The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall

“We were very much in the Cold War. The East and West Germans did not discuss things together, nor did the West Berliners and the East Berliners, and the Western Allies did not talk to the East German authorities. The Soviets and East Germans, despite earlier diplomatic agreements, aspired to place the entire city of Berlin behind the Iron Curtain and remove the presence of the Western allies.”

“In October 1959, the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, in a speech, announced that the legal basis of Western presence in Berlin had expired. The Soviets were in the process of launching an attack upon our basic legal right to remain in Berlin. Crisis after crisis cascaded from that time. …Harassment of our convoys in the Berlin corridor increased regularly. The elevated train system began to appear in West Berlin with flags of the East German Democratic Republic on them. This led us to stop the trains and remove the East German flags. While these may seem petty, they were all part of a clearly calculated policy to salami slice the Western presence in Berlin.”

“They were losing huge numbers of East Germans, it was like a hemorrhage. They were losing very valuable people—doctors, engineers, and young people. They’d have been bled dry of their most useful population.”

“I was alerted at one minute past midnight that the East Berlin radio had started to announce that communications within the city were cut. Within 15 minutes, I was down at the station, as were all of my colleagues and staff. All through the night, RIAS [Radio in the American Sector] was the only station on live all night long at the time. Most of the German radio stations didn’t carry the news of the Wall until their first live program at 6am. We carried live news every 15 minutes in the hope that it might still help some people escape. Three times during the night I went over to East Berlin, and because we didn’t know what reception we would get, I hid a tape recorder under a coat. I went and simply drove around and recorded on tape what was going on—reported from the Eastern side and it was broadcast. …The Wall started with work crews tearing up the street and laying rows of barbed wire. Beginning at midnight, it turned out, that the cutting of the city in half was so effective that they started breaking up the streets simultaneously at all points where later the wall was constructed.”

“There were many potential crises during the years 1965-69, incidents at the Wall and
checkpoints, on the Autobahn [highway], or in areas of city administration. These were manageable, because we carefully assessed the nature of each provocation and the required Allied response, if any. A Soviet decision to escalate tensions was always possible. The Soviet government was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary [in 1967], believing itself stable internally and a world power internationally. Its constant mischief-making in Berlin was intended to wear the West out, but failed to do so. The Russians historically backed down to the letter of wartime agreements when confronted by strong protests.”

“It was our presence in Berlin and our retaining our rights in Berlin, the French retained their rights in Berlin, the British retained their rights; it was that on which the three were always completely agreed, the commanders of the Allied garrisons. I think it’s due to this unity that the map of Europe reads as it does today. …We had to maintain our rights in Berlin and to prevent the constant and very able attempts of the Soviet Union to undermine our position, so that before we knew what was happening, we would find that we’d lost the game in Germany.”

“President Kennedy’s receptions in Bonn, Cologne, and Frankfurt were as enthusiastic as you could wish, but the one in Berlin overshadowed everything that we had experienced in Western
Germany. When we stopped for his major speech, he called me over and said, ‘I want you to write out for me on a slip of paper “I am a Berliner” in German.’ I quickly, by pencil, wrote it out in capital letters and he rehearsed it a few times. And that is really the whole story. I am assuming it was in English in the original text. There have been all sorts of stories about the manuscript, etc. I can only tell my part.”

“There had always been a deeper level of emotional commitment between the Social Democracy and Communism than many people would like to admit. It was a long time before the Social Democratic Party declared itself a non-Marxist party. So Willy Brandt who came out of that entire era, always had some interest in trying to engage in the East. I think the reason that there was not as much anxiety over this was that the United States was at that time going through its own policy of détente with the Soviets. The key was the Berlin agreements. Of course, in Berlin there could be no agreement without the four powers. The Germans had nothing to do with Berlin. It was still actually an occupied area. So, we engaged in the Berlin agreements, which took 90% of the time of the German Bureau while I was there. It was a fascinating time.”

