This new policy of openness had already resulted in contested elections in Poland in May 1989 as well as reforms in Hungary. Gorbachev was also in favor of a relaxation of censorship of the press and of the central control of economic matters.
He instituted disarmament and a winding down of Cold War confrontations in Europe as preconditions to his reforms. Some even attempted to cross in hot air balloons, by ramming through in vehicles at high speeds or by crawling through sewers.īut by 1989, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was convinced that the Soviet Union needed reform.
According to German historian Hans-Hermann Hertle in his work Berlin Wall: Monument of the Cold War, between 1961 and when the wall finally came down in 1989, over 5,000 East Germans successfully managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows of buildings adjacent to the wall or climbing over the barbed wire. In total, at least 171 people were killed attempting to get over, under or around the wall. It became an ugly scar on the German landscape and a symbol of division in the country. With many East Berliners fleeing that situation, a physical barrier between the two sides of Berlin, known as the Berlin Wall ( die Berliner Mauer), was built starting in August of 1961. Valuable assets were shipped back to the Soviet Union and economic recovery was slow and stagnant.
The economy in West Germany, as a result of the help provided by its occupying forces, quickly grew.
7, 1949.īecause the city of Berlin was located entirely within the Soviet zone of occupation, West Berlin became an island within Communist East Germany. On May 23, 1949, the three Allied zones became the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) while the former Soviet occupation zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on Oct. Berlin, as the capital, would be likewise split. Following World War II, at the Yalta and Potsdam peace conferences, it was determined among the war’s victors that Germany’s territories would be split into four “Allied occupation zones.” 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.