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Course note · Lecture 5 slides (file not included in this release)
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Verbatim transcript supplied by Anthony for Lesson 5, “The Price of Division,” on 2026-09-28. It has not been checked against the video. Transcription errors and unsupported historical assertions may be present; see the linked course note for selected source checks.
Transcript
Hitler and the Nazis were defeated in 1945, and it was the Russians who had reached his bunker first. They proudly raised the hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union over the Reichstag as well. The US lost a little bit over 400,000 men in World War II, but the Soviet Union lost between 8 and 12 million in addition to a similar number of civilians. Stalin sent many Russian ex-POWs to the Gulag upon their return to the USSR, both as punishment for having been caught and for knowing too much about the outside world.
After World War II was done, dominion over Eastern Europe was ceded to the Soviet Union by the Western powers. All the land that Lenin had surrendered to Germany under the treaty had been regained by Stalin. Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, and Romania all had governments installed that answered to Moscow. The Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, fared even worse. They lost their status as nations and were incorporated into the USSR as new Soviet Socialist Republics. No one knew what to do about the Japanese colony of Korea, so they split it down the middle, and the Soviets had the north, and the West had the south.
On March 5th, 1946, Winston Churchill announced that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and Eastern Europe —Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia. All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high, and in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.” The Cold War had begun.
For a brief period, the United States had been the world’s was only nuclear power, but aspiring of Stalinists and fellow travelers in various American-classified agencies delivered the bomb to the Soviet Union by the end of the 1940s. By 1940, Czechoslovakia would also be taken over by a Soviet-led coup, and the Cold War turned violent shortly thereafter when each half of Korea declared itself the rightful government of the entire country. This led to the Korean War with the United States and the newfound United Nations fighting in the south, and Russia and China fighting along the north, and the Korean people paid the price. The war effectively ended in a draw, and the Korean people still to this day remain separated.
Alongside Stalin through all this was the last and perhaps most malevolent of his many accomplices, Lavrentiy Beria. It’s him right there. He’s not as widely remembered as Nazis like Goebbels or Himmler, but what he’s most remembered for is his infamous quote, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Beria was in charge of the secret police and expanding the Gulag, and he bragged about his ability to get confessions out of innocent people. “Let me have one night with him and I’ll have him confessing he’s the king of England.”
In typical Russian humor, one anecdote put it that, one morning, Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing, so he called in Beria, instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off a search. “But, Comrade Stalin,” Beria said, “five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.” Beria bragged about his ruthlessness, saying, “When we, Bolsheviks, want to get something done, we close our eyes to everything else.” He was a being of pure ruthlessness. And one of his subordinates said, “Beria is a man for whom it costs nothing to kill his best friend, if that best friend said something bad about him.” It’s clear why he got along so well with Stalin.
When Beria took over the head of the secret police from Yezhev in 1938, the worst of the Great Terror had receded and the number of victims caught began to decrease. His coup de grâce may have been getting an agent past security and having Trotsky assassinated in Mexico with an ice pick to his head in 1940. For Beria and his conquests, things often got personal. As in the story of the actress Tatyana Okunevskaya, she was a popular actress. Beria invited her to perform, and when she accepted the invitation, he instead took her to a private home where he proceeded to try to get her drunk. Then he began to seduce her.
To further entice her, he promised to free both her father and her grandfather from prison if she went along. He told her, “Scream or not, it doesn’t matter.” After he had his way with her and let her go, he nevertheless had her arrested and sent to the Gulag, nor did he keep his word about her family because he knew that her father and grandfather had already been executed. She was not alone, for Beria was one of the worst sexual predators of all time. He had his men drive him around Moscow at night looking for women to pick up. Resistance from them would lead to extreme consequences, though compliance was often not better. Fifty years after his death, they’re still finding the remains of his victims on the grounds of his former home.
With a bureaucrat’s obsessive attention to detail, both him and his bodyguard kept lists of all the women that he engaged with. There remains some dispute as to whether his sexual predations reached literal children or if he contented himself with mere teenagers. Stalin knew. In fact, when he learned his daughter was at Beria’s house, he called her in a panic and told her to leave right away. Stalin made that point explicitly when he was faced with criticism as the Red Army made its way west toward Berlin, and the men engaged in assaults on the women citizenry that they encountered. He goes, “How can a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman after seeing such horrors as they’ve seen?”
