Divided Germany in a Divided Europe
February 1945 – The Allied conference in Yalta. The USSR, Britain and the US decide to divide Germany into zones of occupation.
1949 – The division of Germany into two separate states, the GDR and the FRG, is formally confirmed.
August 1961 – In order to stop the flight of East-Germans to the West, communists decide to construct the Berlin Wall.
The breaking of the communist regimes in Poland and Hungary had shaken the entire Eastern Bloc. But many thought that the fate of Communism in Europe was to be decided in Germany, which as a result of the Cold War had been divided into two separate states: the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the West. In no other place were the East-West confrontation and the pains caused by it as evident as in the divided Germany.
The splitting up of Germany was the result of the war-time decisions of the winning powers, the USSR, the US and Britain. Already at the conference in Teheran in 1943 Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill decided that the highest political power in the zones of occupation of the Allied armies, intent at invading Germany, rested with the commander-in-chief of each Allied power. At the conference in Yalta in 1945 the division of Germany into zones of occupation was fixed. The eastern provinces fell under the stranglehold of the Red Army. In 1949, as the Cold War began to settle in, the formation of two German states was formally announced.
The problem that the dictatorship of the GDR faced was that for the loyalty of the people, it had to compete with the other, democratic German state. The official ideology of the GDR was anti-fascism; the leadership of the FRG was castigated as Nazis. Before long these slogans sounded ever hollower. The decisive weight in the scales was, however, the giddy economic upsurge of West-Germany – the Wirtschaftswunder – which contrasted with the miserable “real socialism” in the Eastern Bloc. This encouraged a phenomenon which was dubbed “voting with the feet”: East-Germans in ever greater numbers left the GDR for the West. By 1953, the year of Stalin's death, there were already 330 000 such refugees (2 % of the population).
The problem would have been easy to solve, if the leaders of the GDR could just close the border with the FDR. But the Allies had not only divided the country, they had also divided the capital, Berlin, which was located in the middle of the GDR’s territory. This made it easy for East-Germans to simply march from one city district to the other, where the authorities of the FDR welcomed them with open arms. In 1961, however, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the government of the GDR took a secret decision to promptly construct a border defence system, the Berlin Wall. The Wall ensured that the GDR would not simply bleed to death. However, the Wall also became a symbol for the inhumanity and weakness of the communist regime in the GDR. It thus resembled a time bomb attached to a communist's foot. The seeds for the events of 1989 had thereby been sown.