Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
At the Vienna summit on 4 June 1961, tensions rose. Meeting with US President John F. Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev reissued the Soviet ultimatum to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and thus end the existing four-power agreements guaranteeing American, British, and French rights to access West Berlin and the occupation of East Berlin by Soviet forces. [1]
Between 1945 and 1988, around 4 million East Germans migrated to the West. 3.454 million of them left between 1945 and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The great majority simply walked across the border or, after 1952, exited through West Berlin.
East German border guard Konrad Schumann fleeing East Germany, 1961. Around half of the Grenztruppen were conscripts, a lower proportion than in other branches of the East German armed forces. Their political reliability was under especially close scrutiny due to the sensitive nature of their role.
Czechoslovakia's hardline communist government agreed to close its border with East Germany to choke off the exodus. The closure produced uproar across East Germany [160] and the GDR government's bid to humiliate refugees by expelling them from the country in sealed trains backfired disastrously. Torn-up identity papers and East German ...
An East German Grenzaufklärungszug (GAK) border trooper taking pictures of US Army activities across the inner German border Grenztruppen guarding maintenance workers on the western side of the inner German border fence. The red tape in the foreground, the so-called "death cord", marked the area the work detail was permitted to operate, and ...
East Germany's political and economic system reflected its status as a part of the Eastern Bloc of Soviet-allied Communist countries, with the nation ruled by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and operating with a command economy for 41 years until 3 October 1990 when East and West Germany were unified with the former being absorbed ...
In Denmark, most people know at least the basic facts of the horrifying true story that makes up the backbone of the new film, The Girl with the Needle. Between 1915 and 1920, a Copenhagen woman ...
East Germany (German: Ostdeutschland [ˈɔstˌdɔʏtʃlant] ⓘ), officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR; Deutsche Demokratische Republik [ˈdɔʏtʃə demoˈkʁaːtɪʃə ʁepuˈbliːk] ⓘ, DDR [ˌdeːdeːˈʔɛʁ] ⓘ), was a country in Central Europe from its formation on 7 October 1949 until its reunification with West Germany on 3 October 1990.