How the Berlin Wall Divided a City Overnight

After the Allied victory in World War II, Germany was divided into four occupation zones administered by the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union. The same thing happened in Germany’s capital Berlin, where the city was partitioned into four sectors, each run by a different Allied power.

Germany was never supposed to be split into two countries—communist East Germany and democratic West Germany—but that’s exactly what happened when Cold War tensions grew between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1952, Joseph Stalin closed the 855-mile border between East and West Germany, but Berlin remained a “loophole.”

For almost a decade, there was no border between East and West Berlin, and people moved freely across the city for work and to visit family. Berlin was also the crossing point for millions of refugees fleeing East Germany for a better life in the West, a fact that angered East Germany’s hardline communist leader Walter Ulbricht.

The open door to West Berlin slammed shut overnight on August 13, 1961, when tens of thousands of East German soldiers and police encircled West Berlin with barbed wire. When Berliners woke up the next morning, their city was slashed in two and anyone attempting to cross the barrier was shot on sight. It was the birth of the Berlin Wall.

Before that fateful night in 1961, Berlin was “one city,” says Hope Harrison, a history professor at George Washington University. “You could walk from East Berlin to West Berlin, you could take a bus, and you could take the metro. Lots of people in Berlin lived in one part of the city and worked in the other or lived in one part and went to school in the other. Everyone had a grandma or a sister on the other side."

Each day, more than 60,000 East Germans commuted to jobs in West Berlin. That’s because the West German economy was booming, thanks in part to more than $1 billion in American aid via the Marshall Plan.

“West Germany was called the ‘economic wonder,’ and they needed labor,” says Harrison, author of Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961. “So a lot of people from the East got jobs in the West, which drove the East German leader Walter Ulbricht nuts.”

For years, Ulbricht begged the Communist Party leadership in Moscow for permission to close the border between East and West Berlin. The daily border-crossers (called Grenzgängers) were only the tip of the iceberg. The much bigger issue was the 200,000 to 300,000 East Germans defecting to the West through Berlin every year. The faltering East German economy couldn't hemorrhage workers for much longer.

The reply from Moscow was always no. Despite the open hostilities of the Cold War, the Soviets had signed a postwar agreement with the other Allies that they weren’t willing to break. Nikita Khrushchev, who rose to power after Stalin’s death, told Ulbricht that he needed to convince East Germans to stay by showing them the superiority of Soviet communism.

Berlin had always been a flashpoint of the Cold War. The city is located deep inside East Germany, which means that West Berlin was separated from the rest of West Germany by 110 miles. In 1948, Stalin ordered the Berlin Blockade, which cut off all overland supply routes to West Berlin. West Berlin survived the 11-month ordeal thanks to the Berlin Airlift, in which Allied planes flew in food and provisions to the city.

Then in 1958, Khrushchev issued an ultimatum to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and other Allied leaders to withdraw all troops from West Berlin and recognize the sovereignty of East Germany. Their refusal triggered the Berlin Crisis, a period of heightened tensions that coincided with the U-2 spy plane incident and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba under John F. Kennedy.

“People were afraid that if there was going to be a third world war, it was going to start in Berlin,” says Harrison.

War seemed like a real possibility in June 1961, when Kennedy and Khrushchev met in Vienna for a disastrous summit. Instead of resolving the Berlin standoff, Kennedy refused to move American troops and Khrushchev threatened to cut off West Berlin with another blockade. Both men vowed that any aggression on the other’s part would be an act of war.

“I never met a man like this,” Kennedy told Hugh Sidey of Time magazine. “[I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill 70 million people in 10 minutes, and [Khrushchev] just looked at me as if to say, ‘So what?’”

After the failure of the Vienna talks, the steady stream of East German refugees into West Berlin became a torrent.

“For the rest of June, July and August, more than 1,000 East Germans left every day,” says Harrison. “There's a long German word, Torschlusspanik, which means ‘panic at the doors closing.’”

Ulbricht sent an urgent message to Khrushchev warning that if the border with West Berlin remained open, “collapse was inevitable.” After seven years, Ulbricht finally got the green light: Shut it down.

August 12 was a Saturday in the heat of the German summer, when many Berliners took vacations in the countryside. That’s why Ulbricht chose it as the launch date for Operation Rose, his top-secret mission to cordon off West Berlin overnight.

At 1 a.m. on August 13, the streetlights in Berlin went dark as tens of thousands of East German troops quietly rolled into position at every intersection, park and public square connecting East and West Berlin. Starting with the 27-mile internal border, the troops rolled out a thick barrier of barbed wire—Ulbricht had stockpiled more than 150 tons—in strict accordance with Khrushchev’s orders not to cross “one millimeter” into West Berlin.

The next job was to cut off rail access to the West. Aboveground, train lines were severed and strung with barbed wire, while all underground stations with routes extending to West Berlin were sealed off.

“They called them ghost stations,” says Harrison. “I've talked to people who lived in East Berlin and they could hear the trains running underground, but there was no stop there anymore.”

By dawn, the entire 96-mile perimeter of West Berlin was surrounded by barbed wire and East German troops had closed off 193 streets, 68 border crossings and 12 train stations.

Berliners woke up on the morning of August 13 to a shocking scene. Their beloved city was cut in half by a 27-mile-long scar of torn-up streets and barbed wire. Armed East German soldiers were stationed at every major intersection and crossing point. Vans blared communist propaganda explaining the need for an “anti-fascist protection wall,” as it was called.

In West Berlin, shock quickly turned to outrage as protesters took to the streets. In East Berlin, there was panic as families crowded onto trains only to be stopped at the border. American journalist Robert H. Lochner was in an East German train station when an elderly woman asked a police officer when the next train left for West Berlin. “That is all over,” the policeman said. “You are all sitting in a mousetrap now.”

On Bernauer Strasse, a street that ran directly along the dividing line, people started leaping from windows. Their apartment buildings were in East Berlin, but the street below was technically in West Berlin. West German firefighters waited outside with nets to catch the desperate refugees. On August 22, 58-year-old Ida Siekmann became the first recorded victim of the Berlin Wall when she fell to her death trying to jump from her third-floor window.

West Berliners expected the U.S. Army to intervene and tear down the barbed-wire barrier, but they were sorely disappointed. In fact, when Kennedy heard the news, he was relieved, privately telling an aide, “A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

Unwilling to wait for help, East Germans continued to make daring escape attempts. The Guardian reported some of the desperate scenes at the border. On September 25, a 77-year-old woman was grabbed by the wrists by East German police as she tried to drop from her second-floor window. She was wrestled free by West German bystanders. On September 27, police opened fire on a woman and her small child as they ran for the barbed-wire barricade. On October 13, nine East Berliners escaped by ramming a truck into the barrier.

With each successful escape, the East German authorities replaced the barbed wire with cinder blocks and mortar. A year later, a second fence was erected 100 yards inside of the original barrier. The space in between the two fences became known as the “death strip,” because anyone caught there risked being shot on sight. Over the years, the fences were replaced with 45,000 heavy concrete panels guarded by 302 watchtowers and 259 dog runs.

From 1961 until 1989—when the Berlin Wall was finally torn down—at least 5,000 people successfully escaped and 140 were killed, most of them shot by East German guards. Harrison adds that across East Germany, a total of 77,000 people were imprisoned for attempting to flee the country.