A Memorial to victims who died at the Berlin Wall Photo credit: Wikipedia |
…'from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain
has descended over Europe' – speech made by Winston Churchill in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri
At the end of World War II, the victorious
Allies divided Germany from 1945 to 1949 into four sections, each administered
by a different allied country, in order to prevent the spread of Nazism
(National Socialism).
The Americans, the French, and
the British did not take as seriously as the Soviets did the virtual division
line between their controlled territories and those controlled by the Soviet
Union. People from the western and eastern parts came and went as they pleased,
crossing this imaginary border and angering the Soviets in the process who were
very partial to their communist ideology and boundaries.
On May 26, 1952 the newly-formed
Soviet East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) began building an actual
inner border concrete wall, 9 ft. tall and topped with barbed wire, which they
dubbed “the anti-imperialist wall.”
In reality it was not a wall
built to keep imperialist invaders from West Germany (Bundesrepublik
Deutschland, BRD) out of East Germany (DDR) but to keep their own East German
people inside a one giant Stalinist prison.
To protect their zone and their
ideology, the Soviets built one of the deadliest border walls in history. If
their citizen dared to even try escaping to the West, they were summarily shot
and killed. The wall was so long, over 866 miles from the Baltic Sea to the
center of Germany, that it put the Berlin Wall to shame. The concrete wall
topped with barbed wire snaked around the countryside with no trees a certain
distance from it so that escapees would have no ground cover in any direction.
There was a vehicle barrier in
front of this concrete wall and a six foot wide plowed strip of dirt to record foot
prints. Watch towers and manned posts made sure that guards caught those
attempting to flee. If caught after the fact, the citizens were heavily fined
and imprisoned for three years.
Trees were cut down and
underbrush was cleared so that there was always a clear line of sight and a
clear line of fire. With electronic sensors strategically placed, this “death
strip” was running through towns, manicured stretches of land, farms, coal
mines, and even through the middle of a house. Many communities were split in
half, very similar to the Berlin Wall which split streets in half.
According to historians, out of
17 million East Germans, one million people a year were trying to flee to the
west. The border with its buffer zones, no man’s lands, and more guard towers
than one could imagine, became so elaborate and strict that the population’s
flight or attempts to flee were reduced by 75 percent.
An impregnable barrier of iron,
concrete, barbed wire, electric sensors, watch towers, plowed strips, and mine
fields was thus built between the German Democratic Republic in the East and
the Federal Republic of Germany in the West. When historians refer to the
communist Iron Curtain of Eastern Europe, they are referring to this border
wall between the two divided Germanys. The first reference to the Iron Curtain,
fearing the spread of communism, was made by Winston Churchill in his 1946
speech in Fulton, Missouri.
By the 1980s thirty guards were
protecting each three-and-a-half mile stretch of the entire border wall. Sixty
thousand anti-personnel mines to deter border crossings further reduced the
escape rate to less than one percent.
Hundreds of people trying to
escape to West Germany from East Germany were shot, stepped over land mine
wires, or were killed by dogs. Some of the guards themselves tried to escape to
the west.
For over thirty years the
Soviets built an elaborate system to imprison East German citizens in their own
communist prison country. On November 9, 1989, a series of revolutions caused
the demise of this border, the “Iron Curtain” between the East and the West.
The more visible and more photographed
wall by the press, The Berlin Wall, a symbol of oppression and shame, of dividing
a city between the communist ideology of the Soviets and the capitalist one of
the West, was dismantled with much fanfare and celebration, chunk by chunk, by
people who escalated the graffiti-painted side of the West. Checkpoint Charlie,
the actual crossing point in Berlin, became part of the dustbin of history.
The main stream media revisits
the Berlin Wall when it’s convenient to support the progressive globalist narrative
of ‘no borders.’ They equate a wall today which protects the sovereignty of any
nation as an oppression of the migratory masses from third world countries who are
entitled to invade well-developed nations with generous welfare systems, a social
security which is missing in their basket-case nations from which they hail.
Asylum-seekers and economic refugees have certainly already overwhelmed several
European countries.
The inner East German border
wall was also dismantled with less press coverage, creating almost two million
tons of debris. A small section of this wall is preserved today in Hötensleben as a memorial to the death zone created between the
free state in the West and the communist prison state in the East.
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