and sent to work camps to be exploited for 10 years until they were too thin and weak to be productive workers.
Then they were sent to concentration camps to be exterminated.
The punishment Berliners suffered for this crime was the destruction of their beautiful city and the death of 125,000 of its civilians.
After the war, the victors, the Russians from the east and the Americans from the west divided Germany into east and west. Berlin, in the center of East Germany, was also divided. Having a different currency than that of East Germany, West Berlin halted trade with the local communities and started to trade with West Germany. This was as devastating to the East German economy as for a small store suddenly finding itself behind a shopping mall.
The East German government, run by soviet bureaucrats, regarded and treated the West Germans as new fascist with a new face in a new uniform under new symbols. The suit and tie replaced the Nazi dress and logos of the invading corporations replaced the swastika.
People were able to freely travel between the east and the west parts.
In a 10 year period before the wall was built, 3.5 million, or about 1 in every 5 East Berliners, immigrated to West Germany. They were mostly young and the most educated.
To exasperate the situation, many east Berliners worked in west Berlin, got paid in west Berlin currency and did all their shopping in west Berlin, using the east Berlin roads and public transportation just to go home to sleep. The economy of East Berlin suffered greatly as a consequence. So in 1948 the soviets initiated a blockade of West Berlin and required permits for traveling to and from the east.
The east regarded the freedoms promoted by the west as dangerous to society. They claimed that those new freedoms were expensive addictions. Like pornography, illegal drugs and unhealthy life styles, all very tempting and highly addictive. The east regarded the western lifestyle like religions looked on sin. They banned it.
To keep the fascist elements from infiltrating and corrupting the east and to protect themselves from this threat, they completely surrounded West Berlin with barbed wire and barricades. They locked in west Berlin and locked out the east Berliners like they were locking up candy bars from children who would otherwise be tempted enough to take some.
The East German authorities regarded any East Berliner who wanted to immigrate to the west as a traitor who, like a virus when left alone, can grow to be deadly. They argued that such traitors deserved to be shot.
A secret state security police force called Stasi was set up. Using ideology and fear, they recruited and paid patriotic East Germans to spy on their neighbors.
The spies were sworn to secrecy and there were spies spying on spies.
This caused such a weakening feeling of overall distrust that it just resulted in waves of East Germans flooding thru West Berlin and draining into West Germany.
Barbed wire was not effective as people risked getting all cut up to escape. So they made an electric fence with monitors and ordered the guards to shoot any border crossing violators. People were so desperate that they drove cars and trucks thru the barricades.
So a stone wall seemed to be the solution. But even that did not prevent people from risking their life to escape. While ideology is a very powerful driver of man, freedom is much more so.
Desperate people jumped from the tops of the building which were right on the border into the nets of firemen on the west side.
In 1961, East Germany built a 150km wall that totally encircled West Berlin. The wall thru the city ran in places along streets lined with apartment blocks in East Berlin having their front doors and windows opening into West Berlin. Before the wall was built, people envied the people living in those blocks on the border as they were able to go across to the west so easily.
A few months after the wall was built the front doors of these apartment blocks on the border were nailed shut. So people started to jump from the windows.
Then the windows were bricked up. So people started to repel down from rooftops. Then the access to the rooftops was locked in the unsuccessful attempt to block people from fleeing. Eventually the buildings were expropriated, the tenants evicted on a few hours notice and the apartment blocks demolished.
Two walls running parallel about 100 meters apart were built. The 100 meter wide strip between the walls became to be known as the death strip. It was lit up with spot lights and had police dogs patrolling it. Its sand covering allowed footprints to be seen and guards that didn't detect them in time to be punished. Every year in the wall's 30 year history, the wall was improved and became more and more impregnable, until it was destroyed when the communist party in Russia suddenly fell.
Over the 30 years that the wall stood, 5000 people made it across alive. They used every conceivable way from tunnels to hot air balloons. 200 died in their attempt.
2 years before the wall fell, a church in the death strip called the church of reconciliation, virtually abandoned for 30 years, was demolished.
The Berlin wall teaches important lessons about freedom, life, love and truth. We learn that freedom, like life, love and truth, are inherent unconditional rights given to man that cannot be easily taken away.
If they are given with any conditions to them, then they are meaningless. The other lesson is that freedom, life, love and truth have many heads, from the good to the bad with as many faces from beautiful to ugly.
We can only look on freedom, love and truth thru our own eyes. We see best what we want to see and hear best what we wantto hear.
And only when we squint our eyes and look thru our eyelashes do the underlying features come to focus. Walls and chains, many freely chosen, are only temporary restraints on our inherent prevailing freedoms. The constant erosion of truth will always uncover the deepest buried lies
THE END
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