The Rest Is History - 83. The Berlin Wall
Episode Date: August 5, 202160 years ago this month, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) began building a barrier that divided the city of Berlin. It stood until 1989 and came to symbolise the front line of the Cold Wa...r. Iain MacGregor, author of "Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth", joins Tom and Dominic to discuss the history of the Wall, the ideological divide it represented and why it eventually fell. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport & Harry Lineker Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:Â @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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The opening lines of David Bowie's great song Heroes.
I apologise for not singing it.
I'm just not equal to doing that.
It was recorded in 1977 when David Bowie was living in West Berlin,
hanging out with Iggy Pop.
And of course, the lyrics famously name check the Berlin Wall.
But for me, I think it's that opening that is the most haunting.
Because in July 1977, the same month that Bowie began recording Heroes,
the body of an East Berliner, Henry Weisser, was found on the Marshall Bridge water border in Berlin-Mitte.
He'd been dead for two months.
He'd almost certainly died trying to cross the River Spree from East Berlin into West Berlin and had died while doing so.
And it's hard not to think that his fate didn't influence Bowie's idea of the lovers separated by the wall.
If only he'd been able to swim like a dolphin. And I think, Dominic, the Berlin Wall is a great theme for a podcast this August because it's the 60th anniversary of its building.
I think it actually the 13th of August is when it began. As a historian of the modern world, I mean, in a way, the Berlin Wall, I mean, it served as a symbol for the Cold War, but also its coming down serves as a symbol of the end of the Cold War.
It did. You're absolutely right. I think it's extraordinary, isn't it, when you look back?
I think the Berlin Wall is one of the hardest things to explain to people who are too young to remember it.
So I think you can explain the Cold War,
but that sort of sense of the divided city
and just the colossal iconographic importance of the Berlin Wall.
I mean, for people like us who grew up in the sort of 70s and 80s,
the Berlin Wall, I mean, the weird thing is it kind of was an it kind of was an obscenity and a symbol of, you know,
the sort of madness and terror of the Cold War.
But at the same time, it had always been there in our lives.
So it was just part of the sort of-
Yeah, you took it for granted.
You completely took it for granted.
And so the weirdness was when it wasn't there.
Precisely.
The idea, I mean, to me, there was always West Berlin and East Berlin.
They appeared in Bond films.
They were part of the sort of conversation.
And that moment when the Berlin Wall came down and there would be one Berlin and one Germany,
that was the weird bit because I'd always known nothing but West Germany, East Germany, East Berlin and so on.
I mean, it's an extraordinary thing to get your head around.
And imagine a wall like that in London or Paris or something.
It's mind-boggling.
But it happened in the capital of modern Germany,
one of the most dynamic and exciting cities now in the world.
Well, so it's a great theme.
And we need the author of a great book to take us through it.
And very fortunately, we have Ian McGregor, the author of Checkpoint Charlie,
a book about the Berlin Wall with us.
Ian, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. So you've written about the Berlin Wall,
so you've been thinking about it for a long, long time. Do you feel kind of divorced now
from the strangeness of it? Or are there still moments where you go, wow, that's odd?
Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm pretty much the same age as you guys.
So just what Dominic says, I mean, he basically took the words out of my mouth.
I grew up with the permanence of not just the Berlin Wall,
but obviously of the intra-German border, which we can talk about later,
and the physicality of it.
To me, growing up, lover of history since I was 11,
it was as permanent as the Himalayas.
It was just never going to go away.
So, yeah, I'm a bit of a Cold War, Berlin Wall, Berlin City geek, because that's what I was brought up on.
I mean, I've had my father and various relatives all served in the British Army of the Rhine from the 1950s onwards.
So that's weird, isn't it? The British Army on the Rhine from the 1950s onwards. Yeah, so that's weird, isn't it?
The British Army on the Rhine.
It's all so odd.
And yet we all just took it for granted.
Yeah, so I just grew up on their stories.
And my dad, he was never stationed in Berlin, but he obviously had R&R trips there.
So I had the excitement of him wide-eyed telling me what it was like,
the bright lights and everything, the American sector and all the things you could buy and things like that.
Even a British squad he couldn't buy that you could go into the American PX stores and that kind of thing.
And then younger uncles who were there in the 70s and then the early 80s.
So by then I was studying for A-level history and it was always going to be about modern European history and the Cold War. So and then I was lucky enough to go to East Germany as well.
And I went to the Soviet Union in 81 on school exchange trips.
So there was only if I was ever going to write a book because this is my proper first book,
even though I'm a publisher, it was always going to be about this because it was the thing that was always bubbling up inside me.
And I knew how I wanted to tackle it and the people I'd like to talk to.
So give us a sense of I mean,, we do have, amazingly to Tom and me, we actually have
some young listeners for whom all this is absolute ancient history.
So maybe we should talk a bit about the context, because actually the context of this originally
is not really so much the Cold War as the Second World War. It's the fact that the two pincers of the Allied advance,
you know, that the Russians get to Berlin first.
And then there's this question of what's going to happen to Berlin
and what's going to happen to Germany.
So talk us through a bit of that background.
Well, Stalin obviously was throwing a few bogus decisions or ideas, I suppose, to the Allies, especially to Eisenhower, saying Berlin had lost its strategic importance to the Soviet Red Army's thrust into Europe.
But to them, it was always the goal. The main goal was to capture the heart of Hitler's Reich.
And there's a very important comment or line that his foreign secretary Molotov said just
after the end of the Second World War. Well, it was about 46 where he'd said, what happens to
Berlin happens to Germany, and what happens to Germany happens to Europe. And he said that just
after the end of the Second World War. And that shows you exactly what the Russians thought of
Berlin, its place in Germany, and obviously Germany's place to the Soviet plan in Europe.
Now they'd obviously marched westward, right up to the Elbe River, where the demarcation was going
to be for the Allies. That had been the agreement, as in that's where the Red Army would stop,
and that's where the Allies coming from the west would stop too. And then they would sit down and have their discussion on how they were going to occupy
and govern the country and denazify it to where it was going to be a stable governing
democracy in inverted commas.
And that's what would happen at Potsdam, the Potsdam Conference in July.
So obviously, end of the war is May 1945.
