It started as a barbed wire fence.
Dividing a city.
Imprisoning its people.
The very image of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall.
Memphis, Tennessee. March 1958.
"I, Elvis Presley,
do solemnly swear
that I will bear true faith and allegiance
to the United States of America."
Elvis Presley hits West Germany.
"The well-known guitarist has come to bolster NATO forces,
in particular a third U.S. armored division tank unit."
West Germany was NATO's front line along the Iron Curtain.
Since 1955, the Americans had been training a new West German army.
Some thought that could mean a German finger on NATO's nuclear trigger.
German rearmament brought back nightmares for many Europeans,
above all for the Russians.
The new weaponry alarmed East Germany
The German Democratic Republic.
"The GDR made various offers to prevent the nuclear armament of West Germany,
but it found no response, no echo.
The GDR felt directly threatened by tactical nuclear weapons.
It accepted that the Soviet army, stationed on GDR territory,
also should arm itself with tactical nuclear weapons."
Berlin, deep in East German territory,
was under the joint occupation of the former wartime allies.
Now in West Berlin, 12,000 British, American and French soldiers
were surrounded by half a million Soviet and East German troops.
Western rights of access were protected by four-power agreement.
Each day thousands moved freely between the Soviet and Western sectors.
Berlin's open border gave East Germans access to the glittering West
which Soviet and East German leaders wanted to end.
"West Berlin was becoming increasingly dangerous to the existence of the GDR
and to the existence of socialism.
Khrushchev proposed to create a free city of Berlin
with special rights of its own.
With its own foreign policy, its own police
and its own symbolic foreign forces."
"Khrushchev thought that some pressures should be put on the Americans
and the obvious place was West Berlin
so that this was a sort of shock therapy
on the part of Khrushchev, I would say."
In November 1958, the West rejected Khrushchev's Berlin proposals.
Khrushchev now offered East German leader Walter Ulbricht a peace treaty.
It threatened Western rights in Berlin.
"He said that unless agreement were reached,
that Berlin would be turned over to the East Germans
within six months.
We regarded that as an ultimatum.
"Eisenhower felt that the Soviets were doing something that
was not really in their interest.
His view was that if there were to be actual conflict
between the United States and the Soviet Union
it would move quickly to large scale, all-out conflict
where everything would be drawn into it.
And that was the... that was the danger, that was the risk."
"A new red threat to West Berlin.
Khrushchev's demand that the United States, France and Britain
agree to end the four-power pact governing West Berlin,
turning it over to red East Germany, hints a new and major crisis.
The Western powers reacted strongly,
affirming their determination to keep the city free. It's an outpost..."
American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles,
seeking common ground for a bargain over Berlin,
consulted America's allies.
But talks between the West and the Soviet Union led nowhere.
"The attempt to find a compromise with the Soviets was where
we began to get into serious trouble,
because any concessions that you made to the Soviets
from the Western side would be an
an erosion of the Western position there
and the Soviets themselves were committed
to a situation in Berlin that the allies could not tolerate,
so you were already... I mean there was no
possible outcome, negotiated outcome that was possible."
But the talks persuaded Khrushchev to shelve his Berlin ultimatum
and head West.
He chose the world's largest aircraft for the journey - Soviet built.
In September 1959, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
became the first Soviet leader to visit America.
"Khrushchev got what he wanted,
which was a visit to the United States and treatment as an equal
and an exchange with Eisenhower, which gave him,
I think, a fair idea that probably if he continued without too much provocative
actions on the ground he could get more and more out of the Western side."
In talks with Eisenhower, a new spirit of cooperation eased the crisis.
But Khrushchev's hopes for a Cold War truce only lasted six months.
On the eve of a grand peacemaking summit in Paris,
an American U-2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace.
Khrushchev was enraged.
The summit collapsed before it had even begun.
1959: East Germany celebrated 10 years of socialist achievement.
Walter Ulbricht, party leader, boasted of rapid industrial progress
and of a socialist democracy that Germany had never known before.
Official films portrayed a paradise for workers and peasants.
The reality was shortages and chaos.
Private farms were forcibly collectivized,
and the state's resources poured into heavy industry
at the expense of consumer goods.
Obediently, East Germany copied the Soviet model,
down to thought control of its people.
East Germany, its leaders claimed, was succeeding through sheer will power.
But in spite of hard work and enthusiasm,
only Soviet support kept the economy going.
East Germany could not compete with the swelling prosperity of the West.
