The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of BerlinĪs World War II came to an end in 1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam determined the fate of Germany’s territories. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep so-called Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. ![]() ![]() The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin.
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