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THE HISTORY CAT
Unit 18: The Cold War
1945-1990
The Berlin Wall
Berlin Wall Lesson Plan | Grades 7-12
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Cold War Berlin: A City Divided
The East Germans called the Berlin Wall the anti-fascist protection barrier. But the 103 mile long concrete barrier was meant to keep the people of East Berlin in rather than keeping the West Berliners out. On the night of August 23, 1961 Berliners on both sides of the invisible line that divided their city went about business as usual. In the early years people were (for the most part) free to cross from East to West.
But shortly after midnight all that came to an abrupt halt. Most Berliners had gone to bed and didn’t have a clue of what was going on (until the jackhammers started that is). Those caught out in the streets saw firsthand the ten thousand East German and Soviet troops ringing the city. Soon a small army of construction workers began tearing up the streets.
Concrete posts were sunk into the ground and barbed wire was stretched across the border between East and West Germany. The East Germans had done a great job at keeping their plans of the wall hush hush. But the noise of construction soon brought people out of their homes. West Germans, used to enjoying freedom of speech, yelled at the workers and guards. East Germans remained silent or quickly made a run for freedom at any place they could find an opening. Over the next two years the barbed wire would be replaced with a 12 foot high concrete wall that would remain in place until 1989.
Hans Conrad Schumann, was an East German Bereitschaftspolizist (riot control police) who escaped to West Germany during the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
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The Soviets Take Control
Let's back up a bit, and explain why the Berlin Wall was even built. After World War II, Berlin became one of the strangest flashpoints of the 20th century. In 1945, the Soviet Red Army stormed the city from the east, while British, American, and French forces advanced from the west, leaving Germany’s capital in ruins after 363 bombing raids. At the Potsdam Conference, the Allies agreed to divide Germany—and Berlin—into four zones, intending it to be temporary until Germany was “de-Nazified” and stable enough for reunification. Instead, tensions between the communist East and capitalist West turned Berlin into a Cold War battleground. By the late 1940s, the Western zones merged into West Germany with the help of U.S. Marshall Plan aid, while the Soviets kept tight control over East Germany, stripping it of resources to rebuild their own war-torn economy.
City of Berlin was divided between the Soviets and the allies (America, France, and Great Britain). The plan was to reunite all four sectors once Germany had been de-nazified.
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Life in East Germany
Berlin was a tale of two cities. In the west, new housing, cafes, cinemas, and good-paying jobs were showing that West Germany was on its way to full recovery, while the Soviet-controlled east struggled under a communist government modeled after the Soviet Union. Under communism, farms and factories were controlled by the government, which eliminated unemployment but also wiped out high wages.
The East German government banned Western books and newspapers, crushed free speech, and relied on the Stasi—East Germany's secret police—to monitor its citizens. One in ten East Germans spied on friends and neighbors, often in exchange for privileges like foreign travel, and those who criticized the government risked losing their jobs, imprisonment, or worse. The Stasi didn't stop at informants either—they opened mail, bugged apartments, and kept files on more than a third of the population.
After reunification, East Germans could request those files, and plenty discovered that the person reporting on them had been a spouse, a coworker, or a lifelong friend. Talk about awkward.
In addition to low wages and constant surveillance, East Germans faced chronic shortages of basic goods. Take the Trabant, for example—East Germany's proudest automotive achievement—which had an eleven-year waiting list. Families put their names on the list, waited a decade, and then got a car with a two-stroke engine that belched blue smoke and topped out at 60 miles per hour. Grocery stores stocked whatever the state decided to produce, which was rarely what people actually needed, and luxuries like bananas or decent coffee were the kinds of things you might wait months to find.