The people in the East looked toward the West
with what I might say longing.
They would have liked to have the same comforts,
the same goods, the same chances,
and they saw in what was called socialism at the time,
a system that demanded of them sacrifices,
with nothing but promises for the future
and as long as the borders were open it was relatively easy to get there.
All you had to do was board a subway and you were in another world.
And it was really a crazy system. "Imagine you go from
socialism, in quotation marks, to capitalism in two minutes."
Every month, thousands of East Germans
fled across the open Berlin border and took refuge in the West.
Most refugees were young and skilled.
But their departure was bleeding the East German economy to death.
"A foreman in a plant in the East
wouldn't know how many workers he still would have the next day
because part of his working force had left him,
had left the East, had left the system in order to go over there.
Of course in West Germany they made every effort
that people who came from the East would get jobs
and would get a comfortable existence."
As his people drained away, Ulbricht became anxious.
He urged Khrushchev to recognize East Germany as a sovereign state,
with control over its own borders.
Khrushchev, outwardly sympathetic, played for time.
"The idea of a separate peace treaty with the GDR
was put forward mainly by Ulbricht,
who wanted to bind the GDR into fixed treaties
and link it politically with other countries.
But Khrushchev argued that a separate peace treaty
would intensify the Cold War."
Ulbricht argued that there could be no lasting peace in Europe
until both German states, East and West, were recognized.
But Moscow was in no hurry.
The German question
must wait until after the American presidential election.
John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961.
He had campaigned for a more vigorous American foreign policy.
"I don't think the communists are about to collapse.
I believe we have to build strength. We have to stand for freedom.
We have to demonstrate some vigor in our foreign policy."
Kennedy agreed to meet Khrushchev at Vienna in June 1961.
The president arrived bruised.
His invasion of Castro's Cuba at the Bay of Pigs six weeks before had failed.
Khrushchev concluded that Kennedy was weak.
He had decided to bully the new president.
"He felt that this young new president inexperienced
specifically after he had a fiasco with the Bay of Pigs.
He came rather with a not very strong position.
He said, 'Look here, already so many years passed
and Western countries do nothing
about Germany and the peace treaty and about specifically West Berlin,
so I'm going to press this issue
very strongly in this meeting with the new president.'"
"What Khrushchev kept saying was that
we surround all those troops you have in West Berlin
and we could take West Berlin any time we want to.
And Kennedy's reply to him was,
'Well that's as may be,
we fought the Second World War and they're there
because of the Second World War by right.'"
"He became very emotional,
very angry.
This young fellow doesn't want to discuss with me
the issue which is very important.
And this makes him very angry. And really it influenced his attitude.
So he had mixed feeling about...
For one thing he accepts that he is tough
but on the other he said that he is not wise enough,
he doesn't understand quite well the foreign policy."
"The meeting was unproductive
and the longer it went on the more that became apparent.
It was difficult, it was disappointing.
It left us with a Berlin crisis that was still active
and on which no progress had been made."
"At the summer White House in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts,
Defense Secretary McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk
confer with President Kennedy on the increasingly ominous words
and actions from Moscow."
Khrushchev had renewed his ultimatum, and increased the Soviet arms budget.
Kennedy asked his advisers to list America's military options.
It was conceivable there would only be two alternatives:
surrender or use of nuclear force,
which might well have brought destruction to both east and west.
So the president was very anxious
to find a middle course.
In July, Kennedy asked Congress for extra defense funds
and called reservists to arms.
"The source of world trouble and tension is Moscow, not Berlin.
And if war begins, it will have begun in Moscow,
and not Berlin.
For the choice of peace or war is largely theirs, not ours."
"Of all the presidents in the Cold War period
I think the nuclear issue bore hardest on Kennedy.
He took it very seriously and he was sometimes afraid that
the Good Lord had put him on Earth to start a nuclear war, really,
and he was not about to get out of Berlin no matter what it took."
"It would be a mistake for others to look upon Berlin,
because of its location, as a tempting target.
The United States is there, the United Kingdom and France are there,
the pledge of NATO is there, and the people of Berlin are there.
It is as secure in that sense as the rest of us.
For we cannot separate its safety from our own."
"So he made it very clear that he is going to defend
the status of West Berlin and the presence of their troops there.
But when he mentioned this one, we noticed one thing, that in his speech
he mentioned that the line between West and East Berlin are a line of freedom
and he didn't say anything about the freedom of
movement across this line, East Berlin and West Berlin."
