The Rise And Fall Of The Berlin Wall

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall the event is being marked everywhere it seems. It was a watershed moment which was overdue. The first signs of the wall were seen on August 15th, 1961. It was at first a simple barbed wire fence that was erected on the orders of Soviet General Secretary Nikita Kruschev as a response to the increasing number of East Germans who were fleeing to West Germany and causing embarrassment to the Soviets internationally. During the construction anything that was in the path of the wall was removed including houses, A church, and a cemetery. Over the years the wall grew to become a double wall actually. It was two parallel walls that ran side by side with a "no mans land" or "Death Zone" in between them. The final length of the wall was 155 kilometers which is about 100 miles. The space in between the two walls was fitted with all kinds of traps designed to prevent anyone from successfully making it across. The ground was fitted with spike strips that would pierce a persons feet or shoes if he walked or ran on them. This area was nicknamed "Stalin's Lawn." The dirt in the "Death Zone" was constantly raked and kept soft in order that a person's footprints would be left behind if anyone had been there. The Wall itself had alarm systems that would quickly alert the armed guards in their watchtowers of anyone trying to get across. There were 186 total watchtowers that had 6 guards each posted. The guards had orders to shoot to kill. There were even barriers to prevent motor vehicles from getting through. At certain points the zone was guarded by dogs and minefields that were triggered by trip wires that would also in certain sections set off auto-fire devices or "spring guns" that would shoot out shrapnel in all directions. The wall itself had doors every so many feet that the guards used to inspect the wall both from the inside and outside for maintenance purposes. These doors each had two separate locks that required two separate keys from two different guards in order to open them. It is estimated that several hundred individuals lost their lives between 1961 and 1989 trying to breech the wall. Over 10,000 were caught and prosecuted by the East Germans for attempting to flee. The wall was finally taken down by a protest that grew out of control on November 9th, 1989. Protesters began hacking at the wall with sledge hammers and picks and knocking pieces of the wall off. Almost immediately President Ronald Reagan was given the bulk of the credit for causing this to happen. He gave a somewhat famous speech in 1987 in which he urged then Soviet General Secretary Mikail Gorbachev to "...Tear Down This Wall." While he is rightly deserving of some of the credit he is not however deserving of all of it. More credit in fact belongs to Gorbachev who deliberately did nothing to squelch the rising protest which led to the collapse of the wall. He could have easily stopped it but chose not to. The end of the Berlin Wall opened up the possibility for East Germany and West Germany to be united again as one country. That is exactly what happened almost one year later on October 3rd, 1990.