The Berlin Wall at 60

This week’s diamond jubilee is not one to be celebrated, but grimly noted for the lessons its event taught us. It was 60 years ago this week that construction of the infamous Berlin Wall began. It was a concrete barrier erected to seal off the Western half of Berlin from the East. The barrier included guard towers with machine guns, anti-vehicle ditches and beds of nails. Its purpose was to imprison East Berliners by preventing access and possible escape to the West.

The East German Communist puppet regime ludicrously claimed it was built to keep out “fascist” infiltrators who might try to sabotage their attempt to build a socialist paradise in the East. No-one was killed trying to cross the wall into East Germany, while estimates of the number killed trying to leave it range from 140 to well over 200. The machine guns guarding the wall pointed inwards to the East, not outwards to the West.

During the wall’s lifetime, there were many escape attempts as people tried to bypass its defences. Ober 400 people escaped via a series of tunnels, leading the East German authorities to use seismic equipment to detect tunnel construction. Some swam over at night, braving gunfire and searchlights in the darkness. One family famously constructed a homemade hot air balloon and were carried over by favourable winds. One group modified a sports car and laid themselves horizontal as it sped towards the steel barrier, passing underneath it as the top of their car was ripped off by it.

UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher commented in 1982: “Every stone bears witness to the moral bankruptcy of the society it encloses.” US Presidents Kennedy and Reagan denounced it.

I went through Checkpoint Charlie with my colleague, Eamonn Butler, in 1982. It was like entering a prison, which indeed it was. The East was dull and lifeless, with many wartime bomb sites still unrepaired. The shops were empty, and such restaurants as existed had little appetizing food and were practically empty. By contrast, the West behind us was a blaze of neon lights, street activity and nightlife. In the East one felt in danger of hostile action by arbitrary authority, and it was a considerable relief to be back in the West.

The wall did not last. In January 1989, the leader of the inappropriately-named German Democratic Republic, Erich Honecker, predicted that the Wall would stand for 50 or 100 more years. It did not last ten more months. Its fall was precipitated by earlier action by the government of Hungary, which stopped preventing people from travelling through to Austria. Tens of thousands did so, and East German saw a great and unsustainable haemorrhage of talent as its citizens fled to the freedom of the West.

The citizens of Berlin tore down the wall in November, 1989. It had stood for 28 years as a reminder that socialism can only be sustained by force directed against the citizens of countries that adopt it. People today who advocate socialism, in ignorance of what results from it, would do well to read up about the Berlin Wall, whose 60th anniversary arrives this week.