1961
Construction of the Berlin Wall
At the end of World War II, the the map of the defeated Germany was considerably altered. Parts of the nation were lopped off and given to neighbouring countries while the remaining territory was divided into four, each ruled by one of the occupying powers. There were sectors for the French, British, Americans, and USSR; the old capital Berlin, now deep in the Soviet sector, was similarly divided. In 1948 Stalin tried to drive the Western powers out of Berlin by blockading the city but the Berlin Airlift thwarted that.
Western Germany, or the German Federal Republic, emerged out of the French, British, and American sectors, democratic with a market economy; in the East, the German Democratic Republic, was a Soviet puppet state with a communist command economy. The prosperity gap that increasingly separated the two to the benefit of the westerners and political freedoms led to a desire on the part of GDR residents to migrate west. Before 1961, 3.5 million Germans had done so, perhaps as much of 20% of the population. Particularly irksome to the eastern government was the loss of young, educated Germans to a brain drain, with the relaxed border in Berlin as the faucet. Consequently at the urging of their Soviet masters, the populace of the city awoke on the morning of August 13, 1961 to the construction of the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, a barrier separating East and West Berlin, supposedly designed to keep the nasty capitalists out of the East German paradise. Hundreds of refugees fled over the makeshift border while it was being erected but it soon enclosed West Berlin in a ring of concrete, barbed wire, mines, dog patrols, and a no-man’s land death strip.
The Wall, which was eventually pierced in 1989, may have been of economic benefit to the GDR (ending the black market and enabling tighter control) but it was an enormous spiritual black eye to the communist project. If you had to make a prison of your own country, how could you proclaim the benefits of a Marxist society? Both Presidents Kennedy and Reagan scored propaganda coups by coming to the Wall and demanding its removal.