The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall

1024 Words3 Pages

There are many events concerning the rising and the falling of the Berlin Wall, I will attempt to explain some of them in my following report. The person responsible for the rise of the Wall was Walter Ulbricht. He was a longtime member of the German Communist Party. After 1958 the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) entered a new state of development. As a result of this a sharp rise of industrial output was ordered in East Berlin. This was a part of a Seven - Year Economic Plan to bring per capita consumption in the GDR up to the level of the Federal Republic or Germany (FRG or West Germany).
The one major loop hole of this scheme was the open border to West Berlin. Which hundreds of East Germans left the country daily. Most of them went underground and weren’t notice. Even regular spot checks by police had no effect because most people avoided it by making several trips few belongings at a time. This flow of refuges continued for about a six month period. After that it stopped for a little while, but as soon as the effect of the Seven-Year Plan began to be felt the flow of refuges arose again.
In 1959, it was a total of 144,000 refuges and in 1960 it rose to 199,00 and in the first seven months of 1961 it rose again to 207,000. This included hundreds of professional people 688 doctors, 296 dentists, 2,698 engineers. The total estimation of 2.5 million people had fled between the years of 1949 and 1961.

Although Berlin was politically divided after the end of World War II. To emphasize the point of and to stop the flow from East Berlin. It was physically divided by a wall in 1961. Fleeing the republic was now a criminal offense. The people of East Berlin were

effectively locked in their country. In the summer of 1961 Ulbricht persuaded the Russians that force was the only way to stop the fleeing of all the people.
Early Sunday morning August 13, 1961 the Wall went up. The GDR began to block off East Berlin from West Berlin by means of barbed wire and antitank obstacles. Streets were torn up, and barricades of paving stones were erected, and tanks were gathered in crucial places. The subways and local railway services between East and West Berlin were interrupted.

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