tubes, so make it hard to get a hold. There were really two walls. There was the first run of barbed wire and these tank traps.

If you saw Saving Private Ryan, you've seen those as big, like jaggedy things, like on the beach. Oh, yeah. Tank traps. And they're like huge jacks. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much.

And tanks can't run over them, which is I think is a key. It's like on tank traps. So there was that area, and then there was about 30 to 40 yards, depending on where it was, of just, they called it the, what, the death strip, where they put chemicals on the ground to kill all the vegetation. They got German shepherds and put them on extra long leaders that basically brought them nose to nose, but didn't allow them to get into it with each other. But there were no gaps.

You had to encounter a German shepherd. And then if you got through all that junk, you got to the actual concrete wall. And then on that wall, the actual, at some part, there were guard towers with search lights and they were crafty little communists. They had, they would use like sand or gravel for the walkways. Well, Germany is sand. So they would just use the ground, but they would keep it very well raked, smoothly raked so that you could see footprints very easily.

And everything was painted a bright white. Yeah. So anything would show up against it very clearly. Yeah. And that's on the, the east side, on the west side, it was painted with graffiti and art and yeah, because they were just crazy free people. Well, they could walk right up to the wall too. They didn't have to go through German shepherds or razor wire or tank traps.

They just walked right up to the wall and showed their disdain for it by using graffiti or peeing on it. Probably. And what was peed on more than once. I guess Ronald Reagan famously did. There were trip wires that were hooked up to automatic machine gun fire for a while. Eventually they agreed to take those down. And apparently it was tough to even get guards on this thing because they first had to weed

out. They didn't want any guards that had ties to West Germany at all. No, a lot of guards is defected in the early days. Yeah, so they realized we got to get guards that have no family over there, no affinity over there. And that really narrowed the pull down. And then I'm sure there were some guards that were gung-ho, but a lot of them were alcoholics and did not like their posts and didn't want to be there and didn't want to have the orders

to shoot to kill there. What they might have seen is still their fellow countrymen. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of them did. And we should say also that not everybody was trapped in East Germany. There was a strong sentiment after the war especially that West Germany was the part that was much more associated with the Nazi regime. Some of the worst atrocities were carried out in what was now West Germany.

And in the East there was a perceived separation from that physically and now historically. That was one reason some people like to stay in East Germany. Yeah, and I got the impression that it definitely was a sort of a divide between the old and the young as far as the older people thinking, maybe this communism thing will take care of everybody. Right. And the young were like, no, no, no, no, freedom. That's where it's at.

Yeah. So there was a socialist bent among some people. So there were people who were at least at first and probably throughout, but definitely at first happy to be living in a Soviet block country. Yeah, what struck me is super weird was that as a Western West German, you could travel into East Germany pretty much freely back and forth, which I never knew that. I thought it was just completely sealed off. If you're a West German.

Yeah. Yeah. You were supposed to be allowed passage through and back out pretty simply. Yeah. And back to West Germany. There were special plates for people who lived in West Germany. That made me nervous, man. Oh, yeah.

I'd be like, I don't care what offers in East Germany. I'm not going over there. I'll get a new dentist. Right. And there were actually some standoffs. There was a really big standoff in 1961 because the East Germans didn't allow egress like they were supposed to. Yeah.

To people with plainly marked cars of actually American diplomats. And tanks ended up on either side of the border at checkpoint Charlie for a full day. Two tanks and American tanks just facing one another. And luckily everybody stood down and called the whole thing off. But it was tense there for a little bit and the Americans were intentionally testing the Soviets to see if they would let them pass without stopping. And the Soviets didn't like four or five times in a two day period and tanks showed up. Yeah.

And at the checkpoint Charlie was the main gate there at Berlin, right? For use by NATO in the West. Right. The main gate between West Berlin and East Berlin, but it wasn't the only gate. There were other ones. Yeah. So going from West Germany into East Germany, it was checkpoint Alpha. Yeah.

And then from East Germany into West Berlin was checkpoint, was it Beta? I think it's Baker. Alpha Bravo, Charlie. Bravo. Thank you. And that's where I get lost. Well, yeah. I think it might have stopped after Charlie.

No, I used to know that alphabet, though. Oh, the, what's it called? I can't remember the name of the alphabet now. Well, we'll have to ask Jeff Tweedy. What? Oh. Remember Wilco and the Numbers Station? Yeah.

Yeah. Do you know Jeff Tweedy? I've met him before. Oh, at the... Rally to Restore Sandy? Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. He's a nice guy. That's awesome. I'd love to meet Jeff Tweedy. He's a good guy. Look at you. And that wasn't even a name drop because I asked. Oh, actually you did drop the name, but you didn't drop it in the way that you knew him.

Exactly. That doesn't count. So there are lots of awful stories about people trying to get across and getting killed that we talked about. And we'll highlight a few of those right after this break. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. We've got sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one.

Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So one of the problems with building a wall is that it's not necessarily going to follow the easiest path. So there was a street called Barenauer Street where there were literally apartments that were straddling the Berlin Wall. So like if you were standing in your window and like you leaned your head out the window,

your head was hovering above airspace of West Germany and your feet were in East Germany. And eventually they evicted all those people living in the apartments and sealed up the windows because people would go in the front door and leave the back door. And just defect? Yeah, like hey, that was pretty easy. So they made it a multi-pronged, they addressed the issue in a multi-pronged fashion. They bricked up the first story stuff and I guess vastly underestimated the will of people who wanted to defect because they quickly found out that people were willing to jump out of

second and third story windows. And what's cool is West Berliners would frequently help defectors. And so sometimes they would stand there with blankets like pulled taut to catch somebody jumping from a second or third story window so they could defect more easily. Yeah, there was this one lady and you can actually watch footage of this. It's Starling, a 76-year-old woman named Frieda Schultz. This footage of her being pulled, she's hanging from a window, well not from a window, she's hanging from out of a window by East German policemen.

And there's Western Germans, West Germans pulling her by the feet. So the East German cops are trying to pull her up into the window, the West Germans are trying to yank her down, the 76-year-old lady, and she was eventually yanked down. Which is the goodness I guess. But you can watch that. This file footage exists, it's creepy. Geez. What's her name?

Frieda Schultz. Cool. I mean, there's a ton of great documentaries on this, but I'll watch one from History Channel. Well, it's a pretty nuts-o event in world history. Nuts-o several decades long event, you know? So once the border was really kind of sealed and the East German guards had shown like, you know, we're going to shoot at you to try to kill you if we catch you trying to cross. People kind of settled into, I guess, a pretty dreary existence from what I understand, which

it's probably true, because you remember when we were being raised, we were raised in the Cold War, and we were fed a boatload of propaganda on a daily basis. And then once the Iron Curtain fell, we were able to see like, oh, wait a minute, those people aren't like, they're not all coming over to kill us, they never wanted to kill us in the first place, they're just other people, and we were lied to a lot in other words. Yeah, the Red Scare was just, it's crazy when you think about it. The fact that history still in the 21st century, long after the Cold War, and we're all adults

now, still stands up that living in the Democratic Republic of Germany was a really drab dreary hard existence. It must have actually been that way. Yeah, I mean, that's why someone would risk their life to get out. The first person that was killed, we mentioned, you know, how many people did you say it confirmed? 136? Uh-huh. The first one was Gunther Litvin.

He tried to swim over a canal and was shot, and that's in a message. But the big one was Peter Fechter. Nice. Do you like that? Yeah. In 1962, he was shot in the back climbing the wall. And he was just a boy, maybe 1920, early 20s? Yeah, he was 19, and he was right there at Checkpoint Charlie and shot in the back and

laid there on the ground crying out for help for hours, and American soldiers were right there, German soldiers were right there, and both of them feared gunfire if they tried to do anything. They just let this guy die screaming in the streets, bleeding out. And they left him there for an hour before the East German guards came and dragged his body away. Unbelievable. And there's still a memorial to this day, like almost immediately when it was put up,

and then it was installed permanently years later, but it's been ongoing ever since. There's a memorial to him on that wall where he died. I'm dying to go to Berlin. That'd be neat. Yeah, I've never been. I did Munich, but I've heard Berlin is just awesome, and it's a lot of fun. Just the history there, it must be crazy. Yeah, and I would love to hear from people over there like the lasting repercussions.

I'm sure it's, I mean, it wasn't that long ago. I'm sure things are still strange in some ways. Well, yeah, plus, I mean, even beyond strange, it's, I think still Germany would probably be a lot further along today had it not been divided between Soviet and Allied rule. It set it back quite a bit. Sure. The biggest drag on the East German economy was enough that when the two did reunite eventually, and we'll talk about that in a minute, the West had to assume this beleaguered economically

devastated half of its former country. And that kind of, kind of like Homer Simpson, like adding water and then salt to keep pinchy and the goldfish alive in the aquarium tank, where both just kind of floating there half alive. Right. That's what Germany after reunification. That's good stuff. That, that is the reference that I've gone to more than any other, I think.

What, Simpsons? Or just that one? That pinchy one. Yeah. I don't think I've ever remember using that one. Oh, that's like the fifth time. Really? Yeah.

All right. That's my fault. So by 1963, actually, that have your answer from earlier, that's when the second phase solid wall was fully complete. And that's when they also had like grills through the rivers and canals and metal grills and like sewer systems. And when they really ratcheted it up to the point where there was no way to get out unless you tunneled.

