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.