There was border security everywhere East Germany touched the West. So you could try the wall if you were in East Berlin. Or you could try a fence and land mines if you were anywhere else. Note the mine field between the road and the fence.
Posted on 02/19/2019 9:58:41 AM PST by TangledUpInBlue
At the link is a cool article some may like to read....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
So...
If someone wanted to get into West Berlin and then in theory board an airplane for freedom, why wouldn't an East Berliner simply leave East Berlin by travelling East? Then make their way to the Western edge of West Berlin and enter the city via that direction?
My guess is, they would have only needed fake documents to pass whatever checkpoints may have been installed but this must have been preferable than trying to scale the wall or pass through hidden where the route was closest and obvious. No?
What do you think?
There was a fence line around the western part with guard houses every couple hundred meters or so...............
My guess is that any attempt to circumvent the system would surely leave “blood on the tracks”....
Land mines?
The total length of the Berlin Wall was 91 miles (155 kilometers). It ran not only through the center of Berlin, but also wrapped around West Berlin, entirely cutting it off from the rest of East Germany.
Travel was not that easy. Any travel. You didn’t just hop in your chevy and drive to another town to see your relatives. The whole soviet bloc was like a prison in some very real ways.
“If someone wanted to get into West Berlin and then in theory board an airplane for freedom, why wouldn’t an East Berliner simply leave East Berlin by travelling East?”
Seriously? You don’t just simply board a flight in a totalitarian system. You’d be lucky to have your travel to the next town approved.
Yes, but that was the goal. That was the reason for getting into West Berlin.
It would take more “eyes” to observe whether or not someone is attempting to sneak through an urban environment than a suburban one. More effective to put up a wall in town where it’d be easier to see someone hopping it.
I didn’t think the wall surrounded the whole of West Berlin. If that’s the case, then that’s a very different argument.
And now the East German National Anthem:
Hail, hail, East Germany
land of fruit and grape
land where you’ll regret
if you try to escape
no matter if you tunnel under
or take a running jump at the wall
forget it, the guards will kill you
if the electrified fence doesn’t first
The “wall” around the North, South, and West went up first. It was patrolled by Soviet troops with barbed wire and, I believe, mines. It was a true military border between potential adversaries. They did not at first put a barrier in Berlin due to a desire to keep the one rail route open.
The Berlin Wall was a six-foot-high, 96-mile-long wall of concrete blocks, complete with guard towers, machine gun posts and searchlights. East German officers known as Volkspolizei (“Volpos”) patrolled the Berlin Wall day and night.
To go East, as you suggest, would be to go farther into Communist East Germany.
There was border security everywhere East Germany touched the West. So you could try the wall if you were in East Berlin. Or you could try a fence and land mines if you were anywhere else. Note the mine field between the road and the fence.
I see, so it was totally surrounded, just not by a concrete wall but clearly, by other impassables. Thanks.
The wall eventually surrounded all of West Berlin.
Right, that’s what I was suggesting. I guess the rub is that I’m assuming a level of free travel around to the Western edge that simply wasn’t realistic.
Interesting, thanks for posting that.
People have NO idea how screwed up the soviet system was. “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us”.
Getting a car, a crappy car even, was an exercise in bureaucratic BS. You had to apply for one. It took so long, that the custom was to apply in a child’s name when born. Then maybe 16 or 17 years later, word might come down “go get your car”. Had to pay for all of it upfront, a significant expense so it was also customary to borrow from family members, because you’d lose your spot if it wasn’t paid for.
All this, for a crappy 3 cylinder 2-stroke engine car (like a LawnBoy mower, mix oil in the gas) with a body made of compressed wool and cardboard. Available in such fetching colors as baby-schitt green or brown. THIS is the world that Bernie and Ocassional-Cortex will bring if you let them.
Getting a job meant the job was assigned to you. It meant moving, usually. “Report to Baltimore, Maryland, to the Glorious Widget-works #7 by 8 AM monday, 16 April.” Didn’t matter you lived in Des Moines. And you couldn’t refuse the job.
For many years, people could just walk across the street from East Berlin to West Berlin and then hop a plane to West Germany. The East Germans/Soviets were tired of this drain and decided to put a stop to it.
The wall began as barbed wire being strung across the entire boundary between West Berlin/East Berlin and West Berlin/East Germany—not just W/E Berlin. For the first few days people could escape by simply riding the subways—until the train lines between the zones were stopped.
Next stage was blocking up windows of E Berlin apartments that looked over a sidewalk in W Berlin. I can remember people on the third floor getting ready to jump to the sidewalk with the W Berlin Fire Dept holding a net for them. Sometimes they’d be pulled back in E German border guards.
In time buildings along the zone boundary were razed, a real wall went up and the number of escapes dropped—but every now and then some hardy souls would figure out how to escape.
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