The Berlin Wall and the Intra-German Border 1961-89

The two Germanys

West and East Germany and West and East Berlin were separated by the State Frontier between the GDR and the FRG and West Berlin (Staatsgrenze der DDR zur BRD und West-Berlin). Up to 200,000 citizens a year were leaving the DDR, with 160,000 fleeing between January and August 1961. Many were doctors, dentists, teachers, professors, engineers, lawyers, skilled industrial workers, and other professionals. The departure of young men and women, the most motivated and intelligent and the very future of the new socialist state, was of particular concern. This ‘brain drain’ was depleting the country of its best and brightest at a faster rate than it could train new professionals. Most were not fleeing food, housing, and consumer goods shortages, rather political suppression, the forced collectivization of agriculture, the repression of private trade, and the loss of personal freedom. In 1948 the population of the Soviet Zone was 19 million; in 1960 it had fallen to 17 million. In contrast, the BRD’s population had grown from 47 million to 55 million in the same timeframe.

While the DDR lost valuable human resources, their flight actually consolidated the Communist hold on the country: its strongest opponents had left. Those who remained lived a in a society discouraging initiative and independence, and lacking in genuine political responsibility. There was little prospect of internal change; uprisings had been brutally crushed in East Berlin (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968) and the numerous internal security forces and counter-intelligence bodies exercised tight control.

Although the Berlin Wall came to symbolize the physical separation of the East and West, the real barrier between Western democracy and Communism was the IGB. The average East German had little idea of what the IGB was or what it looked like. It was a restricted zone and it was not discussed or pictured in the media. There were other walls dividing the East and West. Similar fortified borders and barrier systems snaked along the Czechoslovak border between the BRD and Austria. Hungary’s more lightly fortified border faced Austria and Yugoslavia. Romania also bordered Yugoslavia, while Bulgaria faced Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. Even though the Warsaw Pact states were allies, their adjacent borders were also fenced and patrolled, as were their borders with the USSR.

With substantial NATO defence forces stationed in the BRD and West Berlin and Group Soviet Forces Germany situated in the DDR, Berlin and the IGB remained focal points of tension through the 50-year Cold War. The DDR declared itself as ‘the only legal German state, to which the future of Germany belongs’ and called itself ‘the fatherland of the German people.’