The government also decided where you lived—throwing up massive concrete apartment blocks called Plattenbau across East German cities and handing them out based on need and political loyalty. Each one was assembled from prefabricated concrete slabs snapped together like Lego pieces, which meant an entire building could go up in under a day. They looked like they had been designed by a prison warden. Inside, the apartments were small and identical—the same narrow hallways, the same thin walls, the same state-issued wallpaper in every unit across the country. Hot water and central heating were considered selling points worth bragging about. The government put so little money into maintaining older buildings that leaky roofs and moldy walls were quietly swallowing apartments faster than new ones could replace them, and by the 1980s the total number of livable units in East Germany was actually shrinking.
Meanwhile, propaganda posters plastered across East Berlin showed smiling workers surrounded by plenty, a version of East Germany that existed mainly on paper.
Despite strict controls, thousands of East Berliners still crossed into West Berlin every day to work or visit friends, only to return home at night. East German newspapers called them parasites and capitalist spies. Many stopped coming home. Between 1949 and 1961, over three million people—roughly 20% of the population—fled, draining East Germany of skilled professionals like doctors, engineers, and teachers. The government responded by promoting political loyalty over qualifications. East Germany's currency was far weaker than the thriving West German Mark, and the gap between East and West kept on getting wider.
East German Platenblau apartments - painted so they would look less depressing.
East Berliners wait in line at a grocery store. 1970s
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The Wall Goes Up
On August 15, 1961, 21-year-old Hagen Koch stood in the middle of Potsdamer Platz, once the bustling heart of Berlin, now a bombed-out mess. With a paintbrush in hand, he drew a 31-mile white line that would soon become the Berlin Wall—a concrete scar that would soon slice the city in two. Behind him, barbed wire had already gone up three days earlier, sealing off East Berlin from the West. That line, and the wall that followed, would completely upend life in Berlin.
For decades, Potsdamer Platz had been Berlin's version of Times Square—bright lights, busy shops, and plenty of life. But by 1961, it was ground zero for Cold War drama. The wall didn't just divide the city; it tore through streets, factories, homes, and parks like a bad divorce. Families woke up to find themselves cut off from loved ones. Police went door to door, kicking people out of homes that straddled the line. Some grabbed what they could, but many had to leave almost everything behind.
Daily life in East Berlin got weird fast. Before the wall, people traveled freely between the sectors. Now, subway and railway lines were cut, leaving thousands without jobs in the West. Roads were blocked, phone lines were severed, and even sewer pipes were sealed to keep people from sneaking out.
Streets that once bustled with cars and bicycles now stood eerily empty, patrolled by guards with shoot-to-kill orders. Buildings along the border were either demolished or had their windows bricked up. Parks became no-man's-lands wrapped in barbed wire and topped with guard towers.
Meanwhile, the streets of East Berlin fell eerily quiet. Guards patrolled the wall, ready to stop anyone who got too close. For most East Berliners, the border was simply impassable—but a handful of official crossing points remained open for a very specific list of people. Checkpoint Charlie, a small guardhouse on Friedrichstraße, was one of them. Western diplomats, foreign nationals, and military personnel could cross there, papers checked, every move watched. Ordinary East Germans didn't make that list.
Police guard any escape attempts as the wall went up.
Children walk along the West Berlin side of the wall.
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Berlin Wall Defenses
As far as evil engineering projects go, the East German government put more thought into building the wall than they did quality apartment buildings, that's for sure.
The Berlin Wall wasn't just a single wall. On the eastern side, the East Germans built a second barrier about 100 yards behind the first, creating a no-man's land that became known as the death strip—a stretch of sand and gravel raked so carefully that a single footprint would show up instantly. More than 100 watchtowers looked down on it, spaced close enough that their sight lines overlapped, blazing floodlights powerful enough to turn night into day across every inch of open ground. Tripwires connected to flares were strung at ground level, guard dogs ran on long steel cables along high-risk sections, and beds of nails waited under overhanging balconies for anyone who thought they'd found a gap. Anti-tank barriers zigzagged across roads to stop vehicles from ramming through, and the top of the outer wall itself was lined with a smooth rounded pipe engineered so that fingers simply couldn't grip it. Guards were posted in pairs—one watching the border, one watching the other guard—and carried shoot-to-kill orders that explicitly stated not to hesitate, even if women or children were involved.