By July, the Russians had already been in control of Berlin. And that's when the Allies were allowed
to actually then enter the city in July, two months later. And what went on in the country
and in the city itself under Russian occupation has been covered by the likes of Max Hastings
and the atrocities that were committed, etc, etc. But by July, the Russians were wholesale looting
and pillaging and taking anything they could lay their hands on to ship back to the mother country
to help rebuild their destroyed infrastructure, which has had colossal destruction wrought on it
by the Wehrmacht. So at Potsdam, that's where the agreement was that the country would then
be split into zones of occupation. It was originally only going to be what was seen
by the Russians as the victorious allies, which were going to be themselves, the Russians,
the Americans and the British. de Gaulle from France put up a protest and obviously
it was deemed necessary for real politic that the French were involved. So the Americans and
the British gave up some of their territory
that would be under French control, obviously on their border.
So the overall plan to have four zones of occupation for the country
was then mirrored for Berlin itself, which obviously was seen
as the capital of the country.
So therefore, it was deemed necessary that there would be four zones
of occupation for the city itself.
And obviously French, American, British and the Soviet zone.
And that's the way it was as we were then going through into the late 40s. And what could then be seen would be the Allies strenuously trying to evolve their sections of Germany itself and their sections of Berlin itself into a fully functioning, democratic, civilian-led government.
Just how far is Berlin from the frontier of the Western zone?
It's 177 kilometres, so roughly 100 miles.
So that's an island, isn't it?
Island of democracy, you could say, inside the Soviet zone of occupation.
There were links, obviously.
It was never a formal agreement.
This was allowed by Stalin in discussions.
It was never actually signed documents that I could find in the archives
or when I was talking to various commanders who were in charge of the Allied garrisons.
There was a road demarcation from Helmsdorf on the east-west German border that led into West Berlin.
There were three Allied air corridors.
And then obviously there were various canal routes
that would take shipping in and out of the city itself,
all to supply the city.
Because like you just said,
it was an island within the Soviet zone
that had to be supplied by the Western allies
from the Western zones.
So Ian, there's no legal framework governing that.
The various corridors, the road corridors, the rail corridors, the air corridors, because obviously this is key to the story and the survival of West Berlin.
And as the Cold War starts to get chilly, what is stopping Stalin from just cutting them?
The fear of a third world war? Is that the only thing that stops him? Yes, I would imagine so, because he obviously wanted a unified, weak Germany, because in that
way, he would probably eventually have what was going on in the other eastern countries that the
Soviets were occupying, as in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, they all fell eventually,
in the throughout the middle to late 40s, to what basically is communist coups that were taking over
so that the actual civilian elections that were being held, were gerrymandered, and Soviet,
Soviet, sympathetic governments installed.
The answer, obviously, to Stalin and the Kremlin.
That's what he wanted for Germany.
He wanted the Allies out.
He didn't want a military presence that he still saw as a capitalist enemy within Germany.
He would rather have everyone out, and then eventually, through hook or by crook,
through the back door, you'd soviet uh takeover of the government
eventually uh it wasn't in his interest to have uh a big military camp in uh west germany or in
west berlin which is what it was by 1948 49 obviously the cold war becomes you know more
intense the the mutual suspicion grows um effectively relations break down and then and then i mean
you've got the berlin airlift where berlin is kind of sealed off and the allies so that's 49 is it
49 48 49 yeah yeah 48 48 june 48 to may 49 and then you have this intervening period where where
where there is no berlin war but well there's a sort of intellectual and and
cultural berlin war but not a physical one and what's going on there are people just fleeing
across the across the border into west berlin and then through can they get from west berlin into
west germany how does that work well yeah i mean they they right up until about 1952 you could
still get over the the west uh west german east german border anyway i mean you could still get over the West German, East German border anyway.
I mean, you could get through it.
You had to be very, very careful.
And a great many people were arrested and imprisoned.
A few people were shot, but not many.
So it was possible.
But the crux came really in 1953, where you had the East German workers rose up protesting about their pay,
their working conditions, the lack of consumer goods to buy anything, just what a hard life
they were living. And what became like a localized uprising in Berlin ended up spreading across the
whole of East Germany, which was only put down within a week or so by Russian tanks and obviously the KGB helping out the East German government as well
to take out the various protesters, thousands of people in prison.
And from that point onwards, it was very much a much more hard-headed approach
the East German government had to their own citizens about what they could do,
their freedom of movement,
where they're allowed to go, to stop them obviously going.
But to the East German citizenship, what had been a trickle up until 52, 53,
if people wanted to build a new life in the West because they might be unhappy living in East Germany, became a flood.
So you're looking at thousands every week getting through the border.
And the one border that was possible to get through pretty much unmolested,
if you knew what you were doing, was Berlin.
Because what you had again was you had the four occupation zones
were still intact, but they were unmarked borders.
And by unmarked, what I mean is there wasn't a hard border,
there wasn't armed guards there that were checking every single person that was going through.
Because what your younger listeners have to remember is, especially if they live in a city or a big town,
if they think about where they have to go to every day to get to go and do things,
whether it's going to the dentist, going to school, their parents going to work,
they might crisscross across these towns and cities as everyone does.
Everyone does in London, whether it's on the bus, the tube, et cetera.
That's what was going on in Berlin.
Even though it was East and West Berlin, there were zones of occupation,
East Berliners under the Soviet zone could still travel to work in West Berlin.
They could still go to the hospital or they could go and see relatives or friends.
And that was the loophole.
So if you're very clever and careful and you're not obviously showing
you're carrying all your belongings
to leave your life in East Germany,
that's how you get across.
And obviously lots of people were stopped,
but thousands upon thousands of people
managed to escape to a new life.
And I mean, we're not skipping too far forward,
but by 1961 and we're getting to the war,
2.1 million East Germans had fled to the West.
Can I ask you then, so say the summer of 1961, I'm sure this is a really it's an impossible question, but I want to ask it anyway. Do you have a sense of how many what percentage of people in East Germany are true believers in communism?
And what percentage are people who are desperate to get out?
Well, I think you'd have to look at, if you talk about the latter,
the latter is easy to look at because you look at statistics.
Like I said, 2.1 million had left by 1961, and that's a sixth of the population.
