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.

 

Defectors from Globalism, Where Would You Go?

The true Iron Curtain which ran for hundreds of miles between

East and West Germany

Photo: Dr. Aurel Emilian Mircea

During the Soviet and Eastern Bloc decades of communism, which dominated almost the entire 20^th century, fundamental dissenters to the communist ideology who were locked up between the borders of a tyrannical system rarely matched by history were considered dissidents. They were forced to live a life of harassment and poverty below the average proletariat’s impoverished lifestyle, being denied basic human rights.

But some citizens chose to escape their physical and mental communist prison at any cost to them or their families and became defectors. Politically, the definition of a defector sounds ordinary, “a person who gives up allegiance to one state in exchange for allegiance to another, in a way which is considered illegitimate by the first state. More broadly, it involves abandoning a person, cause, or doctrine to which one is bound by some tie, as of allegiance or duty.”

But a defector, whether it was a famous, infamous, or ordinary person, absconded in order to find freedom of mind, body, and spirit. More broadly, they wanted to find freedom which they were denied – religious, educationally, economically, physically, politically, etc.

In a pejorative sense, in the free world, a defector was anyone who switched loyalty to another religion, sports team, political party, a rival faction, a “traitor” to the original side. I do not know how they can be traitors to a cause or ideology they’ve never embraced in the first place, it was forced upon them by heavily armed men on a tyrannical quest.

There is a long list of defectors from the former Soviet bloc countries. The most famous is the two-star Romanian Securitate general and personal advisor to Nicolae Ceausescu, the brutal dictator of the Socialist Republic of Romania. Gen. Pacepa defected to the free West in 1978 in the American Embassy in Bonn, West Germany; he was sentenced to death twice in absentia with a $2 million bounty on his head. The dear leader even sent Carlos the Jackal to assassinate him unsuccessfully.

There was Nadia Comanici, the famous Olympic gymnast, who defected weeks before the Romanian revolution in December 1989.

An air force cadet, Mihai Smighelschi, flew in 1987 his Aero L-39ZA Albatross jet trainer aircraft from Buzau, Romania to Kirklareli, Turkey, where he landed on a dirt road. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_and_Eastern_Bloc_defectors

There are thousands of untold stories of defectors who walked away from conferences, chess tournaments, gymnastics competitions, classical concerts and ballet performances, swam across the Danube River while being shot at by border guards, hiding inside car seats or engine compartments, crawling under barbed wire, jumping from trains into large rivers and lakes and swimming to freedom, flying light aircraft low in order to avoid detection, and many who escaped by visiting friends and family, overstaying their three-month visas, and never returning to the communist hell they’ve escaped.

In each case, the defectors were stripped of their citizenship from their home countries, of their life possessions, savings, and private property if they had any, and their families left behind were tortured, mistreated, beaten, and stripped of their private property which did not even belong to the defector. Such was the totalitarian socialist life dictated by the Communist Party. Under their control, you had no freedoms and certainly you had no way to redress any wrong.

You were told what to do, where to live, how to live, where to go to school, where to work, where to travel, what to eat, how much to eat, how to behave, how to exercise, locked down in your own little world dictated by all mighty communists and their informants, enforcers, the police, the security police, the economic police, the border police, and the army.

People were prisoners in their own countries, their homes, and minds. Doctors were even sent to homes to check on the medical and physical welfare of children to make sure that they were raised in the right socialist environment in order to become good and compliant socialists.

Having felt on my own skin the socialist oppression under the boot of the Communist Party, I watched in dismay as one virus, which killed less people than the seasonal flu, become an instrument of oppression and an excuse to install a political global control which someone had termed “corona communism.”

Never have I seen Americans, so fond of their freedoms spelled out so clearly in their founding documents, compliantly and peacefully watch them disappear virtually overnight under the guise of “protection” from a virus.

Millions of healthy people around the globe were quarantined in their own homes by draconian state and local governments who used the police and the military to enforce compliance – healthy people forbidden from walking and sitting in the woods, parks, beaches, and other recreational venues. Everything was shut down except “essential businesses” which were randomly chosen based on their crony capitalist size.

Avicenna, who came up with the idea of quarantine for SICK people, would have laughed today to see healthy people being quarantined for more than 40 days, affecting their natural immunity in doing so.

During the 14^th century, in order to protect coastal cities from infection by plague epidemics brought in by ships, vessels arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing.

But the current lockdown (quarantine) of healthy people all over the world, not just in the U.S., is something that we have never experienced before to this extent.

Why did Americans fold so quickly to the irrational power and control of two CDC doctors, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief whose faulty computer modeling predicted millions of casualties in our country alone, and globalist political hacks at all levels of government? Certainly, the globalist media fanned the flames of fear and irrational panic of instant death and destruction.

It is a good question to ponder as we struggle to restart the comatose economy at -4.80% GDP in the first quarter. As more and more small businesses are going belly up due to forced closures, and even large retailers are filing for bankruptcy, are we just sinking into an even more serious recession in Q2 or is there something more nefarious at play?

I hope that some Americans will not be forcefully vaccinated with the rushed corona vaccine nor microchipped to prove their compliance. They will become defectors in their own countries because there is certainly no where else to defect to on the planet that offers the freedoms they have been enjoying and taking for granted for such a long time. But the skies are getting darker and more ominous with each day of forced lockdowns and closures of “non-essential” businesses. Defectors from encroaching globalism, where will you go? The “no borders” are being squeezed tighter.

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.