I have Blogged about Berlin a lot since I started blogging back in 2011. I have a connection to that city as I have for Stuttgart. I remember walking around the city from the West Berlin part to the East Berlin part and how different they were, the vibrant West and the Dour East.
When
the Second World War was finally over, Germany was divided up into four
occupation zones among the Allied forces. Berlin was also divided up
into four sectors between the USA, the UK, France, and the Soviet Union.
Tensions between the Soviets and America, the UK, and France grew
strong over the following two years which culminated in the latter three
uniting the non-Soviet controlled zones of the city into one to promote
reconstruction in post-war Berlin, during this time in the 1950’s there
was mass emigration from the Eastern Bloc across to the occupied Allied
zones, and 3.5million East Germans managed to defect from the German
Democratic Republic (GDR) before the wall was built.
The Berlin
Wall was erected in 1961 with the purpose of preventing any emigration
and defection from East Germany to West Germany and in it’s lifetime saw
approximately 5,000 people attempt escapes over, or under it. The death
toll ranges from 136 to more than 200 people in and around Berlin. Some
of these escape attempts were incredibly creative.
During the nights of October 3rd and 4th,
1964, the largest mass escape of East Berlin was conducted with 57
people managing to escape through a tunnel underneath an apartment block
in Strelitzer Straße. The tunnel itself was two feet high and three
feet wide, and the people making the leap could not bring any baggage or
belongings with them, only their papers. They came out on Bernauer
Straße, underneath a disused bakery in West Berlin.
On
the second night two men came with a group of border guards and gunfire
broke out, one of the East German border guards, Egon Schultz, was
killed after an escape helper, Christian Zobel, opened fire and shot
him. He was then hit by friendly fire from another guard and fatally
wounded.
There is a memorial plaque on the site to commemorate the escape and the death of Schultz.
A
trapeze artist living in East Berlin had been banned from performing
due to his beliefs being anti-communist, so went over the wall on a
tightrope to escape to West Berlin. Horst Klein said he ‘couldn’t live
any longer without the smell of the circus’ to newspapers in the city at
the time and in December 1962 he made his brave escape over the wall.
Klein
climbed an electricity pole near the Wall and went across the cable,
over the infamous Death Strip in between the two walls dividing Berlin
using his hands. When his arms became too tired he then inched his way
across the disused power cable and then fell from the cable into West
Berlin. He broke both of his arms as a result, but was free to perform
again.
Two
brothers, Ingo and Holger, in West Germany were determined to rescue
their third brother, Egbert, who was stuck in East Berlin. Ingo had
escaped East Berlin in 1974 and Holger in 1983, Ingo fled through fences
and minefields before floating across the Elbe river on an air matters
and Holger used a zip line he created to get to West Berlin.
Their
rescue mission went so far as learning how to fly planes, and then
painted two ultralight planes in a Soviet style with red stars.
The
daring attempt took place in May 1989, when they disguised themselves
in military uniforms and flew the planes into East Berlin where they
picked up their brother and brought him back. The three brothers were
reunited for the first time in a decade.
Two
families made a fearless attempt to escape via hot air balloon. Hans
Peter Stelczyk, an aircraft mechanic, got the idea from an East German
TV show on the history of ballooning and made a hot air balloon with his
friend Gunter Wetzel, a bricklayer. Together they built the engine from
cooking propane cylinders and an iron platform with posts for corners
and handholds, and rope anchors while their wives sewed together canvas
and bedsheets to make a 72-foot diameter patchwork hot air balloon of
sorts.
While their first attempt failed this did not deter the families, and on September 16th,
1979, they flew across the wall, over minefields and guard towers and
crash-landed in West Germany, in a blackberry bush. The total flight
time was thirty minutes and families in the town they landed in were
quick to offer food and clothing to the escapees.
At
19, Richter swam for four hours across the Teltow Canal in 1966 to
reach West Berlin. He said of his ordeal that he was attacked by a swan,
there were times where he had to dive underwater to evade the guards
and by the time he arrived he ‘had hypothermia and was exhausted’, and
then passed out on the shore.
Once he was in West Germany he moved
to Hamburg, and in 1971 was released from his East German citizenship.
This allowed him to travel to East Germany as a West German resident
without any legal consequences, and he saw an opportunity to help those
who were still in need.
Richter
then came to the aid of others who desperately wanted to get out by
returning to East Germany and smuggling out friends in the trunk of his
car. He helped more than 30 people escape this way before being caught
in March 1976 when border police inspected his car and found his own
sister and her boyfriend in the trunk. All three were arrested and
Richter was sentenced to 15 years in jail.
West Germany bought his freedom four years later and he was released on October 2nd, 1980.
Other
escape attempts happened through Hungary and Yugoslavia, or across the
Baltic Sea. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, to much celebration, in
November 1989 almost 200 people had died around the wall, or along the
death strip in Berlin.
How many people alive today remember the Berlin Wall? With it apparent how many American "educators" have a left-leaning or even full-blown socialist outlook, have to wonder how the wall is presented in history texts or classrooms.
ReplyDeleteHey Doug;
DeleteThat is the bad thing, the people that remember the events are fading away and the people that are coming in have a very skewed or diluted version of history and the lessons learned.