Chapter 11 - Crossing the German–German Border from the End of World War II until 1990: From Escape to Alienation

Summary

1. Preface

Until 1989, massive fortifications along the almost 1,400-kilometre-long inner-German border prevented the inhabitants of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from visiting the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) or leaving it permanently for the West. Officially, these fortifications did not include that part of the GDR's border with Berlin, which's western sectors within the city were sealed off from 1961 onwards by the so-called Berlin Wall. Nevertheless, all these border fortifications are generally considered in a common context. The main line of the border separating the Federal Republic and the GDR began in the south at the border triangle of FDR/GDR/ Czechoslovakia and ended at the Baltic Sea. During the Cold War, it was militarily and geopolitically a part of the Iron Curtain which separated the occupation zones of the three Western victorious powers (USA, Great Britain and France) including West Berlin from the occupation zone of the USSR and East-Berlin. Not unimportant for an overall assessment was the fact that the Iron Curtain divided Germany mainly in a west-east direction, i.e. contrary to the traditional economic, political, cultural and confessional disparities between northeast and southwest. The border fortifications also cut through the main west-eastern economic axis, which since the industrialisation of the nineteenth century stretched from the Ruhr area via Berlin and Saxony to Upper Silesia. Therefore, the walls cut through the traditional spatial structures of Germany, which initially made the consequences of the division difficult in every respect.

It is hardly surprising that the so-called inner-German border (apart from the Federal German legal concept, however, it had become a national border like any other according to international law in the early 1970s at the very latest) is more suitable than almost any other for studies on the topic of border crossings. However, this actual topic is preceded here, especially for a non-German readership, by a preoccupation with the origin of the border and the legal situation established by bilateral and multilateral agreements up to 1989.

2. The Establishment and Development of the Zonal Border (Zonengrenze)

After a series of war conferences from 1942 to 1945, the countries allied against the Nazi Reich had finally found consensus on the basic lines of a future policy towards ‘Germany’.