Life Behind the Wall (2024)

FAQs

What was the purpose of this wall? ›

The Berlin Wall was built by the German Democratic Republic during the Cold War to prevent its population from escaping Soviet-controlled East Berlin to West Berlin, which was controlled by the major Western Allies.

Desperate to keep its citizens, East Germany decided to build a wall to prevent them from crossing the border. The Berlin Wall stretched over a hundred miles. It ran not only through the center of Berlin, but also wrapped around West Berlin, entirely cutting West Berlin off from the rest of East Germany.

Berlin was a divided city before the wall

The American, British and French sectors would form West Berlin and the Soviet sector became East Berlin. The division of Germany and the nature of its occupation had been confirmed by the Allied leaders at the Potsdam Conference, held between 17 July and 2 August 1945.

The Berlin Wall would prevent the West from having further influence on the East, stop the flow of migrants out of the communist sector, and ultimately become the most iconic image of the Cold War in Europe. The United States quickly condemned the wall, which divided families and limited freedom of movement.

Because of its psychological, as well as its physical, significance, the fall of the Berlin Wall quickly became the symbol of the collapse of the communist ideology it had shielded.

The Berlin Wall ran 96 miles in length (27 miles within Berlin), and two walls rose between 11 and 15 feet high. Between them was a 160-foot “death strip.” The wall included 302 watchtowers, 20 bunkers, 55,000 land mines, 259 dog runs, and machine guns activated by tripwires.

Life on the other side of the Iron Curtain was far from easy. Those who lived in the East remember those years as a time of shortages, being spied upon and feeling trapped. This explains why, over the nearly three decades of the Berlin Wall, thousands of people tried to escape from the East to the West.

Fortified concrete and wire barrier that separated East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. It was built by the government of what was then East Germany to keep East Berliners from defecting to the West.

The Wall had a profound impact on the way each person went about their daily lives - no matter what side they found themselves on. Overnight people were cut off from their friends and relatives, from their offices, factories and schools, and from places where they enjoyed spending their leisure time.

The wall came down partly because of a bureaucratic accident but it fell amid a wave of revolutions that left the Soviet-led communist bloc teetering on the brink of collapse and helped define a new world order.

Which side was communist on the Berlin Wall? ›

The Soviet Union occupied East Germany and installed a rigidly controlled communist state.

West Berlin was formally controlled by the Western Allies and entirely surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Berlin and East Germany. West Berlin had great symbolic significance during the Cold War, as it was widely considered by westerners an "island of freedom".

The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin. (Though he was not happy about it, President John F. Kennedy conceded that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) Almost two years after the Berlin Wall was erected, John F.

The West Berlin city government sometimes referred to it as the “Wall of Shame”—a term coined by mayor Willy Brandt—while condemning the Wall's restriction on freedom of movement.

Between 1961 and 1989, at least 140 people were killed or died at the Wall in connection with the GDR border regime: 101 people who tried to flee through the border fortifications were shot, died by accident, or committed suicide.

Why was the Berlin Wall built? To keep people from fleeing East Berlin, and to separate East and West Berlin. What happened to East Germany after WWII? What happened to Western Germany after WWII?

Wall stood as a symbol of Cold War for three decades., 1961 - The Soviet Union, under Nikita Khrushev, erected a wall between East and West Berlin to keep people from fleeing from the East, after Kennedy asked for an increase in defense funds to counter Soviet aggression.

Berlin Wall. A Wall build by East Germany (Soviet Union) to divide the city of Berlin into a east and west side controlled by the Soviet Union (east) and United States (west).

The Wall was built in 1961 to prevent East Germans from fleeing and stop an economically disastrous migration of workers. It was a symbol of the Cold War, and its fall in 1989 marked the approaching end of the war.