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A woman climbs out of her apartment at Bernauer Strasse to freedom in West Berlin

In issuing this dire prediction, Brandt had no idea that it would come to pass so quickly. In the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, a Sunday, East German troops and SED labor gangs began drilling holes and pounding fence posts in the streets along the border between the Soviet and Western sectors of Berlin. Then they strung coils of barbed wire between the fence posts. At the Brandenburg Gate armored cars took up positions between the columns while soldiers installed machine guns around the monument. All the streets running between the eastern and western sectors were blocked off, as were the U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations in the east. Some parts of the border were difficult to close off. Such was the case at Bernauer Strasse, where the pavement and sidewalks were in the western district of Wedding but the apartment houses on the southern side of the street stood in the district of Mitte in the Soviet sector. Here the houses themselves were made part of the barrier by closing off their entrances and boarding up the windows (at first, only the lower-story ones). The work progressed at a frantic pace, and by Monday morning, as Berliners set out to work, the first phase in what was to become the most infamous edifice of the Cold War was already completed.

Authorization to erect a fortified border in Berlin had officially been given to Ulbricht by Khrushchev at a Warsaw Pact meeting on August 5, 1961. Ulbricht had been pleading for months for permission to build a “Chinese Wall” in Berlin—an analogy he liked because it suggested a defense against intruders rather than a barrier to departure. As recently as March 29, 1961, the Warsaw Pact had voted to deny Ulbricht his wall on the grounds that it might provoke a war. The SED leader nonetheless went ahead with secret preparations to construct a barrier, which he entrusted to one of his favorite satraps, Erich Honecker. At a press conference on June 5 Ulbricht almost let the cat out of the bag by blurting out: “No one intends to build a wall.”

Permission to translate Ulbricht’s intentions into reality came in the wake of various signals from the Western Allies that they would not go to war to prevent East Germany from sealing its border in Berlin. In a speech on July 25 President Kennedy promised that the United States would do all in its power to protect its position in West Berlin, but he pointedly said nothing about guaranteeing free access between East and West Berlin. In private, as we know, he had expressed sympathy for Khrushchev’s predicament in Berlin, musing that a border-closure might be a reasonable solution. Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared in a speech on July 30: “I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their borders, which I believe they have every right to do.” Even with what they took to be a green light from the West, however, the Warsaw Pact leaders were cautious when they gave Ulbricht his go-ahead on August 5: they merely authorized a wire fence, which might become a wall only if the West made no move to knock it down. As an expression of gratitude to Khrushchev for orchestrating this decision, Ulbricht ordered that Stalin’s name be removed from East Berlin’s showcase-of-socialism boulevard, the Stalinallee, which now became Karl-Marx-Allee. A bronze statue of Stalin that had previously stood on the avenue was broken up and carted away.

Erich Honecker (middle) with Willi Stoph (left), 1984

Despite many rumors that East Germany and the USSR might undertake drastic measures to stop the flow of refugees fleeing through Berlin, Berliners reacted with stunned disbelief to the events of August 13. Most expected the Western powers to eliminate the offending obstacle immediately, with tanks if necessary. In the meantime, because telephone service between East and West had been suspended, people streamed in their thousands to the border in hopes of catching sight of friends and relatives from whom they had been abruptly cut off. Over the din of post-hole digging they yelled greetings and brave words of encouragement. Tearful lovers waved handkerchiefs and blew kisses across the wire. But it wasn’t just greetings and longing looks that were exchanged; some shouted insults and threw stones at the fence-builders.