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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]
The East German government described them as "victims of armed assaults and imperialist provocations against the state border of the GDR" [41] and alleged that "bandits" in the West took potshots at border guards doing their duty – a version of events that was uncorroborated by Western accounts of border incidents.
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 ...
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.
In present-day Germany, the former eastern territories of Germany (German: ehemalige deutsche Ostgebiete) refer to those territories east of the current eastern border of Germany, i.e. the Oder–Neisse line, which historically had been considered German and which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union after World War II.
The East German government sought to define the country as a legitimate state in its own right [15] and portrayed West Germany as enemy territory (feindliches Ausland) – a capitalist, semi-fascist state that exploited its citizens, sought to regain the lost territories of the Third Reich, and stood opposed to the peaceful socialism of the GDR.
To maintain what the East German state called Ordnung und Sicherheit ("order and security") along the border, local civilians were co-opted to assist the border guards and police. A decree of 5 June 1958 spoke of encouraging "the working population in the border districts of the GDR [to express] the desire to help by volunteering to guarantee ...
The treaty also declared the intention for East Germany to join the Federal Republic by way of the Basic Law's Article 23 and indeed laid much of the ground for this by providing for the swift and wholesale implementation of West German laws and institutions in East Germany. [14] In mid-July most state property—covering a large majority of ...