After he invaded Poland in 1939, Stalin was stuck with tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war that included many of the Polish intellectual elite. This had the potential to be a new anti-Soviet power center, which therefore was a threat to Stalin’s power. Beria, Stalin, and other Soviet officials had a discussion. “What should we do about these Polish captives?” They came with the inevitable conclusion, execution. Two years later, things took a sudden turn. Stalin couldn’t believe that Hitler broke their pact and invaded the Soviet Union under Operation Barbarossa. For days, the Red Army desperately waited instructions while Stalin was MIA, unable to believe the reports that were being told to him from the front, thinking these were just provocations.
Worse, his purges had wiped out many of the Soviet Union’s best and brightest military leaders, just a few years prior. As Stalin himself put it, “Everything’s lost.” Lenin left us a great legacy, but we, his heirs, have shitted out our asses. As the Nazis worked their way east, they uncovered mass graves in Russia’s Katyn forest. It was there that Beria’s men had left the remains of all the massacred Polish prisoners of war. It was a huge embarrassment internationally for Stalin, and the Russian claims that these dead were victims of the Nazis were met with great skepticism.
Though Stalin’s relationship with Hitler vacillated from rivals to non-aggressors to co-conspirators against Poland to outright foes, there was one group that the two men both despised, the Jews. Even when Stalin met with Churchill and FDR at Yalta to plan against Hitler, Stalin still found time to rant to the US president about how Jews were parasites. His comments were censored from the official record of the conversation. In fact, all Soviet organs remained deliberately silent about the slaughtering of the Jews by the Nazi conquerors of Poland when the Nazis invaded the USSR, and the silence continued even after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
In fact, the Jewish populations in the Soviet Union were completely oblivious as to themselves being the targets of the Nazis. When the Germans invaded the Ukrainian town of Korosten, the Jewish population greeted them with food as a welcome. His own family wasn’t safe from Stalin’s modern pogrom. When Stalin’s son Yasha was captured by Hitler’s men, Stalin had his Jewish wife arrested as a plotter and thereby left his three-year-old granddaughter without any parents. Yasha killed himself a few months later. When his daughter, Stalin’s daughter, fell in love with a Jewish screenwriter, he had the man arrested as a British spy before slapping the hell out of her for good measure. As he screamed, “Such a war is going on, and she’s been busy the whole time fucking,” even though she’d only shared an innocent kiss with her crush.
As the war proceeded, any Jews in the Soviet Union who felt the need to organize came under great suspicion. The Polish ambassador of the UN demanded the release of the leaders of the Bund, which is Poland’s strongest and largest Jewish party, which had fallen into Russian hands. He had been told that “it has been established that they were working on behalf of Germany.” When he protested the absurdity of Jews from Poland working on behalf of Hitler, his protests were met with a shrug. “And yet Trotsky turned out to be a German agent.” Jews were arrested en masse and put on trial in the Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated countries. Then those trials were used as proof of a Jewish conspiracy.
In 1948, the Soviet Union became the first country to recognize the newly formation of Israel, expecting it to be a bulwark against the West due to conflict between the Israelis and the former British rulers. When Golda Meir, who was Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, visited Moscow in September of 1948, tens of thousands of Russian Jews came out to welcome her. Stalin ordered the arrest of any one of them who could be identified from photographs of the event.
During World War II, a Soviet organization called the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was created to mobilize world opinion to help the USSR fight against Hitler. After the war, any Soviet Jew who wrote to them inquiring about Israel was arrested. Stalin’s campaign against the USSR’s Jewish population came with the same tortures and farcical accusations as had previously taken place in the Great Terror. Jewish intellectuals and writers began to be systematically driven from their jobs as traitors.
Lina Stern was the USSR’s most prominent female scientist. They called her Einstein in skirts, and her discoveries regarding the blood-brain barrier still hold up decades later. That didn’t save the 71-year-old woman from arrest. Her interrogators called her an old whore and claimed that when she was at conferences abroad, she was selling her body. And she snapped, “At my age, I would be the one paying.” While many of her co-defendants were shot, she managed a lighter sentence of deportation to Kazakhstan.