If you were thinking of escape, you had to get past all of that. Getting caught meant prison—or more than likely a bullet. East German newspapers ran stories about people shot trying to escape, framed as cautionary tales for anyone else who had ideas, and at least 140 people died at the wall between 1961 and 1989. But more than 5,000 still made it across, forcing themselves to get creative—through it, over it, under it, or around it entirely.
Walled In: The Inner German Border
DW News
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Great Escapes & Almost Escapes
In the early days of 1961, the wall was built up against an existing house or building. Many East Germans snuck past the police and made their way out second and third story windows that had not been boarded up (yet). Using a mattress or rope they simply climbed to freedom. Often a passing West Berliner would help them get down.
Sometimes the West Berlin firefighters would be waiting. Again the police put an end to this by boarding up all windows and eventually demolishing any building close enough to the wall to escape from. The government even went so far as to ban the sale of rope strong enough to hold the weight of a person! Of course, climbing from a window was dangerous work. You could be pulled back in or shot by the Vopos (border police) patrolling nearby. If the Vopos didn’t do you in, the fall just might. This is what happened to Ida Siekmann who became the wall’s first casualty when she died from injuries after jumping from a third story window.
Then there was Horst Klein, who took a more acrobatic approach. Klein was a trapeze artist who had been banned from performing in East Germany for his anti-communist beliefs—which, if you're going to ban someone from doing something, banning a trapeze artist from performing is a spectacularly bad idea. One day in December 1962, while walking along the wall, Klein noticed something the East Germans had overlooked: an old disused electricity cable, left over from before the wall went up, that still ran from a pole on the eastern side all the way over to West Berlin. On the night of December 27th he climbed the pole, grabbed the cable, and started pulling himself hand-over-hand, dangling 60 feet above the guards patrolling below—in the dark, in December, at seven degrees. When his arms gave out he hoisted himself on top of the cable and inched the rest of the way along that instead. By the time he reached West Berlin his hands had gone completely numb and he fell, breaking both arms on landing. The East Berlin police didn't even figure out how he'd done it until days later. Ten points for creativity, zero for the dismount—but he was free.
But, our favorite escape story is about a group of young people who literally drove out to freedom. Their plan was to disguise themselves as soviet army personnel and simply drive through a checkpoint. After stealing a soviet-car and putting stolen military plates on it, they even made it more convincing by putting maps and other “official looking papers” on the dashboard. To make themselves look like Soviet officers they sewed cardboard stars onto their raincoats. When the three young men (with a women hidden under a blanket) drove up to the checkpoint they were waved through by the border guards, no questions asked!
Horst Klein after his escape to West Berlin
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Why It Matters
The Berlin Wall was the most important symbol of the Cold War. Not only was it a literal wall that tore Berlin in half, but it sent a message that life under communism was so bad that the government literally had to imprison its own people. While Soviet propaganda insisted communism offered a better life, East Germans were fleeing west by the hundreds of thousands—so in August 1961, the East Germans simply walled them in. For twenty-eight years, it ripped apart families, it claimed 140 lives, and created a surveillance state that turned neighbors into informants. When the wall finally collapsed in November 1989, crowds tore it apart with their own hands because the people who had been living under Communism had finally had enough.
Exit Ticket
Take a stand on one of these questions. Use 3-5 sentences to explain your thinking based on what you just read.
Exit Ticket 1: The Building of the Berlin Wall — In 1961, the East German government built a 103-mile concrete wall to stop people from fleeing to the West. Why would a government choose to use a physical wall to keep its own citizens from leaving?
Exit Ticket 2: The Stasi and Secret Informants — In East Germany, the Stasi secret police used a massive network of regular citizens to spy on their friends and neighbors. How does a neighborhood change when people are afraid that their own friends are reporting them to the government?
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