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At midnight, East Germany's border police, the East German army and units of the Soviet Army began to close the border; by morning on Sunday 13 August 1961, the border to West Berlin had been shut. East German troops and workers had begun to tear up streets running alongside the barrier to make them impassable to most vehicles, and to install ...
In 1961, 8,507 people fled across the border, most of them through West Berlin. The construction of the Berlin Wall that year reduced the number of escapees by 75% to around 2,300 per annum for the rest of the decade. The Wall changed Berlin from being one of the easiest places to cross the border, from the East, to one of the most difficult. [1]
East German border guard Konrad Schumann fleeing East Germany, 1961. In 1961, the Grenzpolizei were reorganized as the Border Troops of the GDR (Grenztruppen der DDR) and were moved from the Ministry of the Interior, which oversaw policing, to the Ministry of National Defence (MfNV) which oversaw the military.
The relationship between the East and West German border guards and officials was frosty. As a Bayerische Grenzpolizei report of 1968 noted, "the conduct of the Soviet zone [i.e. East German] border troops continued unfriendly and uncooperative. Officers and officials only sought contact to obtain information about refugees or to influence the ...
The Berlin border crossings were border crossings created as a result of the post-World War II division of Germany. Prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, travel between the Eastern and Western sectors of Berlin was completely uncontrolled, although restrictions were increasingly introduced by the Soviet and East German ...
The political history of East Germany had four periods: [80] 1949–1961, which saw the building of socialism; 1961–1970, after the Berlin Wall closed off escape, was a period of stability and consolidation; 1971–1985 was termed the "Honecker Era", and saw closer ties with West Germany; and 1985–1990 saw the decline and extinction of East ...
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]
This is a list of wars involving Germany from 962. It includes the Holy Roman Empire, Confederation of the Rhine, the German Confederation, the North German Confederation, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the German Democratic Republic (DDR, "East Germany") and the present Federal Republic of Germany (BRD, until German reunification in 1990 known as "West Germany").