Now, throughout his life, Stalin liked to drink and he liked to smoke. And even as he entered his 70s, he would host drunken parties that lasted until 5 in the morning, expecting his subordinates to be available, should he decide to ring them in the middle of the night. Now, as his health naturally deteriorated, this was proof that obviously the medical community was trying to kill him, the wreckers, but now they’re doctors. Stalin’s doctor obviously was the best that the Soviet Union had to offer. When he advised Stalin to take some rest, Stalin repeatedly screamed for the man to be put into irons. He took it not as informed medical opinion, but as an attempt to remove him from power.
Stalin remembered what happened to Lenin after his first stroke. A cadre of doctors were arrested, and Stalin explicitly demanded that they be tortured. He insisted that the interrogators “throw the doctors in chains, beat them to a pulp, and grind them into powder.” Once again, virtually all of them confessed to whatever was asked of them. The Soviet press began to increase references to “rootless cosmopolitans” and other euphemisms for Jews that had been popularized by the Nazis. Commissions were set up for the purpose of removing Jews from medical facilities, and Jewish medical school graduates began to be deported to the far east in order to practice.
In fact, letters were published in Pravda, arguing that “Soviet people are naturally outraged by the ever-widening circle of treason and treachery, and the fact that, to our sorrow, many Jews have helped our enemies to form a fifth column in our midst,” arguing that these Jews should be deported and sent to the far east in order to “protect them.” Mao’s doctor in China was a Soviet Jew. Agents were sent to arrest the man for supposedly trying to poison him. The president of the Jewish advocacy group, B’nai Brith, told the US State Department explicitly that he believed the Soviets have decided upon a campaign of extermination. After all, the Soviet Union already had a functioning concentration camp system.
It seemed as if the Jews would need a miracle to stop the worst from happening again, less than 10 years after what had happened before, and they got one. It’s not clear who personally discovered Stalin on March 1st, 1953. After neither his staff nor his subordinates heard from him all day, a brave soul finally decided to enter his chambers to check in on him, and they found him on the floor, immobile, still alive in a pool of his own urine. Now they didn’t know what to do. Nothing of import could be done in the Soviet Union without Stalin’s approval, yet he was obviously unable to grant it. Beria was informed. He got on the phone, but that only put the sword of Damocles over his head.
He knew perfectly well what happened to his predecessors. If it looked like he was plotting against Stalin, he could be killed. If it looked like he was working with the doctors who were supposedly plotting against Stalin, he could be killed. After hand-wringing, the decision was made to ask the Minister of Health to get help. But there was one major problem. The best doctors in the country would have been the ones assigned to Stalin and other top Soviet officials, and those were the men who Stalin had accused of plotting against him. In what can be seen as either the height of irony or the epitome of farce, the doctors who were being held in government torture chambers began to be asked about medical advice.
One asked, “What specialist would you recommend for one of our most important people who had just had a stroke?” He recommended eight men. Unbeknownst to him, all eight of them were currently imprisoned. The captor still had more questions, and despite his confusion, the physician nevertheless did his best to explain what a Cheyne-Stokes respiration was. He was unaware that the tentative diagnosis reached by the doctors who had been sent to help Stalin were men who were so incompetent that they couldn’t figure out how to operate a respirator.
His daughter Svetlana was there to see the end. As she put it, “His death throes were agonizing. For several days, he lay unconscious, choking on his own fluids as a cerebral hemorrhage spread throughout his brain. His face gradually darkened, his lips turned black. He was being slowly strangled. He began vomiting blood at one point, and at what seemed like the very last moment, he suddenly opened his eyes, cast a glance over everyone in the room. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that, to this day, I can’t forget and don’t understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though we were all pointing at something above and bringing down a curse on us all.” And with that, Stalin perished.
Just days after his death, the edifice he had built began to be undone. The Gulag system quietly began to be disassembled, and a broad amnesty was declared, liberating miners, mothers with young children, and those serving terms of fewer than five years. Nearly a million total inmates had been released, a mix of political prisoners and criminals, in a nation where the line between the two was often blurred. Publicly, and in unprecedented terms, the government began to acknowledge not just mistakes, but brazen wrongdoing.
The Internal Affairs Ministry released a statement acknowledging the doctors that had been accused were arrested without any legal basis and admitted that they had been tortured into professing their guilt. Pravda referred to the newly freed doctors as “honest and esteemed figures of our state,” while also doing a complete reversal on one demonized Jewish writer, now rehabilitating him as “the people’s artist of the USSR who has been shamelessly slandered.”
