Before the Wall: A final chance to flee from East to West Berlin
Breaking through gaps in the fence on the day they were closed for good
Chris Wild
Aug. 12, 1961
On Saturday Aug. 12, 1961, a record number of people (approximately 4,000) fled from East to West Berlin. The following day, the world awoke to find 30 miles of barbed wire running through the heart of the city. The barrier was laid by East German soldiers. Two days later, on Tuesday Aug. 15, the same soldiers began to transform that wire into a wall — the Berlin Wall.
Berlin is the testicle of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin - Nikita Khrushchev, Leader of the Soviet Union
After World War II, the Potsdam Conference had divided Germany into four occupied zones, each under the control of one of the allies: France, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Berlin, the capital, lay in the eastern section controlled by Russia and was itself divided into sectors.
The Soviets had already erected a heavily fortified barrier between East and West Germany, which made West Berlin a small capitalist island in the middle of a Communist state. In the beginning, subway trains ran between the two territories. New passport rules proved ineffectual at stemming the flow of dissatisfied East Germans to the west, a flow which bled Soviet East Germany of economic power.
Between 1948 and 1961, 3 million people had fled the Communist state, representing one-sixth of East Germany's population. By August 1961, an average 2,000 people made the one-way journey from East to West Berlin each and every day.
Before the wire barrier, it was still possible to move between East and West Berlin. The barbed wire rendered that close to impossible. But, as these pictures show, even the wire was not strong enough to contain desperate people.
So began the creation of what was officially dubbed the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart." Checkpoints between the two sides were shut down, and the wire became the wall. For almost three decades, the wall cut Berlin in two. More than 100 people would die trying to make it across.