And from that sixth of the population,
50% of them were under 25 years old.
And the bulk of them too were from the professional classes.
So you'd leave if you were ambitious, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, higher education.
So the socialist dream that they were trying to build
was very much you'll have free education
right up to university level.
You'll have a job for life because you'll be going into pre-planned occupations.
That's fine.
But as Dominic just said, if you have plans,
because who knows really what they want to do when you're a student.
So if you even diverge slightly from the official storyline
of where your career might go or where your life might go, you were deemed a threat to the ruling party, the ruling government, society in general in East Germany.
And obviously, we can talk about the heavy surveillance they had on the population in terms of the stars, the operatives, the secret police.
But like I said, 50% were under 25.
That's the lifeblood of any economy. If they're
departing to go and start a new life in the West, it's a brain drain. It's an economic drain on the
East German experiment surviving economically. And so the true believers, the true believers.
True believers. Well, I mean, at any one time, again, if you look at the statistics and you
listen to when you're talking to East Germans themselves, I'd say I interviewed over 50 East Germans for my book.
And I'd say at least half of them were, I wouldn't say true believers in the purest sense, but they believed in the system they were in until they ran into problems further down the line as their lives were developing and they wanted their careers to grow.
So I talked to people that were in the East German socialist version of the Hitler Youth, so to speak, that believed completely and believed the war was necessary. But by the time we get to the 1980s, and they're seeing their restrictions more and more curtailed, especially in travel, they'd become very cynical and wanted to change the
system and wanted to get out of the country. So I'd say not even 10% were true believers.
But how many of us are ever true believers in anything? I mean, it's like saying we live in
the Western world of capitalism and democracy, but how many of us would say, yeah, I'm a really
true believer. I think about it all the time. And I love our system.
I mean, that's not really, I suppose they just muddled along, didn't they?
Until they, a lot of people just muddle along.
Well, I'm not sure that's true because communism is, I mean, it's a faith.
It's something that you feel is changing the world for the better.
So in a sense, it does imply a kind of ideological commitment in a way that perhaps a commitment to the right to buy goods isn't quite the same way.
But I was going to say, I mean, one of one of the key interviews I had in the book, a guy called Professor Stefan Voller.
That's his title now. And he's director of the GDR Museum on Museum Island in Berlin.
It's one of the best Cold War museums in Germany. And to see what life was
really like in East Germany. Very, very intelligent man, obviously, a bestselling author. He wrote the
very first book of what life was like after the war came down. He told what life was like as he'd
been growing up as a number one bestseller. But anyway, his father was on the East German
Politburo, so to speak, and was an economist. And Stefan grew up in that atmosphere and he was a believer.
He did his national service in the East German army.
He was seen as one of the brightest students that they had.
He was allowed to travel to Moscow to study.
But gradually, as he's seeing the erosion of civil liberties increase, especially by the 80s, and he's seeing some of his friends being in prison, he's seeing some of his friends escape, the veil is pulled apart.
And he might be sitting down and having lots of arguments with his father by this time.
And that's what he was talking to me about, saying, you know, by the 81, 82, so that's seven years before the war came down, he was firmly, firmly against the regime.
He just didn't know how it would end and how he could possibly
effectively bring about change.
He was just as surprised as the war coming down as anyone else.
So let's go back to 61.
Yeah, sorry.
So the summer of 61.
So what's the thinking in the sort of East German high command?
So they're seeing, obviously, they must have a sense of numbers.
They must get a sense that all these people,
and do they just think this is utterly intolerable?
We have to do something and this is the obvious thing to do?
Or is there a real debate within the regime about the wall?
Do some of them see the PR disaster that it will be? Well, Walter Ulbricht, who was the
leader of East Germany, had been from the late 40s, really. And by the mid 50s, was the de facto
leader, recognized as such. He'd been arguing since probably 56, once Stalin had gone
and Nikita Khrushchev had taken over and given his famous speech
behind closed doors of what a tragedy it had been for Russia
that Stalin had been in charge, et cetera, et cetera, jumping ahead.
But it was seen that there could be some kind of more open relationship
between the East German government and the Kremlin.
So instead of a one-way traffic of orders,
you will do this, you will do that,
Ulbricht was allowed to obviously regularly visit the Kremlin,
sit down with Khrushchev and tell him his problems.
And they're all very aware.
They're looking at the statistics.
They're seeing this flood, this migratory flood
of East Germans going to the West.
So from I would say from 57 onwards, Ulbricht was constantly telling Khrushchev something needs to be done.
And he was hoping it would be done on a more strategic level, that Khrushchev would win some kind of concessions from the Allies,
where there might be a harder border along East and West Germany, as well as in Berlin itself,
that would make it difficult for the East German citizenship to escape. These kind of things weren't happening. So by the time you're getting to 61, and like I said, by then a sixth of the
population has just disappeared to the West. It was really crunch time.
I mean, I would imagine, again, having talked to various people
at the time and looked in the archives, they were probably only a year away
from economic collapse if something hadn't been done by that time.
And obviously to the Allies, they're thinking this is great.
Welcome aboard.
Just come on in because we know what's going to happen.
So there was that.
But then, as we'll talk about
the 61, it was just almost like a perfect storm of you've got a new American leader in John F.
Kennedy. You've got Khrushchev coming to the table, very much more belligerent than he had
been before because he knew it was crunch time because he was being told this by these Germans.
And to him, just as much as the Americans had their domino theory about democratic states falling to the communists, Khrushchev had
this fear keeping him up at night thinking, well, if I allow East Germany to fall, what's going to
happen to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, et cetera, et cetera. I can't have this happening
on my watch. So it's a decision for the Russians as much as it is for the East Germans.
No, it was always a decision for the Russians, just as it would be in 89.
So the East Germans can't do anything unless they get the green light.
They wouldn't have moved a muscle.
They wouldn't have moved a muscle.
They could have done, but they wouldn't have had the backing.
Because the key thing is, in East Germany, you've got over 300,000 Red Army troops.
You've got over 3,000 Russian tanks, the Air Force, et cetera, et cetera.
