The capital city Berlin lay in the Soviet zone. It was likewise divided into four sectors. This meant that the British, French, and American sectors of Berlin were an “island” surrounded on all sides by Soviet-controlled territory.
The original vision included open borders between the four zones of Germany, and between the four sectors of Berlin. The USSR quickly made it clear, however, that it was eager to restrict or stop the people’s movement across these borders.
The French, Americans, and British merged their zones and allowed them form a sovereign state, The Federal Republic of Germany, known more commonly as “West Germany.” Likewise, the corresponding three sectors of Berlin were merged to form “West Berlin.”
Eventually, the Soviets cut off all movement into or out of West Berlin by car, truck, bus, or railroad. This was done suddenly in June 1949. The USSR hoped that West Berlin would collapse when all supplies, included food, medicine, and fuel were denied.
The western Allies responded with the massive effort known as the “Berlin Airlift,” a technologically amazing string of round-the-clock flights, bringing nearly every imaginable supply to the city: gasoline, coal, clothing, medicine, newspapers, etc.
The logistics were complex, precise, and breathtaking in scope: airplanes landed every thirty seconds in Berlin. Each plane rolled to a stop, was quickly unloaded, and took off again to land in West Germany, take on new cargo, and repeat the process.
Everything was precisely timed: a twelve-man crew could unload ten tons of coal from an airplane in five minutes and forty-five seconds. This exact timing was maintained for thousands of flights, with hundreds of airplanes, connecting several different airbases in West Germany to the two landing airports in West Berlin.
The Soviet blockade lasted from June 1948 to May 1949. The USSR decided to end the blockade, because the airlift had shown that the western Allies were resolved to support West Berlin, and the airlift had effectively negated the Soviet effort to isolate the city and starve it into surrender.
From the time the war ended, through the 1950s, the Communists made it ever more difficult for people to move in or out of the Soviet occupational zone, or ‘East Germany,’ as it came to be known. They likewise kept tightening the borders between East Berlin and the rest of the city.
The USSR was aware that East Germany was losing population. The workforce there was highly skilled, and the Soviets depended on it to augment and enhance the industrial and technological base in Russia.
The continual trickle of scientific expertise out of East Germany posed a strategic problem for the communists. The borders around East Germany, and around East Berlin, had to be sealed. Vice President Dick Cheney describes the events in early 1961:
Documents in the Soviet archives released since the collapse of the Soviet Union detail Khrushchev’s plan. In a meeting with the President of the Supreme Soviet on May 26, 1961, Khrushchev laid out his scheme for isolating West Berlin and shutting off the flow of refugees from the East. He did not believe the Americans or any of the other Western powers would stop him, and as he saw it the situation was dire: thousands of East Germans citizens were fleeing the Soviet Bloc through West Berlin. Khrushchev planned to notify Kennedy that the Soviets and the East Germans would sign a treaty by the end of the year closing all corridors of access to West Berlin, with or without U.S. approval.
In Khrushchev’s estimation, Kennedy was young and indecisive. Khrushchev had scored a tactical victory over Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs, when Kennedy launched the invasion of Cuba, but then didn’t authorize the Air Force to support the soldiers landing on the beaches there.
The troops who hoped to liberate Cuba from the Soviet-backed communist dictatorship instead found themselves easy targets without the air support which had been promised to them and on which they had counted. Kennedy’s halfway measure - launch an invasion but then fail to sustain it - created the impression the mind of Khrushchev that Kennedy was passive and not ready to stand solidly in the face of the USSR’s socialist aggression.
Khrushchev and Kennedy met face-to-face in Vienna in June 1961. The Soviet leader was full of bombast, and the young U.S. president miserably endured the meeting.
Khrushchev left the meeting confident that he could do as he pleased, and the American leader would organize little or no resistance.
In August 1961, in a massive surprise operation, soldiers built a wall encircling West Berlin. At dawn, those who were in that half of the city found that they could not leave. Whether they were permanent residents or mere visitors, they were confined.
Likewise, those in East Berlin could not go to West Berlin. Family or friends who were merely spending the night with loved ones in East Berlin suddenly found themselves to be permanent residents of the Soviet-controlled half of the city.
For the next three decades, very few people crossed in either direction between the two halves of the city. Of those who did cross, some did so legally, others found ways to sneak or escape from East Berlin into West Berlin.
Tragically, many died attempting this escape, shot by socialist guards who patrolled along the Berlin Wall.
The wall became a symbol of Soviet socialism. The final opening of the wall, in November 1989, and its demolition in 1990, became a symbol of the freedom which came to the East Germans, largely as a result of pressure from NATO and from President Ronald Reagan’s assertive response to the USSR’s bullying.