“How could we work on a long-term basis to undermine the Soviet’s hold over the area? It seemed to me that the only way to do that was through a system of deliberate contacts not with only the general population, but with the regimes themselves in an attempt to change them over a period of time.”

“It was always Brandt who took the initiative with East Germany, prodding the Bonn

government to follow through. Brandt realized that his “small steps” would become an

important part of the Social Democratic Party’s platform in the next general election. The Western Allies scrambled in Berlin, Bonn, and their capitals to keep pace with events. What we were hearing in Berlin from Brandt and his coterie was crucial to achieving an understanding of where Brandt was taking Germany. Brandt was also talking with the Soviets directly, meeting occasionally in East Berlin with Soviet Ambassador [Piotr Abrasimov]. Our Berlin mission was in the forefront of those who expected Brandt’s ‘small steps’ gradually to lead to a wider range of topics for discussion between East and West. We were certain Brandt did not intend to keep contacts between East and West Berlin limited to technical levels. We saw that should he become Chancellor, the pace would accelerate. His motive in ostpolitik was to achieve a more healthy and human relationship among Germans, even at the cost of accepting two German states. He was not a panderer or accommodator toward the East. Yet Brandt’s moves at times caused suspicion in Western capitals as to whether he might trade West Germany’s western orientation for reunification.”

“Brandt never went beyond the formal limits the Western powers had imposed, which were based upon their responsibilities as occupying powers. He stayed within the framework we had established with great skill, yet subtly forcing the Western powers to re-examine and gradually expand their parameters of accommodation. Such was his ostpolitik. My acquaintance with Willy Brandt enriched my appreciation of what one person with a driving sense of purpose can accomplish. I have seldom dealt with a man of so many facets, and such boundless political, physical, and intellectual energy. He was a visionary who led Germany to its reunification, beginning with the necessary first ‘small steps’ in Berlin.”

“There was a fear in Washington, not only of Soviet-phobes, that East Germany would end up with its status increased. Indeed, that was exactly what did happen in that East Germany in practice became associated with the four wartime allies and the Federal Republic of Germany in the administration of Berlin. That was the practical outcome of these Berlin negotiations. And, of course, as part of the whole complex, the Federal Republic recognized East Germany as an independent state. They assumed diplomatic relations with one another and both German nations entered the United Nations as independent states. Of course, the basic importance of the ostpolitik and all of these agreements, coming to the final outcome and the conclusion, was that the West Germans convinced the East German officials that, if there was some kind of political settlement, the East Germans were not going to be taken out and executed by the victors. That eliminated probably the most basic reason for resisting the later unification.”

“Our posture was that we had recognized East Germany to remain in step with West Germany, France, and Great Britain, who had already done so. In fact, we were the 111th country to recognize the German Democratic Republic. The U.S. side had no smiles for photographers. The East Germans and Soviets were delighted not only to have American representation in East Berlin, but to gain this in a person of John Sherman Cooper’s renown, as U.S. ambassador. Our presence and the American flag flapping from a window pole represented to them the completion of a legitimization process by the West. Ambassador Cooper and I had argued that, despite the nature of the regime, the East Germans should be treated correctly and with a certain respect, consonant with proper diplomatic behavior on our part. This may seem a small point, but it was not. Communication in diplomacy takes many forms, and often consists of sending signals to the other side through actions, attitudes, and behavior sometimes no greater than a look of disapproval, a stiffening of one’s back or a smile. East German officials were correct and courteous, but distant. Periodically, we would be treated to a lecture about the wonders and successes of communism, but this was an exception; our relations with East German officials were businesslike. Interested in promoting our presence, they tried to accommodate us and not offend us. They sought visible rapprochement as a propaganda objective, and understood that preaching ideology would not make a dent on us and might even have a negative impact.”

