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Until June 1963 the East deepened its border zone around West Berlin in East Germany and East Berlin by clearing existing buildings and vegetation to create an open field of view, sealed off by the Berlin Wall towards the West and a second wall or fence of similar characteristics to the East, observed by armed men in towers, with orders to ...
East Germany also received DM 76 million additional compensation. As a result of this exchange, West Berlin's territory grew by 9.4 hectares. By declaratory action the Tiefwerder Meadows, an East German enclave within West Berlin's Spandau, de jure forming part of the Seeburg municipality, became officially part of Spandau.
During the 1950s, West Germany sent millions of propaganda leaflets into East Germany each year. In 1968 alone, over 4,000 projectiles containing some 450,000 leaflets were fired from East Germany into the West. Another 600 waterproof East German leaflet containers were recovered from cross-border rivers. [97]
A further 2,087 prisoners were released to the West under an amnesty in 1972. Another 215,000 people, including 2,000 children cut off from their parents, were allowed to leave East Germany to rejoin their families. In exchange, West Germany paid over 3.4 billion DM – nearly $2.3 billion at 1990 prices – in goods and hard currency. [38]
An important reason that passage between East Germany and West Berlin was not stopped earlier was that doing so would cut off much of the railway traffic in East Germany. Construction of a new railway bypassing West Berlin, the Berlin outer ring, commenced in 1951. Following the completion of the railway in 1961, closing the border became a ...
The reunification of East and West Germany was just months away. East Berliners get help from West Berliners as they climb the Berlin Wall early in the morning Nov. 10, 1989, after people started ...
The East Germans preferred to call it by the more euphemistic name of the "action strip" (Handlungsstreifen). [15] It was also nicknamed the Pieck-Allee ("Pieck Avenue") after East Germany's president Wilhelm Pieck (1949–60). [16] The Soviets had pioneered the use of control strips on the borders of the USSR.
The collapse of the East German economy following unification has combined with racism and neoliberalism to feed far right support. How divisions between East and West Germany persist 30 years ...