Building the Berlin Wall 1961
1961 Tank Standoff
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Building the Berlin Wall 1961 1961 Tank Standoff |
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West Berliners watch the building of the wall
The Wall (1962) / Berlin Wall Documentary Film Video
Since the late 1940s, East Germans had been leaving the Soviet zone of Germany to emigrate to the west . This was a serious brain drain for East Germany . An estimated 4,000,000 East Germans had fled to West Germany by 1961.
tank standoff in Berlin Oct 22, 1961. The Soviets withdrew after 3 days
By October US and Soviet tanks faced off at each other at Checkpoint Charlie over an incident with US troops. The US sent 10 M8 tanks to Checkpoint Charlie and the Soviets sent 33 tanks into Berlin . In 1961, 207,000 left the country, and a high proportion of them were young, better educated and of the most productive members of society .To stop this, the government used 32,000 NVA troops to build the Berlin Wall, starting an Aug 13, 1961.After building the wall, national conscription was legislated. It was feared that conscription would lead to an even higher exodus, but the wall solved that problem. Nine months after the Cuban missile Crisis, Kennedy made his famous' Ich bin ein Berliner' speech in Berlin. In his last Five Year Plan, Honecker planned to make a fully automated wall with sensors and automatically firing guns by the year 2000.
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The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 A comprehensive history of the 103-mile wall between East and West Germany describes its representation of the struggle between Soviet communism and American capitalism, the internal and external pressures that led to its dismantling, and the wall's geopolitical ramifications that remain in place today
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