“People would not accept casual invitations. I tried once and East German Protocol complained. I decided to ignore them, I went directly to the person I wanted, to see if he could come to dinner and I got a message back from Protocol: ‘Don’t do that because our people will still come to us, and unless you have a reason, a visiting dignitary, these invitations should not be extended. We do not accept casual invitations.’ That was that. …The problems faced were solvable in increments. You could lay out a plan, you could work them, be frustrated, be annoyed, angered, offended by that regime, but you could deal with it. We tried to dole contact with U.S. politicians out as rewards to the East Germans without telling them, but an improvement in the human rights list might bring a visit that they could give some publicity to, that made them look good. And we sort of let them know there was a relationship, and we worked every resource we could find. I stayed away from West Berlin and I tried by example to encourage at least the substantive officers on the staff to stay away from West Berlin. When you come back from the West you have to go through that, momentary though it might be, depression that hits everyone going from West to East, and that jars your thinking and appreciation as well. So, I didn’t spend a lot of time in West Berlin. Every so often, I’d have a ‘Big Mac Attack’ and I would run to the McDonald’s in West Berlin. I didn’t spend a lot of time there, but we went across to West Berlin for food. I for one believe it is not fair to take it from the East Germans when we had access to abundance in the Embassy stores.”

“What we did was closely monitored by the East Germans. If we wanted to have a sensitive conversation, we walked the streets. At the embassy, we needed to take down one of the walls in our office so we could install a ‘bubble,’ a secure and shielded enclosure the size of a small conference room. We recommended that people on our staff who wanted to discuss sensitive personal matters use this room to protect their privacy. We would point to the ceiling if someone was about to discuss things that should not be overheard, sign language universally understood behind the ‘Iron Curtain.’”

“For the first time we were embedding human rights in a major international endeavor that was about many things, and human rights was one element of it. We were in effect saying that human rights wasn’t in a separate league; it was in the major league of international affairs in the 1970s. We weren’t expecting that the Soviet Union was going to change its fundamental nature overnight. But we were providing for a process of gradual change, linking it to the major elements on the international chessboard, and providing for a follow-up mechanism giving us the opportunity to hold to account the Soviets or anybody else who had failed to meet a given commitment.”

“Within a couple years after the Helsinki summit, in July 1975, we began to see reverberations in Eastern Europe of the positions on human rights and fundamental freedoms that those countries accepted. Courageous people in countries like Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, for example, with the ‘Charter 77,’ said to Gustav Husak, ‘Hey, you agreed at Helsinki, Mr. President, to respect these fundamental rights and freedoms, how about in our country?’ It really started the ball rolling. We didn’t realize at the time what a tremendous ball we started rolling.”

“Historians now generally agree that the Helsinki Accords definitely worked to the advantage of the West. The Helsinki Accords legitimized human rights as a point for discussion between East and West. This doesn’t mean that the Russians would simply roll over on human rights…human rights became a more legitimate item on which to make attacks on their record and to make appeals for improvement. Also, it gave a certain, international cover and legitimacy to dissidents within these nations. This was one of many situations which contributed to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. . . . [T]he Helsinki Accords turned out to be very much of a factor serving the interests of the West.”

“For Honecker, the visit to Bonn in September of 1987 was seen as the culmination of the effort to establish the legitimacy and the permanency of East Germany. There appeared to be no reason to believe that this was a wrong calculation. By 1987, the Quadripartite Agreement had proven itself and worked very well. The Soviet Union clearly wasn’t interested in provoking such a crisis. There had been a pattern of interrelationships worked out between East Germany and West Berlin and the Western Germans. There were thousands of East Germans working in West Berlin on day projects, something that was unheard of, unthought-of ten or 15 years ago. In all of this, the Allies were there as a safeguard, but were increasingly seen as not terribly relevant to the day-to-day operations in the city.”

