The Construction of the Berlin Wall

The construction of The Wall

As Europe celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we look back at the construction of arguably the most famous and notorious piece of European infrastructure.

Built to stop the large numbers of people leaving the Soviet zone of East Berlin in to the West, the Berlin Wall became a physical representation of The Cold War and the division it caused in Europe. With 3.6 million people leaving the Soviet Zone since 1945, the SED, the East German communist leadership were facing difficulties. To stem this tide of refugees, that saw 360,000 people made a permanent move to the West in 1960 alone, the Soviets decided to act to stop East German falling into social and economic chaos.

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The Wall goes up

On 12 August 1961, the GDR Council of Ministers announced that "in order to put a stop to the hostile activity of West Germany's and West Berlin's revanchist and militaristic forces, border controls of the kind generally found in every sovereign state will be set up at the border of the German Democratic Republic, including the border to the western sectors of Greater Berlin."

The next day, in the early hours of the morning, temporary barriers were put at the sector boundaries to stop people moving into the west. The roads linking the two sides were ripped up and the East German police along with 'militia members' stood guard and turned away all traffic and people attempting to cross over.

Dubbed an "Anti-fascist protection wall" by the East German government, the temporary barriers soon evolved into barbed wire fences and a few days later, construction began on a solid stone wall. House outer walls were integrated into the border fortifications by East Berlin construction workers, who bricked up the doors and windows.

Despite the West's protests and a stand off at Checkpoint Charlie a few months later, the Wall continued to grow and evolve with the barriers being constantly reinforced.

The Wall was expanded into a staggered system of barriers; firstly there was the primary wall which stood 4m tall and was topped with a smooth pipe, intended to make scaling it more difficult. Behind it on the Eastern side, there was a control area, dubbed the 'death area', in which over 116 watchtowers were built. Anyone found to be there trying to escape were shot without warning. Trenches followed to stop vehicles break through and this was further protected by 10,000 border guards on patrol tracks, bunkers and a second wall.

The Wall that ran through the city center was 43.1 kilometers long, but further border fortifications separating West Berlin from the rest of Soviet-controlled Germany totalled 111.9 kilometers long. In the 28 years that the Wall stood, over 239 people were killed trying to defect across the wall.

The Wall comes down

Twenty years ago in 1989, the Wall came down. After masses of people had fled East Germany via hungry and huge public demonstrations, the leader of East Berlin's communist party, Günter Schabowski, said on November 9 that the border would be opened for "private trips abroad".

What followed was history in the making as East Berliners rushed towards the Wall to be welcomed by their Western brethren. Little later, an onrush of East Berliner's towards West Berlin began, and there were celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate and at the Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin. On November 10, demolition works began and with the Fall of the Berlin Wall the Cold War appeared to be coming to an end.

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