But now the question is, what would happen if Beria took over? He would have no issue dispatching those who got in his way. His sadism was well known throughout Kremlin circles, and now Soviet leaders found themselves in a position where they’d have to live in perpetual fear of what tortures Beria would visit upon them and their families. They took fewer than four months after Stalin’s death for Beria to be arrested. He was accused of a slew of crimes at a trial in December 1953 and was executed immediately thereafter. In his place, the comparatively unknown Nikita Khrushchev took over as the new leader of the Soviet Union.
Now, Khrushchev was no saint. He had a lot of blood in his hands. He had been party leader for Moscow, taking part in the purges. How much guilt can be ascribed to him personally is a matter of debate because this was a time when it was clearly kill or be killed. Then came February 25th, 1956. For four hours in the middle of the night, Khrushchev delivered a speech called On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences. No journalists or foreigners were permitted to attend. Due to the unusual circumstances under which the talk was held, it has become known as the Secret Speech. Three years after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev turned his back not just on Stalin, but on Stalinism itself and from the same rostrum that Stalin had just recently occupied.
Khrushchev opened by talking about how it’s impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior. Khrushchev made it clear he’s talking specifically about Stalin and his absolutely insufferable character. He said explicitly that Stalin’s confessions were acquired through physical pressures against the accused and that honest communists were slandered, accusations against them were fabricated, and revolutionary legality was gravely undermined.
Enemies were actually never enemies, spies, wreckers, but were always honest communists. They were only so stigmatized and often no longer able to bear tortures. They charged themselves with all kinds of grave and unlikely crimes. “How is it possible that a man confesses to crimes which he had not committed?” Khrushchev asked. Only in one way, because of application of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, deprivation of his judgment, taking away of his human dignity. In this manner were confessions acquired.
Khrushchev then gave some credence to the conspiracy theory that the murder of Kirov was not the act of a lone gunman, or of those who ended up paying the price, but possibly of Stalin himself. He pointed out that the agent assigned to protect Kirov was killed in a car accident in which no other occupant of the car was harmed and how top NKVD officials were executed in 1937. We can assume that they were shot in order to cover up the traces of the organizers of Kirov’s killing.
He went on to question the very basis of Stalin’s Great Terror. He said, “The mass repressions at this time were made under the slogan of a fight against the Trotskyites. Did the Trotskyites at this time actually constitute such a danger to our party and to the Soviet state?” No. Trotskyism was completely disarmed. Stalin put the party and the NKVD up to the use of mass terror when the exploiting classes had been liquidated in our country and when there was no serious reasons for the use of extraordinary mass terror.
Not only was he condemning Stalin’s internal rule, he also condemned his role in what led to World War II, talking about how the role of Stalin in our movies, films, and novels was entirely improbable. In fact, Churchill had warned Stalin that the Germans had begun regrouping their armed units with the intent of attacking the Soviet Union. Khrushchev confirmed the mass deportation of entire peoples within the Soviet Union. He joked that the Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise, he would have deported them also.
Claims which had been made with a straight face under Stalin were now met with laughter, such as the claims that there was a danger of Georgia leaving the Soviet Union and joining Turkey. And yet this was the accusation under which thousands of alleged Georgian separatists have been exiled or killed. And as for that doctor’s plot, Khrushchev said, “We found it to be fabricated from beginning to end.” Khrushchev concluded, “It is necessary for this purpose to condemn and to eradicate the cult of the individual as alien to Marxism-Leninism.”
For many communists around the world, reading the transcript of Khrushchev’s speech was the end of the line. They’d been happy for years to dismiss criticism of the Soviet Union, and Stalin in particular, as capitalist propaganda. There were some claims that this speech was a forgery, but few took such claims to heart. In America and other liberal democracies, party members handed in their cards and quit. It turned out the criticism was true, all of it. The Soviet Union was no worker’s paradise. It was a worker’s slaughterhouse. As Mikhael Bakunin, Marx’s foremost rival, had once said, “When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the people’s stick.’”
Throughout the Eastern Bloc, a process of de-Stalinization began. Two big exceptions to this were China and North Korea, creating a rift between East and West that was never fully healed. But in other communist nations, Stalin’s veneration began to be reversed. The Russian city of Stalingrad had been renamed in his honor in 1925. Khrushchev reverted it to Volgograd. In Prague, there was a 50-foot -tall statue of Stalin leading a group of workers. It took them five years to build it. It was dynamited into nothing. Statue after statue, honor after honor, monument after monument, all began to fall.
