Barrier to Freedom : Berlin Wall--25 Years of Infamy

“I was only 11 then,” Ilona Falkowski recalled, “but I remember everyone feeling that something bad was going to happen. Then the East German troops moved in with the barbed wire and cut Berlin in half.”

That was 25 years ago, early on the morning of Aug. 13, 1961, a Sunday. East Germany was sealing off the Soviet sector from the rest of Berlin, and by daybreak, barbed wire had been strung across Potsdam Platz, once the busiest intersection in Europe. At crossing points between the Soviet and Western sectors of the old German capital, barricades were thrown up and pedestrians were being stopped.

By the end of the day, East Germany had inflicted a jagged wound that effectively divided the largest city between Paris and Moscow into a free West Berlin and a Communist East Berlin.

“We were all afraid of war,” said Falkowski, who is now a guide for the West Berlin tourist office. She was not alone.

Khrushchev’s Demands

For weeks, ever since Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev had met with President John F. Kennedy at Vienna in June and demanded the withdrawal of all Allied troops from Berlin, the White House had been expecting a confrontation in Germany, sometime that summer or fall.

But most American experts were looking for the East Germans, or the Soviets, to interfere with Western Allied access to West Berlin--the road, rail and air routes across East German territory. Such a move, Kennedy and his advisers thought, could bring the world close to the nuclear brink. Detailed preparations were formulated for a Western response.

Berlin was an embarrassing oddity of the Cold War. East and West Germany had long been sealed off from each other, but Berlin was still technically an open city under the Four Powers Convention concluded at the end of World War II.

East German Claim

The Soviet sector of the city, the area that is now East Berlin, was considered by the East German government as its capital. But in the absence of a peace treaty--none had yet been signed--this status was not recognized by the three Western Allied powers, the United States, Britain, and France. The border between the Soviet sector and the Allied zone was still just a line on the map.

Life in East Germany was grim, and many East Germans made their way to Berlin, where they passed easily into the Western sector and on into West Germany.

A Western diplomat in East Berlin, who was a junior officer here at the time, said the other day: “In the first six months of 1961 there was a hemorrhage of people from East Germany. These were mostly young people, many of them professionals, and it was deeply embarrassing to the Communist regime. Moreover, it was crippling their economy. They had to do something about it.”

Western intelligence officers thought that Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, might try to seal East Berlin off from East Germany in order to stop the outflow of his countrymen. They thought this might explain the volume of building materials delivered to the city in early August.

Thus when Ulbricht’s deputy, Erich Honecker, who today is East Germany’s leader, sent his teams of workers and soldiers into the darkness to put up the barricade across the face of Berlin, the West was caught by surprise.

Mayor Willy Brandt of West Berlin was in West Germany campaigning in his unsuccessful bid to unseat Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Kennedy was in Hyannisport, Mass., for a weekend of sailing. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was shooting grouse on the Yorkshire moors. And President Charles de Gaulle was at his country house in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises.

The Western Allies were caught flatfooted, and when they failed to react, the East Germans went a step further. They started putting in fence posts, turning what had been a string of concertina wire into a more formidable barrier.

Residents Stunned

The people of Berlin were stunned. People who lived in the East and worked in the West were turned back. People who had planned to get out saw their escape route closed off.

Still, some managed to get out at the last minute. On the Monday after the fence went up about 150 East Germans slipped across, some through gaps in the wire and others at out-of-the-way places where there was still no fence.

West Berliners gathered at Potsdam Platz and the Brandenburg Gate and other crossing points to jeer at the fence-builders, who were accompanied by police and regulars of the East German army. At one point, young West Berliners tore open a section of the wire and urged people on the other side to come through before the guards could close it up.

One of the more dramatic escapes took place in the Bernauer Strasse, where a row of buildings follows the frontier between the Soviet sector and the French sector. People who lived in the buildings jumped from their front windows and landed in West Berlin.

Jumping Into Nets

The police occupied the ground-floor apartments, but people continued to jump--into nets held by West Berlin firemen. Some missed the nets and were killed or maimed.

Soon the East Germans put wire grates over the windows or bricked them up, and not long afterward the buildings were torn down.

The first person killed while escaping is believed to have been 18-year-old Peter Fechter, who was shot by an East German sniper as he tried to get over the wire near Checkpoint Charlie.

