How the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain Wall Divided Communists from Capitalists and People Suffered

No-man's land
Photo: Dr. Aurel Mircea

The radical left tries to explain the sudden transformation of our Constitutional Republic into a Marxist “Democracy” with the phrase, “America was just an idea.” No, America is a real country, with a land mass, people, a specific culture, states, mountains, rivers, and a border that has now been purposefully destroyed by the current rulers.

When President Trump asked Congress to build more fencing on the Southern border, Congress told him that it did not have six billion dollars to defend our sovereignty. But the same Congress has no trouble finding hundreds of billions of dollars to fund proxy wars in Europe and the Middle East. Then the radical left screamed that walls do not work yet no billionaires were willing to destroy the fences that encircled their private properties – the walls worked for them.

The Great Wall of China, a series of fortifications built in the northern borders of ancient Chinese states and Imperial China worked fine to stop the invasion of many nomadic Eurasian tribes; portions built by the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) are still standing today.

The Great Wall defended its population, served as border control for taxes on goods brought on the Silk Road, regulation of trade, and control of immigration and emigration. The defensive part of the wall included watchtowers, troop barracks, garrison stations, signaling from afar with smoke and fire, and the very path of the Great Wall was a transportation corridor.

North Korea and South Korea have a 154-miles long border wall separating them since 1953, keeping North Koreans imprisoned within its borders and South Koreans out of North Korea.

India has 6,540 km of barriers along 43 percent of its borders.

Marocco has a 2,720 km long “occupation wall” with Western Sahara.

Other countries like Hungary, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, and Brunei also have border walls. Israel has border walls with Jordan, Gaza, and the proposed wall with Egypt. A complete list of countries with border walls as of December 2021 is found here. Countries with Border Walls 2024 (worldpopulationreview.com)

At the end of WWII, Germany was split into occupation zones controlled by United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The city of Berlin was in the portion controlled by the Soviets and was also eventually divided into four sectors. The Soviets broke agreements with its former allies and started militarizing its zone in Berlin and the rest of its portion of Germany. The Soviets blockaded all access to Berlin, the former capital, to force the other three former allies to relinquish their portion of Berlin. But West Berlin was saved from starvation by the Berlin Airlift, a huge, allied airlift of food and fuel. The blockade lasted until fall of 1949.

Life moved on in the Western part of Germany but life in East Germany was extremely hard and lacking all basics; in 1961 1,500 East Germans a day crossed the border into West Berlin. That was not particularly good optics for the Soviet way of life, so they closed the border and set up the first barriers which eventually became the impenetrable Berlin Wall.

On August 13-14, 1961, the following happened:

-         East German People’s Police (Volks Polizei) stopped subway and rail service between the dividing line of East Berlin and West Berlin.

-         Streets were torn that crossed the dividing line.

-         Erected concrete barriers.

-         Tanks were stationed at various border control points.

-         A no-man’s land was carved within a week around the entire border of West Berlin.

In 1962 a second barbed wire fence was erected 100 yards behind the concrete wall. This was called the “Death Strip.” The Death Strip was mined and covered with gravel.

Guards patrolling the inner and outer Death Strip in Berlin

In 1965 “a curtain of security fences and towers completely encircled West Berlin.” A reinforced concrete wall topped with smooth piping was added in 1975; it was called the Grenzmauer 75 (Border Wall 75). The wall had barb wire, booby traps, anti-vehicle trenches, watch towers, and machine gun bunkers. Despite all of this, at least 5,000 East Germans escaped over, under, and through the Berlin Wall during its 28-year existence.

The Berlin Wall was successful because it separated people from capitalist freedom of Western Germany and stuck them inside the communist oppression of East Germany.

1.     The total border wall length around West Berlin was 96 miles.

2.     The actual border between East and West Berlin was 27 miles.

3.     The border between West Berlin and East Germany was 69 miles.

4.     The border through Berlin’s residential areas was 23 miles.

5.     The length of the concrete wall was 66 miles with a height of 11.8 feet.

6.     The wire mesh fencing was 41 miles long.

7.     The anti-vehicle trenches stretched 65 miles.

8.     There were 20 bunkers, 302 watch towers, and 259 dog runs.

9.     Persons injured or killed on the Berlin Wall numbered 192.

   Persons injured by shooting were estimated at 200.

   First East German shot and killed crossing the wall was Gunter Litwin on August 26, 1961.

   Last escapee shot and killed crossing the wall was Chris Gueffroy on February 5, 1989.

All Berlin crossings were opened at 12 a.m. on November 9, 1989. And the first section of the Berlin Wall came down on November 11, 1989. (Sources: Museum Archives of the War Museum in Newport News, Virginia) 

The lesser-known wall in the twentieth century was the Iron Curtain, what most people thought to be an imaginary line between the Soviet East and the capitalist West. Winston Churchill said the following about the communist nations on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

This Iron Curtain was not just an imaginary description, it became a real wall between East Germany (DDR) and West Germany (BRD) to keep the East Germans inside a giant Stalinist prison.

To protect their zone and their ideology, the Soviets built one of the deadliest border walls in history. The wall was so long, over 866 miles from the Baltic Seat 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 footprints. Watch towers and staffed 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 destroyed to have a clear line of sight and 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, like the Berlin Wall which split streets in half.

Historians believe that, out of 17 million East Germans, one million a year were trying to flee to the west. But the built buffer zone, no man’s lands, and more guard towers than one could imagine, reduced the population’s flight, or attempts to flee to the west by 75 percent.

An impregnable barrier of iron, concrete, barbed wire, electric sensor, 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 speak of the communist Iron Curtain of Eastern Europe, they are referring to this border wall between the two divided Germanys.

Thirty guards were protecting each three-and-a-half mile stretch of the entire border wall by the 1980s. Sixty thousand anti-personnel mines were installed to deter border crossings which further reduced the escape rate to less than one percent.

Records show that hundreds of people trying to escape to the Federal Republic of 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.

But the elaborate system built by the Soviets to imprison East German citizens in their own communist country was finally demolished. The Iron Curtain fell.

Yet today people around the globe embrace Marxism. It is not because they forgot what happened under Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ceausescu, and other tyrants; they never actually studied the history of communism.