Yet the biggest, most famous communist monument was yet to come, and not in the Soviet Union either. That honor would be visited upon the people of Germany, specifically the citizens of Berlin. After World War II, Germany was divided by the Allies into four occupation zones, Soviet, French, American, and British. The German capital of Berlin, which is located entirely inside the Eastern Soviet zone, was itself split into four, as you can see on the map here. Though Germany was still largely in ruins, local elections were held in the Soviet zone in the fall of 1946. The German communists tried to win control of the democratic processes, but despite their efforts, the Social Democrats were the clear victors with 98% of the vote in a three-way race. The communists came in third with 20% of the vote.
In no district did they come in first, not even the ones where they had the majority before Hitler’s reign. Russians were in a bind and took appropriate measures. That winter, they began mass arrests of supposed Nazis and subversives. In practice, that simply meant anyone opposed to domination from Moscow, no matter where they landed on the political spectrum. Then came the People’s Police, which was a further hardening of authoritarianism under Soviet control. Finally, the Soviets reopened camps. Buchenwald, which was now called NKVD special camp number 2, was near the city of Weimar, and Shachsenhausen, which is number 3, was near the city of Berlin. Close to 200,000 people rounded up and carried away when the world was still reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust. Years later, over 10,000 bodies would be uncovered at Shachsenhausen alone, the majority of whom were children and the elderly.
How to handle Germany was an enormously difficult question, even among the Western countries, of course. The Westerns wanted to reinvigorate Germany as a country partial to them, and this, of course, did not sit well with Stalin. But the Russians were outnumbered three to one by the French, Americans, and the British. Then that June came the introduction of a new Deutsche Mark via the British and the Americans, and providing a stable currency would have enormous utility in a nation where hunger was rampant, the black market utterly out of control, and memories of Weimar-era hyperinflation were still fresh.
On June 24, 1948, the Soviets did their best to seal off West Berlin from the rest of the country. They closed down the canals, they closed down the railways, they closed down the roads. No one was getting in or out with them knowing about it and approving it. Food, coal, and medicine would soon become urgent problems. Harry Truman was facing another crisis in his accidental presidency. A conveyor belt of planes taking off from West Germany was organized as a response to the Soviet blockade, delivering what was needed to the beleaguered West Berliners. Soon, there was a plane landing in West Berlin every minute, packed to the gills with the necessary goods. Yes, an iron curtain had descended across Europe, but curtains can only reach so high.
The Berlin blockade was a complete disaster for the USSR. Stalin had played hardball, hoping for negotiations and confessions from his former allies, and instead, they told him to eff off. Regardless of one’s politics, preventing a civilian population from access to food and medication was widely regarded as not just wrong, but downright unconscionable. The Americans did not hesitate to rub their victory in Stalin’s face. When it became apparent that the Russians were under orders to withhold fire, many Western planes intentionally flew in confrontational ways, daring the Soviet forces to do something about it.
Stalin held back from launching what surely would have been World War III. In 1949, West Germany, which was officially called the Federal Republic of Germany, and East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, GDR, became their own country countries. The French, American, and British occupation zones made up the former and would become part of NATO, which is a multinational alliance dedicated to mutual defense, and the Russian zone became the latter, and in 1955, would co-found the Warsaw Pact, which was a counterweight to NATO. The Cold War was hardening into two superpowers with dueling spheres of influence.
Despite East German propaganda and claims of being a worker’s paradise, Germans began voting with their feet to immigrate to the West. They didn’t have to learn a new language. They didn’t have to adapt to new culture. It was the same exact population, so typical barriers to immigration simply didn’t exist. No amount of communist propaganda to the contrary could explain why, given the choice, citizens were choosing to live in West Germany over East Germany. Claims that the thousands of immigrants were all fascists or spies or provocateurs persuaded no one.
Walter Ulbricht was the leader of East Germany, and he had a crisis on his hands and very few positive options. His country was hemorrhaging citizens at enormous rate and, worse, it was the highly skilled, educated workers like doctors and engineers who were the first to flee to the West in order to have safety and far higher wages. On August 13, 1961 alone, over 2,000 Germans registered as refugees in the West. He decided the situation needed to stop, and at 1 AM that day, Operation Rose began. It would have been considered unthinkable for the simple reason that no one would ever have a reason to think it. How do you divide a city in half?