In Washington, meanwhile, attention continued to be focused on what was thought to be a much more serious threat, the possible shut-off of Western Allied access rights to West Berlin. Some officials appeared to be relieved that the situation was not worse.

Some officials, in the Pentagon, at the State Department and in the White House, suggested that U.S. Army tanks be sent across to crush the wire and other fencing. Many West Germans thought that was a good idea.

But Kennedy, as well as Macmillan and De Gaulle, rejected the use of Western troops. Cynics in the Western governments had already written off East Berlin. They considered it to be within the Soviet sphere and not worth going to war over just to ensure the legalistic right of people to move freely in the city.

In this way a myth was born--that Kennedy and Khrushchev made a deal, selling out East Berlin in the interests of overall East-West stability.

Troops Ordered Out

To reassure the West Germans, Kennedy ordered a U.S. battle group, 1,500 strong, to proceed along the autobahn from West Germany to West Berlin. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was on hand to review the troops.

The wall came to symbolize all that was weak and corrupt in East Germany’s socialist society, yet Ulbricht insisted, as Honecker does today, that it was erected to protect East Germany from invasion.

Over the years, the escapes have continued--by glider and underwater vessel, through the air by cable and underground by tunnel. Some people have managed to climb the wall. Among those who have managed to get across have been East German soldiers and policemen.

There is no accurate record of the number of East Germans who have managed to escape to the West in the 25 years since the wall went up. Seventy-four people are known to have been killed trying to cross the wall, which now extends for 103 miles along the 858 miles of the frontier between East and West Germany.

Hans Werner Bepler, a senior official at the Reichstag Building in West Berlin, which has its back to the wall, witnessed an attempted escape in 1973.

A Boy’s Futile Bid

“I saw the boy come running to the wall,” he recalled not long ago. “The guards in the watchtower on this side did not see him. He got past some of the barbed wire . . . but a guard in a watchtower on the other side saw him, and opened up with a machine pistol. The boy was hit and left for dead. The guards took their time coming over to get him.

“There was nothing I could do. I felt so helpless. He was so very young. It took me days to forget his face. He almost made it. But now they have raised the wall even higher and it is much more difficult for anyone to escape.”

Close to the Reichstag Building are nine crosses commemorating the deaths of East Germans killed trying to cross the wall, including the boy that Bepler saw die.

As Bepler said, the wall is higher, and much improved. The original barbed wire gave way to rough concrete blocks topped with barbed wire and then to reinforced concrete topped with tubing that makes it difficult to get a grip.

In the last few years, the wall has been further strengthened and raised to a height of almost 13 feet. A second wall has been put up 50 to 100 yards behind it. Between them is a cleared zone with watchtowers, floodlights, dogs and sensors. Escape is almost impossible.

Tourist Towers

On the Western side, the wall is covered with graffiti. There are tourist towers with a view across into East Berlin.

This month there will be ceremonies in West Berlin to mark the 25th anniversary of the wall. There will be a press conference with former soldiers who fled East Germany, and speeches at the Reichstag Building by West Berlin’s Mayor Eberhard Diepgen, former Mayor Brandt and Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

One of the organizers of the ceremonies is Horst Schumm, 35, who is a director of a museum at Checkpoint Charlie that recalls many dramatic episodes involving the wall.

As a young man in his early 20s, Schumm came to Berlin from his native Frankfurt to help people trying to escape to the West, “to change their address,” as Schumm puts it.

He helped 15 East Germans do it, generally by hiding them in his car or providing them with false papers, he said.

But in 1974, an informer told the police, and Schumm was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison for “crimes against the state.” He spent seven years in East German prisons before his release was arranged through Wolfgang Vogel, the East Berlin lawyer who has organized a number of East-West spy exchanges.

‘I Learned Much’

In his apartment in West Berlin, Schumm poured beer for a visitor and said: “Although it was not a good time in prison, it was a good experience. I learned much. Now I would like to publicize the plight of political prisoners in East Germany.

“I also want to see life made easier for those in East Germany. I believe that if the East German government would give its people more freedom, more would choose to stay there, and the wall would not be needed.

“Meanwhile, what I would like to do is make holes in the wall--not with bombs but with ideas.”