That's what's keeping the, or propping up i would say as well as
obviously uh soviet warsaw pact uh aid economic aid packages is keeping east germany going and
so it happens on a sunday right yeah it's perfect time i mean what it's like uh didn't pearl harbour
happen on sunday you always pick a really great time where you know christmas day would be there
you go you know you know typical uh for for your
listeners i'm sure if you guys have been there you go to berlin at the weekend everyone just
leaves the city and tries to get to their their gardens or their allotments that they've got in
the the various beautiful woods and and lakes that surround the city i mean it's fantastic
but that was what was happening at the height of summer, August 13th.
The great bulk of the city was just relaxing.
The Allied garrisons themselves were relaxing.
And no one, well, I say no one.
I mean, the Allies were expecting the East Germans and the Soviets
to do something because the pressure had been building up all throughout
61 to that point where something had to be done to relieve this pressure.
And that's when they struck. Operation Rose.
And so just one quick question, which absolutely has always fascinated me.
And it's something that people bring up all the time.
If you throw a party and you have to lock your guests inside to stop them leaving, that may cause you to have questions about how good
your party actually is, what a good host you are. Does it not occur to Walter Ulbricht and his
colleagues that if they have to lock their citizens up behind a wall, do they never think
about the quality of their regime and their offer, to use jargon you know do they never have a grain
of self-doubt oh we've got to build this massive wall to keep everybody in because they're leaving
well no because you're talking about uh complete 100 believers in the the socialist plan the
utopia that they'd seen developing in in russia the soviet, since the end of the Russian Civil War by the mid-20s.
I mean, these guys had been committed communists all throughout Hitler's period of power.
Quite a few of them had actually fled to Russia and been housed in the Kremlin.
I mean, Ulbricht is very famously one of the guys that's sitting in a trench with Khrushchev at Stalingrad in 1942-43,
giving propaganda speeches to the German troops that were surrounded in the city to try and break their morale.
These guys had been honed to build the kind of country or you can call it dictatorship that the Kremlin wants.
And also, I mean, the context
also is denazification.
So the wall is the, what is it, the great
anti-fascist barrier.
The anti-fascist barrier.
And so people, presumably
people who are trying to escape to the West
are cast as neo-Nazis,
as fascists, as people
seduced by the evil glamour of
this kind of Hitlerian legacy.
But it's harder to denounce them as that when, like we were saying earlier, a great deal,
a great many of them are from the professional classes. And it wasn't just the odd one or two
persons from your locale that would be going. Overnight, a whole factory could disappear.
Overnight, a whole doctor's surgery could disappear
they would literally just put the shutters down put the lights out and go so you can't
you can denounce them publicly but that to their to the locals who know them and everyone else who
knows them they they know the truth they just haven't those that stay just didn't have the
gumption to go the people at the top who are doing this and who presumably are not
kind of full of self-doubt they they do
see themselves as gauged in a kind of manichaean struggle but you know communism and fascism
between light and and dark and so presumably in that light it makes you know you can justify it
because yeah well it's yeah i i yeah they they to them they were building the utopia and i again if you if you go to the various
like i said amazing interactive museums they've built now over the last 10 15 years
on a certain level the life that you would have in east germany especially by uh the 70s uh where
there was more money more consumer goods that kind of thing. And like we said, you've got free healthcare, free education, job for life, et cetera. Guaranteed housing, basic, but guaranteed housing.
To a lot of people, that's great. That's what they want. But I would argue to the generation
that grew up just after the war, that was enough for them at the time. It's to the following generations,
you and I, who are all now in our 50s, but back then in the 80s, we'd be teenagers in our 20s,
we wanted more. Yeah. Okay. Well, we say the Berlin Wall has been built. I think we should have a commercial break now so that listeners can hear about all the consumer durables that
Western capitalist society has to offer. And then when we come back,
let's look at what it was like to live in Berlin
when it was divided, escape attempts and so on,
and then the process by which it fell.
So thanks very much.
We'll be back soon.
I'm Marina Hyde.
And I'm Richard Osman.
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Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are in berlin a divided city the wall has just gone up in the summer of 1961 and uh our guest ian is talking us through life in berlin and what it
was like to live in the divided city so in Ian, there are people who, I mean, their families are divided.
They have girlfriends or boyfriends on the other side of the wall.
I mean, so this just comes down overnight and your life is literally kind of ripped in two, I guess.
Yes. I mean, you're looking at,
so it's a city of over 3 million people.
And as you were saying about how can you just split something
like London or Paris, that's exactly what they did to Berlin.
They did it really well, very efficiently, very quickly.
So you've got overall, you've got 150 kilometers worth of barriers that went up straight away. And
it wasn't a physical wall straight away. So that's what people need to realize.
The East Germans and the Soviets were putting their toe in the water straight away with just
cement posts and barbed wire. That was the very first, that was the first iteration of the barrier that went up because
they had to see what the allies were going to do.
And as soon as they realized within 24 or 48 hours, well, actually they're not doing
anything and we can handle the civilian uproar, but the allies themselves aren't trying to
push through these barriers with tanks or armored cars.
Let's crack on.
And that was the next phase of Operation Rose.
So you've got 192 streets overall cut off,
97 going out of Berlin into the East German hinterland,
because like we were saying, it's 100 miles or so behind the West German barrier.
The overground train, the S-B-band the underground train system the u-band
they've all been closed off the sewer systems are closed off so it was because people can escape
through the sewer that's what they were doing so and it was very much again as i was talking to
people that were there at the time and they were telling me their stories it was very much a cat
and mouse so every time the mouse as in thee, is blocked on a certain way, so the underground
system, the U-bands block, how am I going to get out? All right, I'll try the sewers. And it was
successful for a few hours or maybe a day or so. And then the authorities found out and then they
would block it. And you've got overall, across the city itself, where the main barriers were
being built at the time, you had 81 official crossing points that we're talking about all these tens of thousands of East Germans were
able to cross over. They'd now been reduced to 10. And they were now being heavily reinforced.
First of all, like I said, with cement posts and barbed wire, but within a few days, cement blocks,
which is where we all see these famous scenes, they were going to be breeze blocks. Ironically,
the material they used to build the first iteration of the berlin wall had originally been set aside to build this great new housing the
workers were going to have in east berlin right that's why housing suffered all the way through
the 60s until they managed to come up with more to build these houses because they'd use them on
the berlin wall walls not houses but a quick question so not back in the early 1950s i think
1953 there had been a kind of an East German uprising.
