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.

 

Mimi Johnson's Essay on the 30-Year Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

In other news around the globe, today marks thirty years since the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. I remember Peter Jennings reporting it on ABC news. I was in 4th grade and had a different understanding than most American children. You see, my mother and grandmother fled a third world communist country and even at a young age, I understood the significance of this wall coming down, uniting broken families and overthrowing a systematic, oppressive government.

Next month, it’ll be thirty years since Romania gained its independence from communist dictator Ceaușescu. The people and militia rose up against 50 years of starvation, lack of water, medicine, jobs, fear for their lives, women being taken against their will by the communist police and raped, having no clothes, shoes, standing in line for bread, milk, being rationed everything and having no free choice of anything; they finally had the courage to say ENOUGH, yet after all that, I cannot believe the global sentiments.

It’s amazing to me, how quickly we forget the pain and suffering millions of people endured and how hard they fought to eradicate totalitarian regime out of their lives. Yet here we are, at the end of 2019, and there has been a massive global wave wanting to bring back this horrific and failed system of government citing “justice for all.” The apropos motto would be “justice for none.”

I wish society viewed communism in the same vein that they view other atrocities, such as slavery and the holocaust; history must not repeat itself. My friends, think hard before you champion something like this coming to our shores. I implore you to talk with people who have experienced horrific tragedies and escaped to tell the story. There are many proud immigrants in this country that are seriously frightened about their existence here in their new chosen home land. Not because they will be deported, but that their haunting history will follow them here, feeling as if they could never escape the proverbial prisons in which they lived.

The U.S. is at a major crossroads and it’s evident every single day. The communist ideology has already snuck in. I watch video after video of people being beaten and spit on for their political beliefs, or losing friendships over opinions, no tolerance for anything that is different from their wavering thoughts. We have become a society of carnivorous animals waiting to pounce on innocent, unsuspecting prey. The offense monster is terrorizing a city near you. No one is civilized anymore.

We now have natural segregation occurring, yet still complain about race relations. If a member of one race attempts to ingratiate themselves into another, there’s an uproar! How dare you! The U.S. has gone beyond being a nation of multiculturalism, more over putting everyone into groups and not assimilating to our inherent value system that makes this nation so appealing to the masses. True multiculturalism is bringing the best things from your country and melding them with others, not segregating yourselves in cities where no one unlike you is allowed.

Our freedoms are disappearing under our noses, yet no one seems to care. Instead we idolize political leaders and follow them like rats to the pied piper. Political figures aren’t deities, yet we expect them to be. This is serious and dangerous behavior and thought.

Even terms like “open-mindedness” have become an oxymoron because the caveat is that you’re only open-minded if you think “this” or “my” way. We the people are responsible for our societal demise, not politicians. The inherent truth is that we are a melting pot of religions and ideologies, however, one message that resonates loudly in most religions is to love thy neighbor and do good unto others.

Let’s get back to that original premise.

Of Walls, Separation, and Sovereignty

Building the Wall
Photo: Wikipedia

Berlin Wall (Berliner Mauer) was a tall concrete barrier built to divide the city of Berlin into the western sector and the eastern sector controlled by the Soviets. Construction of the wall began on August 13, 1961 by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) authorities in order to cut off by land all of West Berlin from East Germany. The communists called the wall the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart (Antifaschistischer Schutzwall). The name was reminiscent of ANTIFA pretending to be fighting fascists while engaging in fascistic behavior.

Highly effective, the wall included weaponized guard towers. Wide areas called “death strips” had anti-vehicle trenches, beds of nails, and other devices that were supposedly installed to protect the innocent German population from fascist elements that were colluding to prevent the building of the socialist state called Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), a state ruled by force, fear, and coercion.



Iron Curtain border
Photo: Wikipedia Commons

The Berlin Wall was meant to keep people in, prisoners to the Stasi police and to the Soviet communists. Stasi, an abbreviation of the official name, Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Ministry for State Security), was the secret police of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and one of the most hated and feared institutions of the communist government.

As the communists went underground to reorganize in order to emerge later in a more powerful form, the infamous Berlin Wall, a symbol of communist oppression, started coming down on November 9, 1989.

