The most famous symbol of the Cold War was the Berlin Wall, which for more than 28 years divided not only families, the city and the country, but also the whole world. After many decades, Berlin began to get out of the thorny and concrete grip on November 9, 1989. As a reminder of this historical landmark, November 9 is World Freedom Day.
It was announced in 2001 by former US President George W. Bush. “The fall of the Berlin Wall is a turning point in the Cold War and a significant milestone in the victory of freedom over tyranny,” Bush said in announcing World Freedom Day.
The tragic night of August 12-13, 1961, when the wall began to be built, froze hopes, ruined life plans and destroyed the human destinies of many Germans. Perhaps most bitterly it affected the residents of those houses on Bernauerska Street in Berlin, whose entrances were from the East, but whose windows faced the West. They were later walled up or shackled with barbed wire.
The Berlin Wall was built to prevent GDR citizens from fleeing to West Germany
The construction of the Berlin Wall was decided by the party authorities of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the grounds that revanchist forces subverting the socialist establishment are penetrating the East from the Federal Republic of Germany (GDR). But the real motive was to prevent GDR citizens from fleeing to West Germany; after all, in the years 1949 – 1961, almost three million people escaped from communist East Germany. There were many experts among them, most of them fleeing to the NSR via Berlin.
The wall measured a total of 155 km, of which 45 km in Berlin, which cut through the city right in its heart. It was almost four meters high, and on the eastern side of the wall there was electric fencing, barbed wire and the so-called the belt of death – an extremely guarded section with fortifications, watchtowers and mines. Over 100,000 people tried to get to West Germany. According to the latest research, between 1961 and 1989, more than 300 people died trying to escape.
The first victim was Rudolf Urban, who fell on August 19, 1961 while trying to escape from the window of his apartment. Although the statistics on the exact number of victims differ, they agree that Peter Fechter became the symbol of the victims of the Berlin Wall. This 18-year-old bricklayer bled to death on Zimmerova Street on August 18, 1962 after being hit by bullets from East German border guards while trying to escape.
The reconstruction (“perestroika”) of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his policy of new thinking created the conditions for the fall of the Iron Curtain. Despite this, the highest representative of the GDR, Erich Honecker, confidently declared in 1987 that the wall would stand for at least another 50 years. But two years later, on November 9, 1989, everything was different – events took place that changed history.
Dozens of journalists from all over the world came in the early evening to the press conference of Gnter Schabowski, a member of the East German leadership, where he informed about the lifting of travel restrictions across the heavily guarded border to the West. However, his words were wrapped in incomprehensible, bureaucratic language.
But everyone paid attention when, at the end of a rather boring press conference, the correspondent of the German newspaper Bild, Peter Brinkmann, asked when the aforementioned regulation would come into force. Schabowski put on his glasses, picked up his handwritten notes, and uttered the historic sentence: “In my opinion, it will take effect… …immediately. Immediately!” The press conference ended immediately and the news spread around the world at lightning speed. These hesitantly uttered words marked the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the end of the German Democratic Republic.
