VE Day was victory for Paris, London, Washington, Ottawa, Moscow, and many other places, but it was only the beginning of a new ordeal for Berlin. The first country to conquer the actual city of Berlin was Russia, culminating in the famous photo of the Soviet flag being raised over the Reichstag.
Britain and America had entered a strategic alliance with the Russian communists to defeat the Nazis, but once the common enemy was gone things went a little sour. Moscow had no interest in handing the territories their army had conquered over to those capitalist pigs--territory which included half of Germany.
For the Allies to have pressed too hard on this point wasn't really an option: by the time the Russians had entered Germany their army was the largest in Europe. Understandably, nobody was really in the mood for the massive war that would have entailed in a fight over Germany and the Eastern European countries.
So countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were swallowed into the Soviet Union and Germany was split in half. Berlin was well inside the Soviet-controlled section of Germany but the Allies hung on to half of the city. Capitalist West Berlin became an island in a sea of communism.
(In the map below, purple is West Germany, orange is East Germany, and the brown circle is Berlin)
East Germany became the German Democratic Republic and West Germany became the Federal Republic of Germany. (To clarify, the half with the term 'democratic' in its name is the undemocratic half.)
As the Cold War settled in, tensions between East and West Germany rose. At one point the Soviets put West Berlin under a blockade to try and force its surrender to communism, but the Allies airlifted an extraordinary amount of food aid in to keep the city alive.
East Germany had a problem on its hands, though. People were moving from East Berlin into West at an alarming rate. So in the middle of the night on August 13th, 1961, they solved this problem.
They put up a wall.
The wall eventually extended right around West Berlin, closing it off completely. It was an inverse prison: the wall wasn't meant to keep people from getting out; it was meant to keep people from getting in.
The punishment for attempting to cross the Berlin wall from East to West without permission was, well, death. East German guards had shoot-to-kill orders if they caught anyone making a run for it.
Scaling the wall became quite difficult after black tubing was installed along the top (you can see it in the above pictures). Funny story: the tubing is actually sewage piping that was ordered from West Germany. Needless to say, the West Germans had assumed it was for the innocent purpose of transporting feces. The tubing made it almost impossible to hoist yourself over.
The wall is composed of L-shaped concrete slabs. The shape was chosen specifically to prevent the wall from being rammed by cars. If you succeeded in knocking over the wall, the short part of the L would pop up and flip your car over.
But even if you made it over or through the wall, your task was far from complete. Two walls were actually built, an outer and an inner, and in between was a jovial area known as the death strip. The death strip was patrolled incessantly and was watched over by guard towers with snipers.
I visited the Berlin Wall Documentation Center, and across the street they had built a re-creation of the death strip (beside actual sections of the old wall).
The most famous crossing point between West and East Berlin was Checkpoint Charlie, where the Americans and Soviets directly faced each other over the course of the Cold War. It was the site of many attempts to escape East Berlin; some successful, others not so much.
Today it's marked by a replica checkpoint booth, a billboard showing an East German soldier staring into the West and an American soldier staring into the East, and the original sign warning that you were about to cross the dividing line.
Near the Reichstag is a memorial to people who were killed trying to cross the Wall. One of the first attempts was by an 18-year-old in 1962. He was shot in the hip in the death strip and bled to death within eyesight of Allied soldiers and media. The most recent death was February 5, 1989--only months before the Wall was torn down.
It's estimated that 5,000 people crossed the wall successfully (many either disguised as American soldiers or hidden inside the cars of diplomats), while about 200 were killed. Scores of people were apprehended while attempting to cross and were taken to the notorious interrogation rooms of the Stasi, the East German secret police.
Just as books are still burned today, people are still being killed while attemping to cross over forbidden boundaries: here's a story from BBC on 15 people recently executed for trying to leave North Korea (officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and the farthest thing from a democracy on Earth).
Today the entire path of the old Berlin Wall is marked by a double line of bricks in the ground. It snakes across streets and parking lots, through parks and under brand new skyscrapers.
It's incredible to think that Berlin was still divided and people were still getting shot trying to cross it less than 20 years ago.
It's also incredible to see how the city is recovering from its past. Nothing exemplifies this more than Potsdamer Platz. During the era of the Wall it was a desolate spot, the death strip running right through the middle of it; today it's an ultra-modern financial district, the "Times Square" of Berlin, filled with shining glass towers, shopping malls, theatres, and a refurbished underground train station.
I was back there at night to catch my movie.
One of the best-known symbols of East Germany is the TV Tower, built in 1969 to show off the power of the communist state. It's actually a bit of a monstrosity to see up close, but it's now an iconic landmark of the Berlin skyline.
The Soviet communists were vehement atheists. In a delicious twist of fate, when the sun shone on the glass panels of the ball at the top of the tower, it reflected a giant golden cross that was visible from miles away. The East German government tried everything to stop this from happening, from tilting the panels to coating them with layers of paint, but the cross wouldn't go away. The tower earned the nickname "The Pope's Revenge".
The Berlin City Palace was built in its modern form in the 1700s on a site directly down the Unter den Linden boulevard from the Brandenburg Gate. The rulers of Prussia used it as the seat of government and all the major events of Germany's history up to the twentieth century revolved around it. It was completely destroyed during World War 2.
In its place, the East Germans built the Palace of the Republic, one of the gaudiest-looking palaces ever built. They held their puppet parliament sessions here.
Yes, as I'm sure you can tell from the cars, I didn't take that picture. That's because the Palace was found to be infested with abestos (also, it was ugly as hell) and is in the process of being demolished. It's likely that that the original City Palace will be reconstructed here, but that hasn't been decided officially yet.
There are a few walking tours you can take in Berlin that take you to all the famous sites of the old Soviet regime, and if I had spent more time in the city I certainly would have taken one. Berlin was the fiercest battleground of the Cold War, full of true-life stories that are the stuff of a spy novelist's dreams.
A great movie that came out last year and won the Oscar for best foreign picture is The Lives Of Others. It follows a Stasi agent as he eavesdrops on a writer and his wife. The movie is based on a true story, and the actor who plays the agent in the movie is an East German who actually found out after the Wall came down that his real life wife had been recruited as an informant against him.
The Stasi was one of the most ruthless secret police agencies the world has ever known; at its height, including all its collaborators and informants, it had an agent-to-citizen ratio of 1:6.
I've met a few people here who grew up behind the Iron Curtain. It's kinda strange to talk to them about it. It seems like something that only takes place in movies.
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