August 13, 1961: the night of the Berlin Wall
The long-awaited and feared event had therefore taken place: the separation of Berlin was a done deal. Third part of Pierluigi Mennitti's story. You can read the other episodes here
That something was about to happen was now in the air. In the first days of August, the exodus reached unprecedented peaks: over 1,600 people swelled the refugee collection centers of West Berlin every day. Yet, when the aforementioned communiqué from the state office for the protection of the constitution reached the benches of the West Berlin Senate late in the afternoon of Friday 11 August (“No unusual events are expected for the coming weekend”), everyone pulled a sigh of relief and they prepared, for the following day, to invade the beaches of the Wansee, the large lake southwest of the city.
At the same time, in East Berlin, a gentleman who would later mark the history of the GDR, Erich Honecker, then a member of the Politburo and secretary of the Central Committee of the SED (the Socialist Unity Party), received the go-ahead from Walter Ulbricht for Action X, the plan secretly developed in the previous days for the construction of a permanent border between the eastern and western areas of Berlin: the Wall, or the "anti-fascist defense bastion".
On the evening of the following day, Saturday 12 August, Honecker assumed command of the operations by establishing himself in the headquarters of the East Berlin police, in Keibelstrasse. From those rooms, the future leader of the GDR, supported by a staff of eight people, moved the entire military and political operating machine. The police and the men of the Nationale Volksarmee, flanked by the so-called Kampfgruppen, paramilitary units made up of workers' brigades, essentially the private army of the SED, were ready to go into action. Soviet troops stationed in the former capital were on full alert.
The first hours of darkness were expected. At the stroke of midnight the plan entered the operational phase. One after the other the trains leaving for West Berlin were blocked, therefore all the railway crossings between the two sectors of the city. At 0.30 am tanks and troops of the East German Army took up positions on Unter den Linden, Berlin's main thoroughfare between the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz.
At one o'clock, four thousand men of the 1st Motorized Division stationed in Potsdam, with 140 tanks and 200 military tanks, blocked all exit routes around the perimeter of West Berlin. At 11.00 the press agency of the GDR, the Adn, issued the communique publicizing a note that the countries of the Warsaw Pact had sent the previous Friday to the People's Chamber and the GDR government with the proposal "to establish an order on Berlin's western border which guarantees effective control of the territory around West Berlin, including the borders of democratic Berlin".
At 1.50am, the first news of what had been happening in the East for a couple of hours reached the West German police authorities: the railway communication routes of the S-Bahn and U-Bahn (respectively the and underground) had been interrupted in the eastern sector. From Gesundbrunnen station, located in the French sector, confirmation reached the police headquarters in West Berlin that all trains had been blocked.
From that moment the news bounced wildly. At 2.30 the passage through the Brandenburg Gate was blocked. Simultaneously, military columns moved towards Potsdamerplatz and the other points of land communication between the two Berlins. Soviet tanks also went into action and took up positions at strategic points in the city and in Alexanderplatz. At 3.25 the Rias, the radio which broadcast from the American sector, interrupted its night programs to announce the blockade of the communication routes. At 4.45 am, of the 60 existing gates, 45 had been closed: an hour later the entire operation was completed. At 6.00, signs reading "No trains leaving today" were displayed at all underground stations in East Berlin.
A hallucinatory sight was presented to the first Berliners who wandered sleepily through the streets of the city: barbed wire had been stretched along the entire perimeter of the city border. The 95 roads connecting East Berlin to West Berlin had been divided. No Easterner was allowed to cross the border without a permit. Only thirteen gates remained open, but closely guarded by the military. No roadblocks were placed on traffic between West Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany. In the early hours of the morning the Western newspaper Berliner Morgenpost came out in a special edition with the headline: "Ost-Berlin ist abgeriegelt", East Berlin is sealed.
The long-awaited and feared event had therefore taken place. The separation was done. In the following days, the barbed-wire barrier was quickly replaced by a real wall, which was erected by brigades of workers kept under close surveillance. It was still a modest wall, almost a country wall, made of bricks cemented one on top of the other, just 1.25 meters high. Inexorable, it ran for 45 kilometres, dividing fields and streets, squares and palaces, rivers and forests. Over the years it will be fortified and perfected four times assuming that ghostly aspect that has often been the setting for literature and spy films.
In the following years, all the houses that bordered the new building on the eastern side were demolished. The Fourth Generation Wall, built starting in 1975, was composed of three-metre-high prefabricated reinforced concrete slabs joined together and surmounted by a round roof to prevent climbing: approximately 45,000 slabs were needed to cover the entire perimeter. Behind it stretched the so-called "no man's land", a long strip of security that ran parallel to the Wall, cut by a metal barrier three to four meters high, interspersed with 300 watchtowers with high voltage wire. The security systems were completed by 22 bunkers, CCTV cameras, police dogs housed in 232 kennels along strategic points, an anti-vehicle trench, a long line of searchlights to illuminate the entire area by day. For twenty-eight years it was the most controlled and most impassable border in the world.
(3.continued. The first and second parts can be read here and here )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/muro-berlino-parte-3/ on Mon, 14 Aug 2023 05:14:01 +0000.