If you had lived in the center of the City of Berlin fifty years ago this month you would have been awakened by the sound of construction equipment and workmen building a wall.
But this would not be an ordinary wall built to protect someone’s garden from rabbits or deer. This wall was built to keep people in and it would become one of the most visible manifestations of tyrannical cruelty ever erected in the modern world.
Overnight, the Berlin Wall became the embodiment of the Iron Curtain that had divided Western and Eastern Europe into Free and Communist blocs since the end of the Second World War.
August 1961 was a very tense time during the Cold War. By then, East Germany had lost over 20 percent of its population to the West. The economic opportunities were simply better there. So, to ensure its survival, the East German state felt compelled to block this massive population flow out of their country.
The barrier they built was stupendous in scope. When it was completed, it was over 97 miles long.
Young refugees who had just fled the East heard radio bulletins that told them the borders had been sealed. The news meant that they would never see their loved ones again. People could not go back to care for their ageing parents. Some children would be born never knowing their fathers.
Over 200 people would lose their lives trying to escape the Communist East. Approximately 5,000 would actually make it to freedom in spite of the wall. It was the stark contrast between freedom and opportunity on one side and tyrannical state control on the other that the Berlin Wall made real for all who saw it first-hand.
I saw the Berlin Wall for the first time in 1970, when I was eight. It consisted of large gray slabs of concrete topped, in most places, by barbed wire. It was guarded by soldiers who seemed to have nothing better to do than to stare from their watchtowers with high-powered binoculars at the folks from the West who were staring back at them. They were a serious bunch, though, and you definitely felt they would not hesitate to shoot you.
Years later, in 1988, I was assigned to Berlin as an Air Force intelligence officer. The Wall was still there. It sported quite a bit more graffiti than it had 18 years earlier, yet the color was on the Western side.
When you were in the West, it was as if you had a role in a color movie. When you went East, the movie turned to black and white. So clear-cut were the differences between the two Cold War antagonists.
Now the sons of those who had watched my family and me back in 1970 were manning bigger and better watchtowers with even more powerful binoculars. On occasion we’d see Soviet Mi-8 helicopters conducting “wall patrols” to make sure no one breached this unnatural frontier.
Relations with the Soviets were relatively cordial, but their leadership did not seem to be heeding President Reagan’s call for Mr Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
All the conventional wisdom about our adversary was about to change. By 1989 the East German people had had enough. They staged mass, at times violent, protests against the regime. While on vacation, thousands fled to the West via Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The corrupt, tyrannical regime was sinking and nothing could stop the inevitable.
On the 9th of November, the East German Government caved and opened the borders to the West.
I was among the thousands who stood on top of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in a gesture that had been unthinkable just a few days earlier. In doing so, we made the Wall obsolete and sealed the fate of the communist world.
The Cold War had permeated every aspect of American society and had shaped the structure and size of our national security establishment for over 40 years. The Berlin Wall was one of that war’s most visible symbols. Its demise meant we had to find new ways of projecting our power.
The Cold War saw us deploy thousands of troops to Central Europe and Eastern Asia in an effort to stem the communist tide. Now our technology and strategies have changed so that we can confront our enemies from Langley Air Force Base, or Quantico, or Fort Belvoir almost as readily as we did across that concrete wall in the heart of Europe.
When the Berlin Wall was built 50 years ago, many thought it symbolized communist strength. They were wrong. It was a brutal and cruel admission of that system’s fatal weakness and I, for one, was glad to see that system brought to its knees.
We’ll be able to learn more about the history of the Cold War because The Cold War Museum will open its doors sometime this Fall. It’s being built at Vint Hill Farms, in Fauquier County, which is the site of an Army signals intelligence facility that was active during World War II and the early years of the Cold War.
Cedric Leighton lives in Lorton and is the Founder and President of Cedric Leighton Associates, a Washington area strategic risk and management consultancy.
