Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The better-known Berlin Wall was a physically separate, less elaborate, and much shorter border barrier surrounding West Berlin, more than 170 kilometres (110 mi) to the east of the inner German border. On 9 November 1989, the East German government announced the opening of the Berlin Wall and the inner German border.
The outer fences and walls were the most familiar and visible aspect of the system for Western visitors to the border zone, but they were merely the final obstacle for a would-be escapee from East Germany. The complexity of the border system increased steadily until it reached its full extent in the early 1980s.
These East Germans flooded the West German embassy and refused to return to East Germany. [126] East German border guard at Berlin Wall, July 1988. The East German government responded by disallowing any further travel to Hungary but allowed those already there to return to East Germany. [127] This triggered similar events in neighboring ...
Here, visitors are queueing to enter East Germany on 23 December 1989. Long queues of cars waiting to cross the Wartha border crossing into West Germany on 10 November 1989, a day after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The East German government eventually sought to defuse the situation by relaxing the country's border controls.
On 1 July 1990, the day East Germany adopted the West German currency, all de jure border controls ceased, although the inter-German border had become meaningless for some time before that. [49] The demolition of the Wall was completed in 1994.
After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, border stations between East Berlin (regarded as East Germany's capital by the German Democratic Republic but unrecognized by the Western Allies) and the sectors controlled by those three Western Allies were created. Although there were few crossings at first, more sites were built over the ...
Germany shares its more than 3,700-km-long (2,300 miles) land border with Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland.
Before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, 3.5 million East Germans circumvented Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions, many by crossing over the border from East Berlin into West Berlin. From there they could then travel to West Germany and other Western European countries. Between 1961 and 1989, the Wall prevented almost all such ...