Yes.
Bertolt Brecht made his famous remark about dissolving the people and getting new people.
Get new people.
Why is the no, why don't East Germans take, are they just so cowed and terrified that they don't take to the streets in 1961?
Well, you've hit the nail on the head.
So the East German government almost was toppled in 53, very quickly.
It could have happened if the Russians hadn't come in with tanks. It would have happened.
But they learned their lesson. And so they'd spent a few weeks realising and briefing police, secret police, border guards and the regular East German army of how each unit was going to monitor and guard the borders as they were being closed. And specifically, they weren't looking west, really.
A few of them were, but the majority of them weren't looking or pointing their guns westwards at West Berlin civilians or the Allies.
They were looking eastwards towards their own people.
The whole point was they had to suppress very quickly, suddenly, any kind of dissent that
was going on, especially from their own uh their own troops
border guards and police that might be thinking have second thoughts and think actually i don't
want to be involved in building this wall i'm gonna i'm gonna either protest and help try and
stop this because that's what had happened in 53 whole you know thousands of police and guard
border guards had gone over to the protesters' side. And that's what they really were successful at stopping in 61.
And from 61 to 89, how many escape attempts are made?
How many succeed and how many people die?
Well, it's roughly, the statistics say it's over 10,000 escapes were made.
And that's not just through the Berlin Wall itself,
but that's obviously through the intra-German border,
which is far harder to get through, I would say, especially in the 60s.
Because like I was saying, it was only by the mid to late 70s and then going into the 80s that I've
got a really lovely diagram of it in the book. It shows you how impossibly difficult it would
have been to get across what was then called the death strip to get from East to West Berlin. I
mean, it was practically impossible to actually get across on foot.
You'd be caught or killed.
Whereas the inter-German border was slightly a little bit easier
and less lethal.
So it was about 10,000, and they reckon it was anywhere between
3,000 to 5,000 were successful.
But again, if you look at the statistics, it's in the early days. So when you've
got the first iteration of the war, the first iteration of the death strip, it's not as
sophisticated or as highly monitored as it was by the 80s to where it's practically impossible.
So a lot more people took their chance of trying to escape in the 60s. And that leads me to tell
you that there's over about 200 deaths altogether, eight of whom were East German border guards caught in crossfire when there was
gun battles exchanged with people escaping. But the majority of the deaths were in the 60s,
because that's when it was seen as easier to try your luck. Whereas by the 70s, you wouldn't do it.
And that's why you famously, by the 70s you wouldn't do it and that's why you famously by
the 70s and 80s you got people trying to tunnel underneath because that was the the safest option
of uh not being discovered and obviously getting as many people out as possible and some of the
people who die are children right or teenagers at least yeah yeah i mean there's uh there's one
tragic case of a mother uh was escaping uh in the car going through the checkpoint and her baby was starting to cry.
And so she smothered the baby in obviously trying to quieten her down.
And by the time they got through the checkpoint, she's actually suffocated.
So tragic, tragic stories like that.
But I mean, the first death was literally two weeks after the first of the
wall had gone up in August the 13th. So 24th of August was the first death by shooting. And that's
when obviously both sides knew that, wow, these guys are for real. They are really going to kill
their own citizens who are trying to escape. And that was a tailor called Gunther Lithgen,
who, a bit of a Del boy, for those who know Only Fu know only fuels and horses, he was a tailor, but he did job,
he lived in the East, but he earned his living in the West. And obviously the ratio, the disparity
between Western currency, which would buy you a hell of a lot more if you lived in the East,
which is what a lot of hundreds of thousands of Berliners were doing at the time.
And he just was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And he was actually moving to West Berlin when they closed the war.
He just happened to be on the Eastern side because he'd gone to collect things.
And he spent the next two weeks going up and down the border,
trying to figure out where he could try his luck and escape.
Realized, right, I'm going to try here.
Tried to swim across one of the canals that were connected,
that flow into the Spray River.
And they fired a few warning shots at him,
and then he was hit three times, and he died on the western side.
And obviously, as Tom was saying, he was then denounced
in the Eastern press as a fascist agitator that tried his luck
to flee to the west and had been stopped.
And he was the first death.
And like I said, that was definitely a red flag
that the regime was flying to the population to say,
okay, you can try it, but this is what's going to happen to you.
And the majority of the deaths were in the 60s.
Right. So you've said that there were 10 crossing points in the war.
And the most famous one is the one that you've
given as the title to your book checkpoint charlie yeah um and i suppose check the notoriety of
checkpoint charlie is that it's seen as the flash point that makes berlin the most dangerous place
in the world for much of the of the cold war that's the reputation that it has. How deserved is that, do you think?
How dangerous is the Berlin Wall
as a possible trigger for the Cold War becoming hotter?
Well, it's much like where we've got today
with the demarcation line between North and South Korea.
So you've got seriously heavily armed forces
just pointing their guns at each other
in a kind of pseudo kind of almost peace treaties going on.
It's the same with Checkpoint Charlie
and the Berlin Wall itself in Berlin.
It was the one place where allied, predominantly American,
but allied soldiers,
usually the elite units that were stationed there. And it was a garrison of about 10,000 altogether, French, German,
sorry, French, American and British, faced off with Soviet units as well.
And famously, Checkpoint Charlie was given the code name straight after the Berlin Wall had gone up because the Allies had to have the three points of contact.
You've got the East-West German checkpoint crossing that would get you access through that 100 miles of Soviet territory.
That was Checkpoint Alpha.
That would then get you to Checkpoint Bravo, which was giving you entrance into the Allied sectors.
And then the next sector, phonetically, would be Checkpoint Charlie.
And that's why it was given that. And that was still the one crossing point that Allied military
and Allied diplomatic international staff were expected and allowed to cross into the Soviet zone.
Because what you've got to remember is, yes, they built the border.
Yes, they were entombing their own East German citizens inside their own country, their own city.
But they still had to abide by the international agreements that had been signed off at Potsdam.
Why? Why did they have to?