"It is a fact that
we were not going to fight about what the Soviets did on their side of Berlin
and that it is quite likely that Khrushchev was
helped to understand that American position by the July speech."
As the Berlin crisis darkened, the flow of refugees became a torrent.
Fear rose that East Germany might collapse,
pitching NATO and Soviet forces into conflict.
"Everybody knew that something is going to happen.
Not necessarily only from the atmosphere but for weeks
thousands and thousands of people had come across and
everybody realized that in some way or another,
East Germany will have to react."
By July, the East Germans were desperate.
They begged the Soviets to let them stem the flow.
"Ulbricht indicated to our ambassador
that they were fed up with the promises we'd given them to sign a peace treaty
and take control
promises which had been made in 1958, '59, '60 and again in 1961.
Ulbricht said that all these promises did
was to stimulate the population drain.
Either we had to act or stop talking about it."
East German border controls were intensified.
Undetected by Western intelligence,
Khrushchev and Ulbricht were planning harsher measures.
"Sometime later a reply came back from Moscow
that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev agrees
to the closing of the border with West Germany
and with West Berlin
suggests the necessary preparations should be carried out."
"The National People's Army, the People's Police,
the Customs State Security, the Transport Authority
were all brought together in the Berlin area.
They were put under strict observation
and they were not allowed to telephone their families.
They didn't even have a telephone.
For four to six weeks they worked in total isolation on the preparations."
On August the 12th, Soviet and East German forces were mobilized.
"At 23 hours we were given our orders
and told that at 24 hours the border with West Berlin
would be closed by military force.
All the soldiers were fully armed.
The People's Militia had automatic pistols and machine guns
any weapons they could get hold of."
By early morning, East German troops were ready,
lined up in battle order along the sector border.
was Berlin's last hour as one city.
On the morning of Sunday August 13th, Berliners woke to find a divided city.
Teams of workers under armed guard
started erecting a barbed wire barrier through the center.
"Khrushchev preparing for this event
will have done everything to minimize, or rather to prevent
any military conflict between us and the United States
and Western countries.
Specifically, Ulbricht was told by Khrushchev
two days before this was happening,
that he, Ulbricht, would build this wall
but he should not infringe even an inch
of American and Western rights.
So we expected a very strong reaction
but we didn't expect any military clash between us."
Narration: The barrier split Berlin.
Families were torn apart.
"My father actually woke me up and said, "Do you know they closed the border."
It was
incomprehensible. You know, it was so strange.
And
then my mother came in crying
and my elder sister and we were thinking, you know,
'How do we get my sister back?'
My sister, that summer, had stayed with my aunt just outside of East Berlin.
So we all took the S-Bahn
and it was an absolute chaos. It was terrible, people crying, shouting,
some were frightened, some were angry
and
I just remember I was so frightened. I thought
we would never see my sister. She's lost, so to speak."
"A pitiful old woman
timidly walked up the three stairs
to one of these Trapos [Transport Police]
and said, 'When is the next train to West Berlin,'
because all these people hadn't heard.
The first news was at midnight over the East Berlin radio
and these people came to the station thinking they could go to West Berlin.
And I'll never forget the sneering tone in which this Trapos said to her,
'None of that anymore, Grandma, you're all sitting in a mousetrap now.'"
"The people were swearing at us.
We felt we were simply doing our duty
but we were getting scolded from all sides.
The West Berliners yelled at us and the Eastern demonstrators yelled at us.
We were standing there in the middle.
There was the barbed wire, there were us guards,
West Berliners, East Berliners.
For a young person, it was terrible."
The anger of West Berliners boiled over:
They demonstrated against the division of their city.
They could not believe that the Western allies
would allow the barriers to remain.
The demonstrations continued, but the West offered little protest.
Mayor Willy Brandt tried to calm the crowds;
he feared bloodshed if they attacked the barriers.
The allies were unsure how to react. Western rights had not been challenged.
"We were outraged
and also disappointed.
The mayor didn't manage to persuade the allied commanders
to make even a small protest."
"People were not clear what exactly was going on.
It was almost 12 hours before it really registered
that this was going to be a total sealing of the inner sector borders.
Nobody was quite sure what to do about the subject,
what exactly was the scope of it.
The focus of all of the planners had been on the threat
the possible necessity of having to take military action
to block a Soviet move on Berlin.
And here suddenly everybody was relieved
to find out that the Soviets had found a way
to resolve their problem with the refugees
in a way that did not affect allied rights."
