camp, 2.8 million people, seventeen percent of the total East German population, had fled Khrushchev's socialist paradise. 3
|
Now that tide was to cease. Two weeks before, Walter Ulbrecht, East Germany's President and Communist Party chief, had come to Moscow demanding that Khrushchev and the Soviets help him stop the flow. Together the two rulers decided that the solution was ''the establishment of border control," as Khrushchev euphemistically called the construction of the Berlin Wall. 4 Khrushchev, like Stalin, still wished to see East Germany succeed as a communist state, and like Stalin, he had concluded that the only way to make this happen was to restrict the freedom of Germans to travel.
|
Controlling the movement of citizens was an important priority for Khrushchev's government. In the Soviet Union if a person wished to relocate from the town of their birth, authorization was required, and indicated on a citizen's passport. In the campaign to snuff out religion, now running at full speed, K.G.B. officers confiscated the passports of priests, and demanded that they leave the town and church to which they ministered. If a clergyman refused, the K.G.B. would arrest him and prosecute him for violating the passport regulations. At monasteries across the Soviet Union religious clerics were being arrested and jailed. One priest was condemned three different times, serving three and a half years of hard labor from 1962 to 1966. Each time he was released from prison he returned to his monastery, and each time the K.G.B. re-arrested him. 5
|
Now Khrushchev moved to apply this same standard to East Berlin. He obtained a map of Berlin and he and Ulbrecht sat down to work out the details. "It was a difficult task to divide the city of Berlin," he reminisced in his memoirs. "Everything is intertwined. The border goes along a street, so one side of the street is East Berlin while the other is in West Berlin." 6 After much discussion, the two communist leaders "decided to erect antitank barriers and barricades." 7
|
By Sunday night, East German guards were patrolling that barricade with machine guns and tear gas. At Teltow Canal, which also formed the border but where no wire fence had been built, many refugees escaped by swimming across its short width. By Monday, the border guards moved in, and when a young couple dove into the water, the guards opened fire. Though the couple escaped
|
|