Innamburan Page: 13 08 2019
Trillions of events take place every second and the count for the history of the world is mind boggling. Three events of the day August 13 in different years were turning points, indeed -Berlin Wall 1961, China's disastrous Cultural Revolution 1966 ("China officially launched the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution on August 13, 1966 by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing" for tightening their grip on the people and to destabilise opposition. And the student Red Guards ran amuck everywhere.)and the birth of Fidel Catro 1926, to name a few prominent events. This post is on the Berlin Wall 1961.
As World War II came to an end in 1945,
the Allied Yalta and Potsdam Conferences artificially partitioned Germany into four “allied occupation zones” (They miserably failed to quell the national spirit of Germany.) The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union, while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and (eventually) France.Even though Berlin was well within the Soviet Zone, it was split into similar sectors. The Soviets took the eastern half, while the other Allies took the western. in June 1945.On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was 'to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state'; The real nefarious purpose was to stem mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War.
No wonder President Kennedy conceded that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
An aside: Never reconciled to the capitalist city of West Berlin being perched in its Communist midst, the Soviets even laid siege to starve the West Berliners in 1948; but, the famous "Berlin Airlift" by the Western Allies carried the day-rather the year.
References:
~https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-was-the-berlin-wall-and-how-did-it-fall
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