Because that was their way of making sure that Kennedy at the time, JFK, who was obviously president of the United States and Macmillan in the UK,
wouldn't interfere with the first iteration of the war.
As long as the allies could see that they're not encroaching on our territory,
our sectors, and they're still allowing us, our troops, our allied diplomatic personnel
to have their usual free entry into the Soviet zone to travel around as they please.
Those rules hadn't been broken.
But to everyone else, obviously, who were trying to escape,
that was the new world they were living in.
Talking about the border guards and stuff,
you have a lovely line in your book that I thought was fascinating.
It was about the, you say, close relationships develop between Russian and British commanders
rooted in mutual respect and the copious consumption of whiskey.
Whiskey, vodka.
So they are facing off.
They are both armed.
There is this sense of paranoia and mutual suspicion.
But they develop a kind of,
as the war becomes something you take for granted
they basically end up they're not they're never friends obviously but they end up kind of getting
along is that right yeah they they do what i found funny was uh all the allied uh soldiers
and diplomats i talked to had huge respect for the sovi not much respect for the East Germans,
especially on the military intelligence side, which is what you're referring to, Dominic.
So we had the military intelligence units that all sides had in the city
that were allowed technically to check each other out.
Because again, that was one of the unwritten rules that a lot of the the civilian populations in in the respective cold war countries never knew the soviets the americans the
french and the british all allowed uh intelligence units to go along agreed lines of travel into in
and out of uh uh the eastern sector in the western sector and so this is what this is this is what
makes it the world capital of espionage absolutely yeah all that reputation that yeah like harry and everything
that it is justified is it yeah because i think it was it was a very good way of both sides
uh trusting each other i use that very delicately that way that uh there weren't any surprises in
terms of uh troops that might be stationed in that particular area or weaponry technology that was being used.
Both sides were giving each other a small amount of leeway
to check each other out to make sure that there was some kind
of tacit agreement or a level of trust between the two.
And that gets back to the point of where they would have regular
get-togethers.
And obviously they were official get-togethers,
but a lot of the time they ended up swapping caps with each other, giving each other badges,
and obviously getting drunk on vodka and whiskey. And yeah, there was a lot of respect,
but on the East German side, no, because the Allies made a point of making sure that the
East Germans realized that you're not a sovereign country. We don't recognize what you've done to
the city. We don't recognize what you've done to the city.
We don't recognize what you're doing to your own citizenship.
And that gets down, if you drill down to what Checkpoint Charlie actually looked like,
it was just a small wooden hut, very insignificant.
It meant a lot, but it was just very insignificant.
Where if you go 500 yards from that checkpoint to the East German checkpoint, by 1989, huge complex.
They spent millions and millions and millions of pounds on, dollars worth,
to make it as sophisticated as possible to make sure that when you came through, like going through Heathrow Terminal 5, you're going through layer after layer of checks
and passport control and, you know, they had cameras everywhere.
And that was them, again, puffing their chests out saying you are entering our sovereign nation and look how powerful and strong we are
and the the the the most notorious flashpoint is is when an american diplomat is going to the opera
yes in east berlin yeah and is isn't it what what kind of triggers the it ends up with tanks facing
each other isn't isn't that because it's an East German guard asking for his credentials rather than a Soviet one?
Yeah, but that had been building for a couple of months.
So August, you've got the war going up.
This happened in October.
So by October, Kennedy has obviously reinforced the Allied garrison.
He sent a battle group right up the autobahn, unchallenged,
a couple of thousand guys.
He sent his vice president, Johnson, to go and bolster the morale of the Berliners
who felt they were being abandoned by the Allies.
But he also sent, as his kind of man on the ground,
he didn't have a position in the chain of command,
General Lucius Clay,
who had been the very first Allied Commandant of Berlin
post Second World War Berlin in 1945,
and was also seen as the architect
of the very successful Berlin Airlift.
So to Berliners, West Berliners, he was a hero.
He still is a hero if you go over there today.
One of the main thoroughfares in in berlin's clay alley uh
he was sent over and he was the instigator of this standoff in october 61 where one of the
diplomats alan leiter was taking his wife like i was saying free access uh unmolested into east
germany uh sorry into east berlin because that's where all the main theatres and operas were still operating.
You could have an amazing lavish night out that would cost you peanuts because of the ratio in discrepancy of currency.
But instead of allowed to be driven through unmolested without his papers being checked because he had his diplomatic plates on,
as you said, the East German officer insisted. He refused.
And he was just stuck there with his wife, Dorothy, in the Volkswagen until Clay heard on the as you said the east german officer insisted he refused and he was just stuck there with his wife dorothy in the volkswagen until clay heard on the phone and he was rubbing his
hands with glee thinking this is the chance i've been waiting for and he sent a platoon of uh fixed
bayonets uh us mps in their jeeps to go through not only surround the volkswagen and intimidate
these german guards but then to say, and just carry on.
And they drove them.
They didn't drive them to the theatre.
He made a point of driving them all the way around the inner part of the city
as a kind of show of defiance to say, you're not going to stop us.
And then this happened two, three nights in a row.
And by that time, Clay had thought, right, they're still not backing down.
I'm going to have to up the ante.
And this is all without the knowledge of Kennedy and the White House, what was going on.
They just trusted him to do this because obviously this is well before the communications we have today.
And that's where tanks started to go to DEFCON 3, then to launches of bombers, etc., etc.
And that's when obviously a panic JFK in the White House got involved.
And that's where both sides managed to calm it down, because obviously the Russians were thinking, well, if you're going to bring tanks to the party, so are we. But obviously, the Russians could bring hundreds of tanks.
And the Allies only had what they were allowed to have in the garrison in Berlin, which was a dozen at best.
Like I said, there was a garrison of 10,000 troops altogether.
All three countries, three sectors had a squadron of tanks and armored cars.
They would have been squashed within hours.
So there was not only Russian tanks that you'll
see in the very famous photos at the checkpoint facing off against American tanks, there's dozens
of them parked in the streets. So the Americans knew that they stood no chance. And that's why
it was talked down. And very quickly afterwards, once it had calmed down, that's when Kennedy
ordered Clay home. Not in disgrace, but he was ordered quietly home.
Yeah, calm down.