Though city life has many disadvantages, the advantages of cities are plentiful. They’re centers of arts and culture. They are breeding grounds for new ideas. They’re centralized locations to do business. They’re dense. Everything is in close proximity to one another. The more urbanized the city tends to be, the more tightly packed it ends up being. It takes decades for cities to grow into an integrated whole, streets feeding into streets, neighborhoods developing their own character. Integration is both a natural and a manmade trend for cities. And now, for the first time in history, possibly, Ulbricht tried to disintegrate a city.
Tanks and personnel carriers surrounded West Berlin in case things got completely out of control. The streetlights were turned dark to hide what the authorities were doing. There were 81 crossing points between West and East Berlin. 68 of them were closed down. All 193 of the streets on the border were closed. The railways, both above and below ground, were blocked. Even shafts of the sewage system were inspected to make sure people weren’t sneaking through. As all this happened, barbed wire was beginning to be laid down alongside concrete bolsters and tank traps. We are tempted to think that “the reaction from the Western world was fast and furious,” but that’s simply untrue. It took a long time for information about what was happening in Berlin to reach Western Europe and the United States, and even then, it wasn’t all that clear exactly what the communists were up to.
The idea of enclosing an entire city or even just part of a city was inconceivable and absurd. So it’s little surprise that many people didn’t appreciate that, yes, the East German authorities were laying the literal groundwork for what would become later known as the Berlin Wall. The official name for it was the Anti-Fascist Rampart. The Wall was so effective in keeping fascists out that not a single one, even so much as tried, to sneak in to East Germany. The traffic was almost entirely in the other direction. People began to be separated from their friends, their family, and their colleagues.
President Kennedy only found out by noon, and by then there was a little that could be done about it. The East German authorities made sure to construct their barriers strictly on GDR territory, and per the post-World War II agreements, they continued to respect the rights of American troops and others to cross. Though Westerners did not quite appreciate what was happening, some Germans understood the situation exactly. Take the case of Conrad Schumann. He was only 19 years old, but he was already an armed East German border guard. Thirty-six hours after the basis for the wall began to be laid down, he stood face-to-face with the citizens of West Berlin, staring at each other across three-foot-tall barbed wire.
He listened to the West Berliners berating him in harsh terms, comparing him, not entirely unreasonable, to those who had guarded concentration camps not that long ago and not that far away. So at 4 in the afternoon, Conrad Schumann made the right decision. He chose peace. He paced back and forth, planning the next step in his mind. At that moment, photographer Peter Leibing, who was himself only 20 years old, he stood nearby. He realized that that young border guard was up to something. Now, Leibing had experienced photographing horses, so he knew when to take his shot when he needed it. His camera had no motor drive. If something was going to happen, he was going to have one and only one chance to get the picture.
On the far side of the barbed wire, a West German police car pulled up, engine running, urging Schumann to defect. With one quick motion, he threw his cigarette aside, jumped the barbed wire barrier, dropped his weapon to the ground, and ran into the car, which took him to safety. At the precise moment Schumann made his leap, Leibing took his shot with his camera, and he got the photograph of the border guard hopping the fence to freedom. Less than two days after the Berlin Wall began to be built, the world already had an iconic picture to represent those who chose to be free rather than to hurt their fellow man.
His reasoning for his action was quite simple. He didn’t want to kill someone for crossing the street. Close to where he jumped, there’s now a statue of Schumann, based on this photograph, complete with the gun over his shoulder and the barbed wire under his feet. Anyone can go there and look and ask themselves if they would have had courage to leave for freedom when pressured to do evil. He was not alone. Nine other border guards also defected within those first couple of days. Yet there remained, and there will always remain, plenty of young men who are more than happy for decades to follow orders and shoot their countrymen for leaving the workers’ paradise.
In the very early morning of Friday, August 18, 1961, came the cranes. Behind Berlin’s historic Brandenburg Gate, a beautiful landmark defined by five pathways, the GDR dropped concrete slabs to block the gate in perpetuity. By the time the sun rose, a five-foot-tall barrier had risen like a middle finger to decency. In less than a week, the emerging Berlin Wall had grown from an impossible hypothetical to drudging reality. Ida Siekmann would be the first one to die only nine days after the wall began being built. Her street opened to the French sector, and residents therein could easily pass to West Berlin. Five days after Operation Rose, the building’s previous entrances were boarded up and new ones were created, and these new entrances ensured that the residents could only exit the spaces that were under Russian control.
