Some people look at the remains of the Berlin Wall and say, “Is that all there was?,” and to them we say, "Of course not; don't be silly." The Berlin Wall There were always two walls, an inner and an outer. And where the space between was large enough, there was also a wire fence. There were 302 guard towers, illuminated roads to provide a clear line of fire, mines, dogs, guards, patrols, automatic gun positions, and a delightful carpet filled with nails to rip up vehicle tires, shoes, socks, feet, and so forth. The whole shebang was built by the communists under the pretense of keeping the ill-disposed and avaricious West Berliners and West Germans out of the people’s paradise.
They called it the “anti-fascist defense wall.” In fact, as we know, it was a desperate attempt to keep the East Germans inside East Germany. Look at any picture and note which way the guns are pointing. The Soviets had unilaterally imposed a communist puppet government on their zone of occupation and declared a so-called German Democratic Republic after the Western Allies had brought the Federal Republic of Germany into being. As time developed, the conditions under the communists deteriorated while in West Germany they improved. People began to move in their thousands from east to west. The border between the two German states was sealed by the Communists (the Iron Curtain), but the streets from East to West Berlin remained open, and once in West Berlin, ex-Easterners were guaranteed a flight to West Germany--as well as a job and a new life. The Berlin Wall More than 2.7 million people had fled between 1949 and 1961. About 2,500 people a day were leaving in August 1961. The get-up-and-goers had got up and gone; East Germany was acutely short of labor. Only the convinced and half-convinced communists, the elderly, the indigent, and the children remained.
On the night of August 12-13, 1961, shortly before midnight, the East German police began enclosing West Berlin with barbed wire. It took about four hours. The city awoke to find itself divided. Families were cut in half. Lovers were separated. Workers could no longer go to their offices and factories. Subway stations and windows of buildings on the East-West border were sealed off. A few days later, the government began work on the physical structure that replaced the barbed-wire-and-guard ersatz barrier. It was the first of four generations of Wall--they kept improving on it.
Circuitous journeys in the West were necessary as travel through the borough of Mitte, jutting into West Berlin, was no longer possible. The public transport system was dislocated. The S-Bahn was boycotted by the West Berliners. It was an integral part of the East German railway and operated by it. The West Berliners thought that their 30pf. fare shouldn’t go to support the maintenance of the Wall and to buy bullets for border guards. Fortunately, the increasingly prosperous West Germany was able to subsidize West Berlin and make it a shop-window of western enterprise and know-how. The Berlin Wall old To counter the internal effects of the boycott, the West Berlin authorities set out on an ambitious development of the U-Bahn or underground in the west. The S-Bahn declined through lack of use. The staff went on strike in 1980 over pay and the East German authorities used that opportunity to close the system. The West Berlin city government bought some sections which it thought indispensable to the western city. The remainder fell into ruin, like many of the old pre-1950 main railway lines leading into West Berlin. Most have been reactivated at huge expense.
On November 9, 1989, the Wall came down--but that's another story for another day. Preferably a day on which you take one of our tours. The Internet can only teach you so much, young one.