Let's get on from getting on yeah we don't actually have tons of time left actually this this has really flown by and we've completely failed to ask any of our audiences questions
that we sort of maliciously solicited and then have you got them there because i haven't there
was a question about um well actually i know what i want to ask. I'm going to ask what I want, Tom. Go on, cut it down.
So tons of people said, did David Hasselhoff bring down the Bowie War? That's the question I wanted to ask.
Is that the question?
I knew you were going to ask that question.
I was trying to find it on Twitter.
So lots of people asked this question about David Hasselhoff, David Bowie,
of course, Bruce Springsteen.
I think you talk about Bruce Springsteen, don't you, in your book?
Yeah, yeah.
So this becomes a kind of different kind of confrontation that the Allies, the West, will have these gigs or have these events.
I mean, Ronald Reagan shouting, you know, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
And they do this deliberately, do they?
And the musicians in particular, they're kind of rock stars.
They are party to it.
They know what they're getting into.
They're perfectly happy to be co-opted as kind of cold.
Yeah.
I mean,
they,
uh,
there's lots of stars had,
uh,
major,
major concerts in West Berlin.
So you're talking about David Bowie.
There was also Michael Jackson,
uh,
Brian Adams,
uh,
in the eighties.
Uh,
and they caused a lot of disruption on the Eastern side because you,
like I was saying,
you've now got your generate your second generation of young East Germans in
their twenties,
the teenagers in their twenties thinking,
wow,
we want this world because they can,
they can,
they can,
they're getting all this music on their,
their legal radio sets.
And so they could go right up to the border within reason.
And cause you're obviously going to hear it in the city.
You can hear this music going on and the likes of Bowie and Michael Jackson,
they were very clever and they had their gigs
and they had their speakers,
some of which turned to the East
to make sure the population could hear it.
But this had caused civil unrest
and lots of people arrested and imprisoned.
So by the time I talk about,
I talked about Bruce Springsteen
because that was a seminal moment in 88
where he didn't give his concert in West Berlin.
He gave his concert in East Berlin.
He was invited by the East German government because by then,
88, you've got a younger generation.
They're still fanatics, but they're in government,
and they're telling the older leadership hanging on to power,
we have to give some kind of panacea to the younger
generation, or this is just going to roll on and on. We've got to show them that we're developing,
we're evolving. And that's why Springsteen was allowed to perform there. And he was on his tour
in Europe anyway, so it fitted. But what they weren't expecting, they thought they'd get 70,000
to 80,000, 90,000 people that were specially invited. So I've got one of the tickets,
they're all printed. But people will
say it's between 200 and 250,000 people flocked to see him. And as we all know, he's a very
intelligent man. He's politically motivated as well to a degree. He could see what was going on
in front of him. And that's why I wouldn't argue he politicized the event, but he definitely gave a very heartfelt speech about freedom.
And then obviously he sang his Bob Dylan song, Chimes of Freedom.
And that had a major, major effect because that kind of event and the ripples it caused to that generation of East Germans couldn't keep a lid on that.
That was just another chip in the wall
of what had been going on throughout the 80s
anyway. And so then
going into 89,
what is the process by which
the wall ends up falling?
So from, say, 83
all the way up to 89, the peace movement
had been growing in East Germany
and that provided a protective
umbrella for thousands and hundreds of thousands of people
to protest about whatever they wanted to protest for.
But it was under the guise of they were, it was in line with the church, which had been
sanctioned and allowed in the 80s by the government.
Because again, it was one of their ways of trying to keep the populace in check.
But by 89, the peace movement had just mushroomed exploded so you've got major major
uh marches peaceful marches but protest marches nonetheless that were happening in the major
cities outside of uh berlin in east germany so leipzig and dresden and the key thing was they
weren't brutally suppressed they weren't stopped They were allowed to march hundreds of thousands of people. So again, that kind of imagery is
making its way around the country of East Germany, but obviously into West Germany,
into the Allies as well. And once you've taken that momentous step, it's then there's just a
natural progress. And the east german government with the younger
generation that was about to take over in a bloodless coup and got rid of eric honica who'd
been who'd been actually the the architect of the berlin wall had built it and then governed from
1970 all the way through to 89 he was very very much ardent communist uh he'd been ousted in
in october but uh you get agon krenz don't you agon krenz yeah and
key thing agon krenz had seen what the chinese had done in chenamon square that year where there'd
been a very brutal bloody crackdown of civilian protests thousands killed he didn't what he didn't
want as he said he didn't want a chinese solution to what was going on in his own country and that's
why there was definitely a kind of,
let's back off and give them what they want and we'll try to manage this.
And it was the process of trying to manage this, but making sure that the one party state was
still intact that led to the terrible press conference about announcing...
Yeah, it's all a mistake, isn't it? Isn't it all a mistake and it all goes wrong? I found the actual annotated briefing notes that were given to Schabowski, the press secretary, by Egon Krenz.
And he scribbled all over it. And he just hadn't bothered reading it properly because he was tired.
He'd been involved in all the press briefings for weeks to the Western allies and to his own countrymen about what was going to be delivered to them to solve this problem. He'd been given a week's leave because he was exhausted, came back, and his first job was
to give this press conference on the 9th of November. And he just didn't read the brief
properly, wasn't over the brief. And instead of saying the plans that they were going to do
further down the line over the coming months of announcing how they would give their countrymen
free movement of travel because that's
really what these germans wanted above all else that's why they were trying to press to go out
of austria and hungary and that kind of places uh he announced oh it happens immediately yeah he had
one job one journey i would imagine i would imagine that's what egon said to him you had one job to do
and uh and so that goes out and then everyone starts piling over well they do well
they no no they go through the entry points yeah they pile down to the checkpoints and it's almost
i mean it's a horrible thing to say but it's almost like a hillsborough moment you could say
you've got these tens of thousands of people that have gone to all these you know dozen checkpoints
along the border and it's just creating a crush and to the the commanders on the ground they
haven't been given any instructions their urgent phone calls that they were giving every five
minutes aren't answered by their next chain of command and as we know it's command economy it's
command policing structure as well they don't know what to do and they're thinking well i'm not going
to be the guy responsible to to open fire on my own people to clear this look at them how can i
get rid of them all so they had to open the gates and own people to clear this. Look at them. How can I get rid of them all?