For the allies, the closed border stabilized the tense Berlin situation.
It was ordinary Berliners, and their families, who paid the price.
In East Berlin, one soldier saw his last chance to escape.
"At 2 o'clock I assigned tasks to my soldiers.
I was in front and I spread the others out so that it wouldn't look suspicious.
Nobody noticed anything.
From 2 until 4 o'clock
I was thinking about the situation and wondering what was the right decision.
I would have to leave my parents and my sister.
Finally I took the decision.
I jumped over the barbed wire at 4 o'clock.
Then I was in the West and they received me with a great cheer.
I was the first."
Three days later, concrete blocks began to replace the barbed wire.
Along the sector boundaries rose the Berlin Wall, carving the city in two.
In West Berlin morale was low.
Confidence in allied protection crumbled.
Mayor Willy Brandt sent an angry letter to President Kennedy demanding action.
"The idea was, since there had been no reaction in Washington,
we had to make it clear to the President
that there might be a breakdown in morale,
a loss of trust.
Something more than just a protest had to be done."
"I think it's probably putting it mildly to say he was furious.
He had
Kennedy felt that he had shown that he was prepared to go to the brink of war,
maybe even over the brink of war to defend Berlin,
and here he was being criticized for doing nothing
by, as somebody put it, a mere mayor."
But Kennedy realized that a gesture was needed,
a sign that America still meant to defend West Berlin.
He ordered a show of force.
An American troop convoy was sent to Berlin up the autobahn
across East Germany.
The plan was to test East German reaction,
and to reaffirm allied access rights to Berlin.
The Americans were stopped and counted.
They waited...
and were let through.
The troops arrived safely.
America's vice president, Lyndon Johnson,
flew to the city as Kennedy's personal representative.
He was accompanied by Gen. Lucius Clay, hero of the Berlin airlift.
Johnson brought a message from President Kennedy.
"He wants you to know
that the pledge he has given to the freedom
of West Berlin
and to the rights of Western access to Berlin is firm."
In the East people risked death to flee through the last chinks in the barrier.
"All of a sudden I saw my friend running. And I said to myself,
"Oh my God, you're not going to make it."
And I couldn't run, I turned into a pillar of salt.
And an elderly woman said to me, "Go girl, run too,
you're still young, run!"
So I just started running.
My friend had hurt her face, but I'd only ripped my sweater.
Apart from that I wasn't hurt.
We were incredibly happy,
we laughed and cried.
We'd just made it."
Many more made an impulsive dive for freedom.
"One day he didn't return home.
I was waiting and waiting.
He didn't come during the night or the next day
and I thought, "What has happened?"
And then my brother-in-law came.
"Don't you know?" he said. "He's in the West."
My whole world collapsed.
I had to collect his things from work.
It was like collecting the belongings of a dead person."
Later Heinz Karstens helped his wife to escape.
Where the border ran down the middle of the street,
windows overlooked the West.
Helping people escape became a routine assignment
for West Berlin's Fire Brigade.
"It became the custom that people who wanted to escape,
people who wanted to leave,
would throw little pieces of paper out of the windows into Bernauer Strasse.
The number of the building, the floor, the window
2nd or 3rd window was written on it,
and the time, for example 10 o'clock,
that they wanted to jump."
"Here are perhaps the most dramatic scenes ever to come out of Berlin.
ossing belongings from the window of an apartment
overlooking the Western border and freedom,
an escapee is prepared to jump to safety
into a net held by police and firemen of West Berlin.
Now then here is a rescue episode that is even more extraordinary.
An attempt is being made by sympathetic Germans
to ensure the escape of a brave woman.
While communist police try to pull her back through the window,
below there is freedom's grip.
A blood-chilling sequence that the News of the Day camera
follows to its dramatic conclusion.
She's safe at last!"
The East Germans blocked even this last loophole.
People swam lakes and canals,
clung under trains,
hid in cars, climbed barriers under fire.
Hundreds failed. Many died.
Despite the human suffering,
East Germany justified the Wall as a bulwark of peace.
"When the barbed wire was put up,
the main argument was that peace had been saved.
It wasn't a question of domestic difficulties.
Ulbricht drew a veil of silence over the economic problems,
they talked always of the anti-fascist barrier,
that's how it was officially described,
the protective bulwark."
"They did it as a necessity
and I thought, 'What kind of system is it
that can only exist
by keeping...
by keeping them with force
in their own bailiwick.'
And the Wall was the actual symbol of a defeat,
of inferiority."
