It was built in 1961 to separate the East from the West and was the symbol of the "Cold War" - It fell after a popular uprising that swept from one end to the other the "iron curtain"
O separation between the "democratic West" and the "communist East" it was not just ideological. In the years of the Cold War he acquired his own symbol. It was the Berlin Wall, the "Wall of Shame", as the westerners called it. It was the wall he had divide Berlin and Germany as a whole into two parts. In East and West Germany.
Nouns The "building" of the walls began immediately after the end of World War II. Germany was divided into four pieces. France, Britain, USA and USSR took from a piece. This is how the capital of the country was divided. Berlin. When France, Britain and the United States joined forces to form West Germany, the USSR proceeded to blockade the western part. In 1949, there were now West Germany and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
The flight to the West
In June 1953 workers in East Germany revolted demanding better wages and better working conditions. The uprising was crushed by the Soviets and from that point on, and then many East Germans began to migrate to the western part of the capital. The East German authorities in the face of this phenomenon decided to build a fence. Initially, it was just a barbed wire. But when it was found that this could not stop the East Germans from fleeing, it was decided to make the barbed wire a 2 meter high wall!
The Westerners, obviously, took political advantage of this fact in order to talk about freedom and oppression in the eastern part. Indicative of the political polarization was that during Kennedy's visit to West Berlin in 1963 he had said the famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" (I am also a Berliner)!
Gorbachev, the perestroika and the fall of the walls
At regular intervals the tension along the walls was growing dangerously. Total 136 people lost their lives trying to cross from the East to the West side of the city. The first victim was 58-year-old nurse Inda Zickman, who was killed on August 22, 1961 while trying to escape to West Berlin, where her sister lived. The latest victim was 33-year-old unemployed electrician Winfried Freudenberg, who managed to fly to West Berlin with a makeshift balloon, but unfortunately fell and crashed, resulting in instant death (August 29, 1989).
From 1986, however, it seemed that the end for the wall of shame was approaching. The leader of the USSR, now, was Mikhail Gorbachev, who with the "perestroika" and the "glasnost" brought a reformist air that smelled of "renewal". The end came when one after another the socialist countries opened their borders to the west. Thus the East Germans crossed into the West via… Hungary, Poland or Czechoslovakia. The authorities of East Germany were found to be chasing the developments and so they opened the borders there too! The Berlin Wall was no longer useful, and on the very same day that the border was opened, the Berliners began to throw it down. A year later Germany reunited.
reader.gr