The Iron Curtain, a term coined following the end of WWII, during the dark period of communist oppression, was an actual barbed wire strip of land which separated the free European nations of the west from the communist-enslaved nations of the east, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, USSR, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania.

On the western side of the Berlin Wall was Checkpoint Charlie manned by three western nations. Many citizens of the communist –enslaved nations attempted to flee across this wall and a few actually made it while others died trying. In remembrance of the daring escapes of those who attempted the impossible and lived to talk about it, a museum was organized in Berlin.

Checkpoint Charlie Museum holds many interesting artifacts used by East Berliners and citizens from other communist countries in their attempt to escape to freedom, such as a car bullet-proofed with concrete and another retrofitted to hold passengers inside car seats. Another museum display holds a small home-made airplane.

The infamous sign, “Halt hier, Zonengrenze,” (stop here, border zone) is a reminder that border walls are effective to protect and preserve a country’s sovereignty despite the weak arguments coming from Democrats who refuse to fund the border wall that would protect our southern border from criminal invasion and drug cartels.

In 1984 a Prague university engineering student from communist Czechoslovakia, was one of those millions oppressed under communism who dreamed to escape to freedom. Ivo Zdarsky was studying aerospace engineering and knew how to build his own homemade airplane.

To an old hand glider, he attached three wheels and a seat, a two-stroke engine salvaged from a car, and a home-made propeller. He tested his plane one night in an eastward direction. Even though he flew low to avoid detection by radar, when he landed, he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian police that was waiting for him in the field. And, to make matters worse, his plane was confiscated.

At the station, Zdarsky explained that his aircraft was a school project and pointed out that no one trying to escape to the west would be crazy enough to fly east towards the Soviet Union. Sure enough, the police believed him, let him go, but they kept his home-made aircraft.

Zdarsky, unable to find more parts to build another plane and desperate for time, returned to the police station and offered them a cash bribe for his plane. As was often the case, officials were bribed all the time for the right price under communism. Allegedly, the police never thought a college student would pose any danger to the national security of a communist nation, so they agreed.

On August 4, 1984, at 3 a.m., Zdarsky flew his plane into the night and landed one hour later at Vienna’s International Airport. Curiously, nobody saw Zdarsky land his “flying lawnmower.” He parked his “3-wheeled craft with a basket-like seat outside an Austrian Airlines hangar used for DC-9 jets and sat there until airport employees spotted him.”

Ivo spoke fluent English and asked to emigrate to the United States or Australia. The 24-year old was granted political asylum after several hours of questioning. He was then taken to the Vienna refugee center in Traiskirchen near the airport.

Zdarsky eventually immigrated to the United States and formed his own company, building airplane propellers.

The Soviets' Inner Wall

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.

 

"We've Proved that Communism Works"

Building the Berlin Wall

It is no surprise that young people are enamored of communism. Their teachers have been indoctrinating them for years into the utopia of “social justice,” “environmental justice,” the “evil” middle class, and the spectacular equality for all as envisioned by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Communism is “cool” in the land where wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt is a hypocritical political statement made while enjoying capitalist amenities. But we expect them to mature eventually and give up the absurdity that communism has not succeeded because the wrong people were in charge.

Furthermore, we don’t expect them to elect representatives that mirror their youthful ignorance. Rep. Joe Garcia, a Democrat from Florida, said, trying to explain our “broken immigration system” that needs to be fixed by enacting comprehensive immigration reform, “Two of the safest cities in America, two of them are on the border with Mexico. And of course, the reason is we’ve proved that communism works. If you give everybody a good, government job, there’s no crime. But that isn’t what we should be doing on the border.”

He tried to walk back the outrageous statement by saying, “My grandfather died under house arrest in Cuba. I’m under no illusions of what evil is.” Apparently he does have some explaining to do how 100 million innocents died through mass starvation, executions, imprisonment in gulags (re-education and forced labor camps), beatings, and torture at the hands of communist rulers during the 20^th century and how Cubans and North Koreans still suffer today under totalitarian communist regimes.