Escapes went on; killings went on.
Telephone lines were cut;
now the two cities could no longer talk.
At the few allied crossing points, tension was high.
In October an American diplomat was stopped by East German guards
as he was crossing to visit the theater in East Berlin.
The Americans decided to make an issue of it
and assert their right to free movement in Berlin.
Lucius Clay was back on the scene.
"Clay's calculation was that the Soviets were responsible for East Berlin,
not the East Germans,
and he was determined that the Soviets
would recognize their responsibility there."
To test East German reaction,
Clay ordered armed American soldiers to escort vehicles back
and forth across the border at Checkpoint Charlie.
"He once told me, he said,
'I learned early in the game of dealing with the Russians. If...
the Russians understand one thing and that's force, that's strength.
You must never negotiate or deal with the Russians
without having a position of strength.'"
To underline his point, Clay moved tanks up to the checkpoint.
The Russians brought up their tanks and guns.
The two sides faced each other barrel to barrel.
"The telephone rang in the command post.
He said 'Let me speak to General Clay'. I said 'Who is this?'
He said, 'This is the military police officer at Checkpoint Charlie.' He said
'Holy Christ!' He said, 'The Russians have rolled in here in force.'
He said, 'They've got tanks'.
He said, 'The balloon's getting ready to go up.' He said,
'Defecation is about to hit the fan.'"
"The situation was dangerous.
The tanks stood facing each other.
Our tank crews were told to exercise restraint,
to give no grounds for provocation."
"The dead seriousness of it became more intense with each hour.
The Western forces went on alert, Strategic Air Command went on alert,
NATO went on alert,
troops were being cranked up around the world
and one never knew if the intensity of the situation in Berlin escalated,
where would be the next sore point."
"Khrushchev ordered the commander of Soviet troops in Germany
that if the West used force, they should respond with force.
"I had a phone by one ear receiving information
from Soviet military headquarters in Germany.
The other phone was connected to the Kremlin.
As soon as I got the information I reported to the Kremlin
what was happening at Friedrich Strasse."
"President Kennedy had sent a message to Khrushchev
through a new private channel that had been established only a month earlier,
for a back channel between the White House and Khrushchev.
And that President Kennedy had asked Khrushchev to take the first move."
"The Americans sent a message.
It said: 'In order for us to move our tanks without losing face,
you should move your tanks back to a certain distance.'
Our tanks stood 200 meters from the Americans."
"The lead Soviet tank cranked up his engine and backed up
some 5 or 10 meters
and we received instructions to have the American tanks to
withdraw exactly the same distance."
"It wasn't a good enough reason to start a war.
Khrushchev himself said,
'We're not unleashing a Third World War because of Berlin.'
The Americans realized that too."
The soldiers pulled back, but the Wall remained.
The East Germans built it higher,
and backed it with fences, trip wires and tank traps.
During the first year, 50 Germans died trying to cross to the West.
One of them was 18-year-old Peter Fechter.
"The Americans gathered. The soldiers gathered on one side not doing anything
and on the other side the GDR. The police there
were standing on their side not doing anything
and this young man was huddled. I remember he was lying like an S shape
and first he screamed, he cried, he shouted for help
and as the hours went on his voice got weaker and weaker.
It was so heart-rendering that
in the middle of nowhere was a human being dying
and two groups was facing each other,
too worried to act because they didn't know what the other one was going to do.
"It was, it was,
it was really horrible.
You were just standing there and you thought he is just dying
and you can't do anything. I mean I've never been in that situation before,
neither after, where you actually see a person dying
and you can't do anything.
And I'm sure everyone else around me felt the same."
The Wall was the supreme symbol of the Cold War's cruelty
and Europe's division.
Its message was a bitter one:
Whatever happened beyond that line,
the West might lament, but would not interfere.
"The Wall
was a way out, really, for Khrushchev.
And although the Berlin affair continued to be discussed,
it was not, no longer in a state of crisis,
as it had been before the Wall."
In 1963 President Kennedy visited West Berlin.
"Freedom is indivisible
and when one man is enslaved,
all are not free. When all are free,
and we can look forward to that day,
when this city will be joined as one and this country.
And this great continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe.
When that day finally comes, as it will,
the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction
in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.
All free men,
wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin
and therefore as a free man
I take pride in the words,
'Ich bin ein Berliner.'"
Subtitles by Juan Claudio Epsteyn
E-mail: epsteyn@hotmail.com