Just after midnight on the morning of 13 August 1961, East German soldiers pulled up in trucks at numerous locations in the center of Berlin. Working quickly, they pulled out rolls of barbed wire and, within a few hours, had established a barrier clean across the center of the city. Guards were posted every few yards, as necessary, and, within a matter of hours Berlin was cut in two. The Berlin Wall had come into being.
Looking back, it is possible to see this as the turning point in the Cold War. No nation, no system, which can survive only by walling in its citizens can possibly hope to achieve credibility or permanency. The building of the Berlin Wall ensured that the German Democratic Republic would last only so long as the Wall remained. Its construction was an admission of defeat by the communist leadership. Once built, it was doomed, sooner or later, to come down.
It did not seem so at the time. The Berlin Wall was built in a period of soaring tension between the US and the USSR. It was the climax of nearly three years of crisis, precipitated in November 1958, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with communist East Germany, thereby putting an end to the four-power regime in the city. In the end, no such treaty was ever signed and Khrushchev moderated his tone over 1959, even taking time off from the Cold War to engage in a triumphal tour of the United States. But, in May 1960, he walked out of the Paris summit, following the shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2, and later that year conducted a stormy appearance at the United Nations, which produced his famous shoe-pounding episode. The specter of a peace treaty was raised again and Soviet- American tensions increased even as Khrushchev prepared to deal with the newly elected President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Looking back, it is possible to see this as the turning point in the Cold War. No nation, no system, which can survive only by walling in its citizens can possibly hope to achieve credibility or permanency. The building of the Berlin Wall ensured that the German Democratic Republic would last only so long as the Wall remained. Its construction was an admission of defeat by the communist leadership. Once built, it was doomed, sooner or later, to come down.
It did not seem so at the time. The Berlin Wall was built in a period of soaring tension between the US and the USSR. It was the climax of nearly three years of crisis, precipitated in November 1958, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with communist East Germany, thereby putting an end to the four-power regime in the city. In the end, no such treaty was ever signed and Khrushchev moderated his tone over 1959, even taking time off from the Cold War to engage in a triumphal tour of the United States. But, in May 1960, he walked out of the Paris summit, following the shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2, and later that year conducted a stormy appearance at the United Nations, which produced his famous shoe-pounding episode. The specter of a peace treaty was raised again and Soviet- American tensions increased even as Khrushchev prepared to deal with the newly elected President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
