Klaus Wiegrefe: Who Ordered the Construction of the Berlin Wall?
[Klaus Wiegrefe is a Spiegel editor.]
They met in Stalingrad, where they fought on the same side in 1942. One of them, the son of a miner from Ukraine, organized the city's defenses against the German Wehrmacht forces, while the other, a German exile, used a bullhorn to encourage infantrymen to change sides. This much is certain, and it is also certain that the two men -- the impulsive Kremlin dictator Nikita Khrushchev and the calculating founder of the German Democratic Republic, Walter Ulbricht -- were never overly fond of each other.
Nevertheless, during the decade in which they simultaneously shaped the fates of their respective countries, Khrushchev and Ulbricht were close allies. But which of the two men was responsible for the construction of the Berlin Wall on Aug. 13, 1961? Whose idea led to a 165.7-kilometer (103-mile) bulwark -- a monstrous barrier of concrete and barbed wire, surrounding the western section of the city, armed with watchtowers and booby traps?
Never before had a regime locked up its own population. The border between the two Germanys had been sealed off for some time, but when the Wall went up, the loophole into West Berlin, through which East Germans had been able to flee to West Germany, was also closed.
From then on, anyone who wished to leave East Germany was risking his or her life. At least 136 people died in the attempt to surmount the Berlin Wall. They were shot by border guards, ripped to shreds by landmines or they drowned in the Spree River.
Was this sinister method of border control created at the urging of Ulbricht, because his state of workers and farmers was threatened by a brain drain, as former Soviet diplomats claimed after German reunification? Or did Khrushchev order the Wall's construction, as former senior members of the East German communist party, the SED, claim?
For years, historians have been trying to clear this contradiction, and now an answer may be in the offing. It appears in a Soviet document that Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute in Moscow has discovered: a previously unknown record of a conversation that took place between the two leaders on Aug. 1, 1961...
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They met in Stalingrad, where they fought on the same side in 1942. One of them, the son of a miner from Ukraine, organized the city's defenses against the German Wehrmacht forces, while the other, a German exile, used a bullhorn to encourage infantrymen to change sides. This much is certain, and it is also certain that the two men -- the impulsive Kremlin dictator Nikita Khrushchev and the calculating founder of the German Democratic Republic, Walter Ulbricht -- were never overly fond of each other.
Nevertheless, during the decade in which they simultaneously shaped the fates of their respective countries, Khrushchev and Ulbricht were close allies. But which of the two men was responsible for the construction of the Berlin Wall on Aug. 13, 1961? Whose idea led to a 165.7-kilometer (103-mile) bulwark -- a monstrous barrier of concrete and barbed wire, surrounding the western section of the city, armed with watchtowers and booby traps?
Never before had a regime locked up its own population. The border between the two Germanys had been sealed off for some time, but when the Wall went up, the loophole into West Berlin, through which East Germans had been able to flee to West Germany, was also closed.
From then on, anyone who wished to leave East Germany was risking his or her life. At least 136 people died in the attempt to surmount the Berlin Wall. They were shot by border guards, ripped to shreds by landmines or they drowned in the Spree River.
Was this sinister method of border control created at the urging of Ulbricht, because his state of workers and farmers was threatened by a brain drain, as former Soviet diplomats claimed after German reunification? Or did Khrushchev order the Wall's construction, as former senior members of the East German communist party, the SED, claim?
For years, historians have been trying to clear this contradiction, and now an answer may be in the offing. It appears in a Soviet document that Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute in Moscow has discovered: a previously unknown record of a conversation that took place between the two leaders on Aug. 1, 1961...