Why The United States Failure To Collapse The Berlin Wall

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There was a separation of eastern Germany and western Germany. After the war Germany was partitioned into 4 military occupation zones controlled by
America, France, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. On the 23rd of May
1949 westerns sectors merged to create the federal republic of Germany and on 7
October the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. Berlin the political economic and cultural heartbeat of Germany was similarly subdivided despite lying deep inside the Soviet zone. Joseph Stalin and East German authorities erected the Berlin Wall. On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete wall "Berlin Wall" between East and West Berlin. The …show more content…
The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin. (Though he was not happy about it, President Kennedy conceded that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) Over time, East German officials replaced the makeshift wall with one that was sturdier and more difficult to scale. A 12-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide mass of reinforced concrete was topped with an enormous pipe that made climbing over nearly impossible. Behind the wall on the East German side was a so-called “Death
Strip”: a gauntlet of soft sand (to show footprints), floodlights, vicious dogs, trip- wire machine guns and patrolling soldiers with orders to shoot escapees on sight.
In all, at least 171 people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin
Wall. Escape from East Germany was not impossible, however: From 1961 until the wall came down in 1989, more than 5,000 East Germans (including some 600 border guards) managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high
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