Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain was a political metaphor used to describe the political and later physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
The fall of the Berlin Wall (German: Mauerfall, pronounced [ˈmaʊ̯ɐˌfal] ⓘ) on 9 November 1989, during the Peaceful Revolution, marked the beginning of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the figurative Iron Curtain, as East Berlin transit restrictions were overwhelmed and discarded. Sections of the wall were breached, and planned ...
The initially inconspicuous opening of a border gate of the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary in August 1989 then triggered a chain reaction, at the end of which the GDR no longer existed and the Eastern Bloc had disintegrated. It was the largest escape movement from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.
Along with the separate and much longer inner German border, which demarcated the border between East and West Germany, it came to symbolize physically the Iron Curtain that separated the Western Bloc and Soviet satellite states of the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. [7]
On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, while at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, gave his speech "The Sinews of Peace", declaring that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe. From the standpoint of the Soviets, the speech was an incitement for the West to begin a war with the USSR , as it called for an Anglo-American alliance ...
By the end of the Cold War, as many as 300 United States citizens were thought to have defected across the Iron Curtain for a variety of reasons [24] – whether to escape criminal charges, for political reasons, or because (as the St. Petersburg Times put it) "girl-hungry GIs [were tempted] with seductive sirens, who usually desert the love ...
Little remains of the inner German border's fortifications. Its route has been declared part of a European Green Belt linking national parks and nature reserves along the course of the old Iron Curtain from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea. Museums and memorials along the old border commemorate the division and reunification of Germany and ...
The dismantling of the electric fence along Hungary's 240 kilometres (149 mi) long border with Austria was the first fissure in the "Iron Curtain" that had divided Europe for more than 40 years, since the end of World War II. Then the Pan-European Picnic caused a chain reaction in East Germany that ultimately resulted in the demise of the ...