Communism promoters may want to explain what is happening now in South Africa under a Marxist-Leninist regime where the South African Communist Party (SAPC) plans to pursue the “radical second phase” of the ongoing communist revolution, confiscation of private property and businesses. http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/africa/item/18594-south-africa-enters-second-phase-of-communist-revolution

Perhaps Hollywood, the MSM, and academic progressives in this country who worship at the altar of communism and wish to transform our country into a communist “paradise” should explain how the dear leaders elevate themselves to god-like status and expect total worship from their subjects, even in their homes, the huge self-portraits and statues erected everywhere, a dangerous cult of personality, the glorification and celebration of the dear leader who replaces the parents of every child in the country, and how communists destroyed the middle class and killed intellectuals.

Can the influential elite explain to us Lenin’s secret police force, Cheka, established to eliminate dissent through execution and forced relocation to hard labor camps? It served as a model for other police force bodies in Soviet satellite countries. How about the executive orders Lenin wrote to shoot or hang kulaks (wealthy peasants), priests, and other “harmful insects?” How can anyone say that communism was or is good? Gone were religion, freedom of speech, private gun ownership, land ownership, food, medicine, decent housing, shelter, and clothes.

Viewed from space at night, North Korea looks pitch-black, but the rest of the world is illuminated. Billions are spent to support the dear leader’s cult of personality while the population suffers and exists in a suspended state of malnutrition. If anybody protests, North Korea has “Camp 22” forced labor encampment which holds in excess of 50,000 people.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara brought communism to Latin America. Over 100,000 Cubans have fled Castro’s regime and an estimated 15,000-18,000 had been killed by the Castro government. During fifty years of repressive rule, Castro destroyed property rights, freedom of speech, press, assembly, put on show trials to dispose of enemies, banned Christmas, and built a prison camp to lock away those labeled “enemies of the state” who disagreed with him - poets, priests, journalists, nuns, dissenters/activists, and homosexuals.

Che Guevara, Castro’s chief advisor, left in 1965 to train communists in Africa and Bolivia. Che was not successful in Africa and was executed in 1967 by government forces in Bolivia. However, the current Bolivian president, Evo Morales, “redistributed land and nationalized key industries, expressing his belief that ‘he [Che] inspires us to continue fighting, changing not only Bolivia, but all of Latin America and the world.’” (Paul Kengor, “Communism: Its Ideology, Its History, and Its Legacy,” Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, 2013)

Venezuela was radically transformed by Hugo Chavez, a Castro ally. He nationalized industries, redistributed land, and censored the MSM. Medical care was nationalized, and people suffered under his rule. The communist Shining Path guerrillas killed close to 35,000 Peruvians. Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua, trained in Cuba to become the leader of the Sandinistas, the communists who overthrew the government in 1979, and who nationalized industries and redistributed the land. “Since 2007 Ortega adopted a policy of democratic socialism.”

Perhaps progressives can explain to the rest of the American voters who are lulled into a false sense of security by clever rhetoric and euphemisms, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and its existence until November 9, 1989.

Nikita Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht gave orders and, on August 13, 1961, the construction of the infamous wall of shame made of concrete and barbed wire began. The Berlin Wall was a glaring expression for 28 years of communist repression which restricted the freedom of movement of its citizens. Those living under communism became “captives” overnight, cut off from the rest of the world while some family members lived free on the opposite side of the street and of the wall.

“For half a century, nearly all of Eastern and Central Europe suffered under communist rule.” Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia fell one by one under the rule and influence of the Soviet regime.

After 1989, a host of changes took place, European Union was formed, 27 countries gave up their monetary policy power to bureaucrats in Brussels, the environmental lobby became very powerful in their quest to protect earth from a manufactured global warming crisis, the communists went underground to regroup and emerged more powerful and stealthy around the world, taking over slowly through academic indoctrination, with the help of crony capitalist millionaires and billionaires.

The illegal immigrants who are currently in our country and who are sending their young through coyotes via Mexico come from Latin and Central American countries where dictatorship, repression, and corruption are the norm. They do not understand any other form of rule and therefore vote, legally or illegally, for the same type of failed society which they’ve escaped from, either socialist or communist. Lenin’s Bolsheviks would be proud – his dream of a world-wide workers’ paradise may commence under the leadership of a one world elite government guided by the borderless United Nations.