Yeah. So people tried to tunnel. There's a guy who killed the guard for trying to stop him evacuating his family out. Through a tunnel? Yeah. Through between an empty lot in West Berlin into somebody's house in East Berlin. Wow. Yeah, the guy made it and then like came back for his family and some guard tried to stop

him and dude shot him. Man. He got a year suspended sentence years later after reunification. Who, the soldier? No, the soldier was killed. Oh, I thought you meant. No, the guy who was getting his family out shot and killed the soldier and was trying to stop him.

Oh, well, that's great. Yeah. I think he got a year suspended sentence for murder after reunification. Wow. That's a nice little slap on the wrist. All right. Well, speaking of unification, I guess we're there, right? 1985.

Yeah. Things were just kind of going along and seemed totally intractable, not just in Germany, but between throughout the whole world. It was an utterly polarized world between the USSR and the US. Yeah, and I think by the mid 80s, too, the idea of the wall coming down was in a lot of people's heads on both sides. Well, thanks to a dude named Gorby. Gorby.

You remember him? Oh, yeah. There was a point in time where he was more popular than the Pope and Ronald Reagan. Really? Yeah. There was some time survey or poll and Gorby was at the top of the list because everybody liked the cut of his gym. Yeah.

Because he was saying, you know what, this whole stranglehold thing we have on people's lives. Maybe we should rethink that. He started talking about reform, which was, I don't know if he meant it that way, but it was the beginning and the end. If he didn't mean it, it sure got away from him quick. He instituted something called Glasnost, which is openness, which basically says, you know what, we want to hear from you.

That's not a very Russian thing to do. We're putting a giant suggestion box outside of all your local government offices and we want you to tell us how you really feel about your life and your life underneath our authority carrying rule. Yeah. And it's not a trap. It's not a bomb when you drop the thing in the suggestion box. I'm sure a lot of people thought it was.

Yeah, but Glasnost went over very well and people on the western side had a lot to say. People on the eastern side were still a little reticent for obvious reasons. And then they set up the Sinatra Doctrine, which I hadn't heard of until. I hadn't either. Basically, the Soviet Union said, this is what we've decided. So all of you Eastern Bloc governments, this is your decision too, you have to do exactly what we say. Right.

And the Sinatra Doctrine, which was named after the Myway song, it could also call it the Sidvicious Doctrine, which would have been pretty cool. Yeah, that's true. Have you heard his rendition? Yeah. It's great. Yeah, I'm a Sinatra guy, though. Well, you can like both.

Sure. Anyway, the Sinatra Doctrine said, you Eastern Bloc governments, you have a lot more authority in deciding what you want to do. Yeah. And so that led Hungary, because they, like all Eastern Bloc nations, had a close border with their neighbor to the west, which was Austria. They said, you know what? It's 1989.

We're going to start allowing people to get into Austria. And if you could get into Hungary, then you could go to Austria and presumably anywhere else you wanted to. And you could get into Hungary because it was an Eastern Bloc country. It basically was a passageway all of a sudden. And it worked. And they went, uh-oh, things are starting to deteriorate now. Yeah, because people by the train loads were leaving every day to Austria through Hungary.

And so things started to crumble. People started to feel a little less fearful of assembling. And they started to, this group in East Germany formed the new forum, the newest forum. Noyes. Noyes Forum. Yeah. And they basically started demonstrating in the streets of East Berlin. And they ran up against the East German Chancellor.

His name was Eric Honaker, and he was a hardliner. Yeah, I remember that guy. You can take yours in Gorby's reform and shove it. We're not changing anything. And the German Communist Party said, we're going to replace you with a liberal. Yeah, because the rallying cry was strong at that point. Like hundreds of thousands of people shouting tear down the wall in German. Yeah, in the streets at the same time.

Not one at a time over the course of many years. All at once in one place. Yeah, and the writing was on the wall. It was. And in a very unceremonious way, in fact, they didn't even tell the guards that they were doing this, which led to a lot of chaos, and they're lucky it didn't lead to people getting shot and killed. But they didn't even inform the guards that they, on November 9, 1989, announced, you know

what, you can start traveling abroad. You're going to be allowed permanent departure. All right. People are like, wait a minute. Are you saying what I think you're saying? It sounds like we can leave now. And they all went and assembled at the gate, and that same official was like, wait, I haven't read off the port futures prices yet.

That was my next announcement. And the guards, though, they did gather at the gates, like en masse, and the guards were like, what is going on here? We didn't get any memo of any free passage. But at that point, it was kind of too late, and people basically stormed the gates and took out their little hammers and started tearing that thing down themselves. And I remember freshman in college, man, it was huge and awesome. Like, I had no stake in this fight other than believing in freedom, and it was a powerful

thing to watch on TV. It was amazing. I watched it, too. I was begging my mom to like hop a flight to Berlin that night. Let's go. I was like, let's go. This is so huge. She said, maybe let's wait a little bit.

