The Soviets’ Inner Wall, One of the Deadliest Border Walls in History

…'from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended over Europe' – speech made by Winston Churchill in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies divided Germany from 1945 to 1949 into four sections, each administered by a different allied country, in order to prevent the spread of Nazism (National Socialism). The Americans, the French, and the British did not take as seriously as the Soviets did the virtual division line between their controlled territories and those controlled by the Soviet Union. People from the western and eastern parts came and went as they pleased, crossing this imaginary border and angering the Soviets who were very partial to their communist ideology and boundaries in the process.

On May 26, 1952 the newly-formed Soviet East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) began building an actual inner border concrete wall, 9 ft. tall and topped with barbed wire, which they dubbed “the anti-imperialist wall.” In reality it was not a wall built to keep imperialist invaders from West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD) out of East Germany (DDR) but to keep their own East German people inside a giant Stalinist prison. To protect their zone and their ideology, the Soviets built one of the deadliest border walls in history. If their citizens dared to even try escaping to the West, they were summarily shot and killed. The wall was so long, over 866 miles from the Baltic Sea to the center of Germany, that it put the Berlin Wall to shame. The concrete wall topped with barbed wire snaked around the countryside with no trees a certain distance from it so that escapees would have no ground cover in any direction. There was a vehicle barrier in front of this concrete wall and a six foot wide plowed strip of dirt to record foot prints. Watch towers and manned posts made sure that guards caught those attempting to flee. If caught after the fact, the citizens were heavily fined and imprisoned for three years. Trees were cut down and underbrush was cleared so that there was always a clear line of sight and a clear line of fire. With electronic sensors strategically placed, this “death strip” was running through towns, manicured stretches of land, farms, coal mines—and even through the middle of a house. Many communities were split in half, very similar to the Berlin Wall which split streets in half. According to historians, out of 17 million East Germans, one million people a year were trying to flee to the west. The border with its buffer zones, no man’s lands, and more guard towers than one could imagine, became so elaborate and strict that the population’s flight or attempts to flee were reduced by 75 percent.

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An impregnable barrier of iron, concrete, barbed wire, electric sensors, watch towers, plowed strips, and mine fields was thus built between the German Democratic Republic in the East and the Federal Republic of Germany in the West. When historians refer to the communist Iron Curtain of Eastern Europe, they are referring to this border wall between the two divided Germanys. The first reference to the Iron Curtain, fearing the spread of communism, was made by Winston Churchill in his 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri. By the 1980s thirty guards were protecting each three-and-a-half mile stretch of the entire border wall. Sixty thousand anti-personnel mines to deter border crossings further reduced the escape rate to less than one percent. Hundreds of people trying to escape to West Germany from East Germany were shot, stepped over land mine wires, or were killed by dogs. Some of the guards themselves tried to escape to the west. For over thirty years the Soviets built an elaborate system to imprison East German citizens in their own communist prison country. On November 9, 1989, a series of revolutions caused the demise of this border, the “Iron Curtain” between the East and the West. The more visible and more photographed wall by the press, The Berlin Wall, a symbol of oppression and shame, of dividing a city between the communist ideology of the Soviets and the capitalist one of the West, was dismantled with much fanfare and celebration, chunk by chunk, by people who escalated the graffiti-painted side of the West. Checkpoint Charlie, the actual crossing point in Berlin, became part of the dustbin of history. The mainstream media revisits the Berlin Wall when it’s convenient to support the progressive globalist narrative of ‘no borders.’ They equate a wall today which protects the sovereignty of any nation as an oppression of the migratory masses from third world countries who are entitled to invade well-developed nations with generous welfare systems, social security which is missing in their basket-case nations from which they hail. Asylum-seekers and economic refugees have certainly already overwhelmed several European countries. The inner East German border wall was also dismantled with less press coverage, creating almost two million tons of debris. A small section of this wall is preserved today in Hötensleben as a memorial to the death zone created between the free state in the West and the communist prison state in the East.