So they had to open the gates.
And obviously the Allies are watching.
So it's the guards who make the decision.
So it's not going up to Krentz or Gorbachev or anybody else.
No, no.
The commanders on the ground gave the key decision
to open the gates.
But what was discussed as this was going on at the very highest level were,
as we saw in China, you had the hardliners in the government
and in the military and in the Stasi saying, we have to crack down.
We have units around the city, motorized elite units we can bring in
and we can put this to bed within 24 hours.
It's going to cost a lot of blood, but we can do it.
Where you've got Krenzer, fair play to him, and his wing of the party saying,
well, no, this can't happen.
We can't do that.
We can't have a Chinese solution in a country like ours.
How would it look?
And we've spent months trying to soften our way to where we need to be.
And that's the decision to take.
So again, I've interviewed people in the book that, you know,
there's one guy who was at the officer training camp that was on the East
German Czech border.
They'd been having emergency riot control training for a week,
thinking they were going to be bussed into the city to quell it.
And obviously they were then to be bussed into the city to quell it. And obviously,
they were then told to stand down. So there were lots of, I'm sure it will come out eventually.
But there were lots of very high strategic conversations going on. And as we said,
right at the beginning, that the Russians propped them up from when they started in,
the uprising started in 53, the Russians withdrew their support under Gorbachev in 89 because Gorbachev had said, my troops are staying in their barracks.
You're basically on your own.
We are not going to get involved in this domestic fight.
Soon as they knew that, they lost.
I mean, I know you've talked to lots of people who are people in Stasi and people in the regime and stuff. Are there people you've talked to who think that they should have kept the wall up and that they were too weak in 1989?
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I had a very, I wouldn't say surreal.
I was hairs on the back of your neck time,
but I was with one of the commanders.
He'd literally grown up with Checkpoint Charlie.
So he started as a private.
And by 89, he was the commander of up with checkpoint Charlie. So he started as a private and by 89,
he was a commander of checkpoint Charlie, Peter Bachman. And, uh,
I was in his, there's a Northwest, uh,
Hohenschonhausen is an area of North East Berlin.
And it's where a lot of the elites, uh,
of the border guards lived and they were given the best housing.
It's still all there and they're all veterans now.
And that's where they all live. It's like boys from Brazil almost.
And so I was in his apartment and I felt like,
it was like Deutschland, the series on Channel 4.
I'm in this apartment and I felt like I was back in the 70s
with all the decor, his armchairs,
and all his photographs of him in his pomp,
all dressed up there.
And he just gave me an hour and a half's education on why
the East German experiment was successful, why his service meant something, why he was bitter
about the outcome, why they needed more backbone and leadership, and why he felt betrayed about
what his lot had now become, living in this flat in on the suburbs of east berlin and doesn't
have a pension and just scraping by that kind of thing and he's not alone he's just one person i
interviewed that's an amazing story um so the berlin wall come i mean it's vanished basically
now hasn't it it's kind of got disassembled yeah i can understand why they yeah i can understand
why they wanted to get rid of it
because it was an abomination
and lots of people had died crossing it.
But in some ways, obviously, as you guys know,
it's such a pivotal moment in 20th century history.
It would have been great
if they just left a decent portion.
That's what I was going to ask you.
I was going to ask you that.
You see, I mean, we did a podcast,
we did three podcasts a few weeks
ago about statues in london about statues coming up staying down yeah my instinct is always to
conserve and i look at berlin and the berlin wall and i know i'm not a berliner so i have no
you know useful input into this at all and it's not my decision but part of me wishes it had stayed
up that it was all still up and you could walk along in well there's a tiny bit of it there's not there's not there's not much of it and of course
to a lot of people to a lot of people it is an obscenity and something they want to be what do
you think about it though in do you would you do is there a bit of you that wishes there was more
of it still up well yeah yeah as a historian definitely i mean i i would have uh i think if
you'd kept the a large section that ran through the central government section, the MITA section, middle section, which is where Checkpoint Charlie is situated and where the British sector was as well, so the Brandenburg Gate.
I think if we kept that, that would have been really good from an education point of view more than anything else there are very small fragmentary sections of it that are there uh one of which is on the the uh the french sector and
there's a there's a really lovely museum there too that's next to it and they've retained the
watchtower so you can see but nearly pretty much all but one or two of the watchtowers and there's
over 300 of them they've all gone there's one you can find in the central section of the city,
and the locals call it Last of the Mohicans because that's the only one.
And there's an old guy there.
He must be 90 at least.
He sits on his deck chair waiting for a fee.
He'll unlock the door and let you go up it.
So I managed to do that.
Would they not think of the tourist industry?
What were they thinking?
The thing is, Tom, it's like going to Edinburgh but uh would they not think of the tourist industry what were they thinking the thing
is tommy it's like going to edinburgh and you're you're you have an avalanche of harry potter
memorabilia you go to berlin there is so much memorabilia of the wall you can buy for
ridiculous prices i sometimes think they knocked the china the wall of china down
yeah so i can see it from space, surely there are factories in China now producing
Berlin Wall.
Anyway, I can't thank you enough.
It's been brilliant. Who needs the Berlin Wall
itself when you've got your book?
Thank you. I can't thank you enough.
Yeah, brilliant book. Absolutely
brilliant human stories that we didn't get a chance to
get into.
Many, many thanks for that.
It's an amazing story, isn't it? Yeah, thank you. It's still ongoing that um i mean it's an amazing story isn't it yeah thank you still
ongoing i mean it's fascinating for for those of us who kind of grew up with it but i'm sure it'll
be fascinating as well for people who live in a world where it just seems impossible to imagine
that berlin was divided so the berlin wall has gone um but i guess in we have your book um
checkpoint charlie um anyone who wants to know more about the berlin wall can't recommend it So the Berlin Wall has gone. But I guess, Ian, we have your book, Checkpoint Charlie.
Anyone who wants to know more about the Berlin Wall can't recommend it highly enough. Fantastic read.
Thank you so much for giving us your time, giving us your knowledge.
We will see you soon with more historically themed podcastery. Auf Wiedersehen.
Bye bye. Bye-bye.