Well, you know what was cool was if you were an East Berliner who came over to West Berlin that day, you were greeted with a welcoming gift of 100 marks, and they gave out 8 million marks that day. No, 80 million marks, because there were 800,000 people who were each given 100 marks. That's crazy. They gave out 80 million marks to people coming over there. And they went to the first beer garden they could find, and they reinvested it right back into their new economy.

And shortly after that, within a couple of years, the Soviet Union collapsed. And if this rang your bell, you should continue things on by going and listening immediately to the Who Won the Cold War episode. Yeah. It's a good one. Yeah, we got a nice little batch of that time period. Yeah. Nice batch of podcasts.

Yeah. It's good. We should do Cuban Missile Crisis at some point. Let's. And Bay of Pigs. Okay. That time period is so fascinating to me. I just read maybe definitely in the top five, but maybe the best magazine article I've ever

read. About elevators? No, that's the best one about elevators. This one, again, is in the New Yorker. You know, the New Yorker has its archives open through the summer. Yeah. They're trying to get you hooked so that when they put up a paywall, you'll subscribe. I subscribed for a while, but they started stacking up and it intimidated me.

Same thing with the economists. Yeah. Man, those things, they started accumulating quick. Yeah, because you can't, it's not a quick read. But you can get a digital subscription. True. But the point is, I've been reading a lot of New Yorker lately and I read this one article called the Yankee Commodant and it's about an American who traveled to Cuba to

fight along Castro as this idealist freedom fighter and just his plight. It was amazing. Wow. But he was there for like the Bay of Pigs and like, it just, it was pretty amazing stuff. Totally worth reading and it's free right now. That's a movie waiting to happen. I can't believe it's not a movie yet because this is the sixties that we're talking about. Eight fifties, early sixties.

Whoever wrote that needs to talk to Josh Bierman. Yeah. Say, how do you do this buddy? Yeah. I can't believe it's not in the works already. It might. I bet you it is. What was his name?

Do you remember? His name was William Morgan. Bill Morgan. Interesting. The Yankee Commodant. Leo DiCaprio, perhaps. Hmm. Maybe.

Yeah. Maybe. I guess so. Who did you cast in your head? I cast Bill Pullman for a second. Oh yeah. He kind of looked like him with Bill Pullman's, he's just too old. This guy was like late twenties, early thirties.

Oh yeah. So who's the twenty-inch Bill Pullman? That's a tough one. You mean Pullman or Paxton? Pullman. Pullman. Okay. I know the difference between the two bills.

Yeah. I was just making sure. Why don't you guys let us know? Well, we'll do a call out in a minute. Which one? Cast and call. Which one? Who plays Bill Pullman as a late twenties, early thirties person?

All right. Okay. If you want to know more about the Berlin Wall, you can look up this article on HowStuffWorks.com by typing those words into the search bar and since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this favorite day stories. Remember you put out a call for that? Mm-hmm.

People's best day. This one's pretty good. This is from Ashley. I immediately thought of the day that I met my best friend. I was in the fifth grade and my parents were building a pool in the backyard. We hadn't filled it yet though. Lots of new friends show up under those circumstances. Oh, no, this takes a sad turn here.

We hadn't yet filled it though and the cats that we had would have a nasty habit of falling in at the empty pool and not being able to get back out without our help. One night it rained a lot, filled the pool up some, and my cat, my childhood companion, ran into the pool and drowned. Oh, no. I know. I was reading this thinking, how's this your best day? Be some kind of a sick person?

See, it continues. I didn't really like the cat and this really handled the problem that I'd had for a while. She does say parenthetically, trust me, the story gets a lot better, I promise. I woke up to my dad telling me not to go outside because Rosie had drowned. I went to school not really knowing how to feel and as my teacher was giving the morning announcement, I burst into tears. She asked what was wrong. I told her what happened.

She didn't know what to do with me and none of the other kids would even make eye contact with me. I had never felt so alone in my entire life, that is, until someone reached out and held my hand. It was this girl in my class who I'd never really noticed before, but she took my hand and said, it's going to be okay, and that has been my best friend for 11 years now. That is very sweet. So that was my all-time favorite day, guys.

Keep up the fantastic work, and that is from, oh, that is from Harry. I'm sorry, and Ashley is the best friend. Gotcha. So, Harry, Janky? Well, you really, this took a weird twist at the end. I just don't know how to pronounce it, J-A-H-N-K-E, Harry Janka. Honka? Honka?

Who knows? Let's call him Harry J. I think Harry Honka is the best name ever, so that's why I'm going to call him. Okay. Well, thanks a lot, Harry. We appreciate you writing in and letting us know. And Ashley, that was a very nice thing you did. It really is.

You got a best friend out of it. That's a great story. Again, if you could tell us who is the late-20s, early-30s Bill Pullman, we want to know. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.discovery.com, and as always, you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas

are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.