Her only surviving relative, her sister, lived a few blocks away, but now she might as well have been on the other side of the world. Physical contact between them had been virtually impossible, and it was almost certain that other forms of communication would become banned as well in the very near future. After all, contact with members of foreign nations was legally regarded as spying, something even Western nations do not take lightly. She had one opportunity to escape. People had begun repelling down from their windows into West Berlin. Others had jumped to escape with firefighters waiting to catch them below.
On the morning of August 22nd, 1961, she threw down a quilt and some other objects down into the street. The firefighters tried to get the rescue net open in time, time which was of the essence. If she did not manage to escape now, she could be certain she would never be allowed near the border again. She might be imprisoned or shot, or who knows what else. She jumped before the net was ready, severely injuring herself in the process. She was a nurse by profession, and she died en route to the hospital and became the first victim of the Berlin Wall. Her death came one day before her 59th birthday, one that she so desperately wanted to spend with her sister.
Two days after she died, the shootings began. One young man, Günter Litfin, tried to flee by jumping into the harbor and swimming across. The guards yelled at him to swim back, and then one unleashed a barrage of bullets. He was only 24 when he was killed. The East German press merely said that he died in a tragic accident. His brother only learned about his death after he was arrested and interrogated all night to see if he had something to do with it.
About a year after the Berlin Wall was constructed, a bunch of East German kids planned to make a break for it. But when the time came, only Peter Fechter and his buddy Helmut had come up with the nerve. By this point, the Berlin Wall was already a far more imposing edifice. There was a wire fence on the near side, which the two young men managed to circumvent. Now they were in the death strip, which was the area between the wire fence and the further wall. And past that death strip was West Berlin. As the border guards opened fire, Helmut made it over. Fechter, however, was not quite so lucky. He was shot in the pelvis and slid down, laying there exposed. There had been a skirmish between East and West German guards a few days prior, and that left the East German guards too rattled to try and rescue Peter, while the West Germans could not reach him to help.
As Fechter lay on the ground, a crowd began to gather screaming, “murder, murder,” at the East Germans. They threw bandages down at him to try to help him, anything to save his life. He could hear West Berlin from where he lay on the concrete and under the barbed wire. An hour is a very long time to die. Did Fechter review his life, not in an instant, but in excruciating detail? Was he worried that he was causing a problem for his family? Maybe he was scared he hadn’t told his mom enough times that he loved her. For all we know, his thoughts turned to some girl he had crush on in school, someone who he wrote really bad poems for and who thought him a nuisance, but maybe she liked the attention. The only thing he had to keep him warm on that ground was his blood.
As the minutes passed, his screams turned into cries for help. There must have been some point where he wondered what was taking them so long to help him. Then another point where he suspected help wasn’t coming at all. And then a final one when he understood that this was the end. Nowadays, there’s a monument to him at the spot where he was killed. Anyone can go there and stand and remember what it’s like to be 18 years old, to be a complete idiot as all 18-year-olds are complete idiots, and to think of all the things that happened in your life since turning 18. That first date that was really the start of something special, that stomachache that didn’t go away, that argument where you said things you immediately knew you shouldn’t have. All those possibilities, both the great moments and the banal, that come with having one’s entire life ahead of them.
But Peter Fechter would have none of this because some border guard just followed orders and shot the young brick layer in cold blood. This wasn’t 1930s Ukraine, this wasn’t even World War II Dachau, this was Berlin in 1962. Photo cameras were common, videos increasingly accessible and affordable. Everyone all over the world could see the footage of Fechter’s dying agony. It’s still on YouTube. They could watch his feet dangling as a guard eventually carried away the body, holding it in his arms exactly like a sleeping child. You could see his hands covered in his own blood.
The East Germans later said he was a fascist, but everyone understood what he really was, another victim of the Berlin Wall. The East Germans never had a good reason to explain why all these fascists were still to be found in East Germany and why it would be a bad thing for them to flee the country. It didn’t matter, though. True to the egalitarian principles of communism, the concrete monster that was the Berlin Wall consumed everyone equally.