“Gorbachev had proposed restructuring the Soviet economy, perestroika, and creating more openness in the society, glasnost. He would make this great reform and the socialist state would continue, reformed, but it would last forever. Well, those two policies were opposed adamantly by Erich Honecker, who believed quite the opposite. If you began this process you would never maintain control, Honecker insisted, and he defied Gorbachev. This defiance was done at great risk because East Germany was totally dependent on Gorbachev; in true sense it was a satellite of the Soviet Union. East Germany had no political legitimacy from its people; it was dependent on the military support of the Russians.”

“There is in the East air that is beginning to rise, there is reform potential, there are changes that will come. I felt my job was to look for those changes, but what I was looking for, to be honest, was change that would come from above, directed, guided, controlled and to some extent limited from above. Glasnost was in full swing in the Soviet Union. Perestroika was already being started. [T]here were limits to what Gorbachev could allow in reform in any part of Eastern Europe. Those limits were more restrictive in East Germany than anywhere else, because it [was] the most dangerous border in the world. It was the point where the two great forces, East and West, came together and where there was more to be risked and more to be lost by reckless policy. We assumed there would be a more cautious approach to reform in East Germany than anywhere else.”

“The question that can never be answered is what would have happened if [Honecker] had been healthy or if he had been so unhealthy that he was clearly not going to come back and they’d have to make a personnel change at the top earlier. There would have been action taken to deal with the situation. Whether it would have been successful or not, nobody can say, but one of the causes that led to [the] crisis in the fall was simple inaction while the situation festered. …The gap between the world that the old leadership was living in and the world that their people were living in had become enormous. They didn’t understand each other. [Y]ou had a group of [communist] old men who for the most part had probably started off as idealists . But by 1989, they were 75 and 80 years old, they had been in power for 30-plus years… It was clear after the government began to deal more honestly with its situation in the fall of 1989, after Honecker, [who believed quite the opposite, if you began this process, you would never maintain control.] Honecker had been deposed; the economy was in seriously deficient shape and there was a great need for Western help, for West German support, to prevent something close to an economic collapse.”

“[The Protestant Church] was the part of the society which in September of 1989 began to coalesce as a political movement. [W]hen nothing happened anywhere else in the society that summer of the crisis, it was the church that began to speak out ever more publicly and groups within the church began to form the first incipient political parties. [The first political demands in the reform process] came from the crowds that were around the church in Leipzig that was holding every Monday large services that became…political demonstrations and spilled out in the street. Those demonstrations in September and October were very important in putting enormous pressure upon the Honecker government, pressure that finally led to its fall.”

“We did know, of course, the importance for Gorbachev for his reforms to succeed. We also knew that there were a number of people in East Germany, particularly at the universities and the churches that were hoping that the examples of glasnost and perestroika would be picked up in East Germany. They were constantly told, ‘No this doesn’t pertain to us. It doesn’t have to happen here, for we have already made the necessary reforms.’ Of course, we didn’t foresee what was going to happen.”

“How would the border guards handle this? We were informed they were told, ‘Don’t shoot anybody and don’t do anything, and if they push you, get out of the way.’ People simply said, ‘We want to go across, can we go?’ They said, ‘OK, go ahead.’ Try to imagine a couple of checkpoint guys sitting there looking at huge mobs of people and wondering, ‘What are they going to do? I can’t shoot; I have been told not to shoot. What do I do?’ So of course all the cameras were there and they started to go through. And of course it was jubilation. People saying, ‘This is crazy. I can’t believe this. I don’t know what is happening here.’ The vast majority of people went back to their jobs and their homes. They went back with a load of bananas or oranges or dishwasher soap. What you saw, however, was constant movement back and forth, but it wasn’t only one way. It went in both directions. The day after on the 10th [of November], I drove with flags up on the limousine and demonstratively went through Checkpoint Charlie. We got a lot of cheers as we did that.”

“So on November ninth Shabovsky had a press conference. Shabovsky, an East German government official, was handed a piece of paper where he announces that in a very short time, there will be no travel restrictions on East German citizens between East and West Germany and East and West Berlin. The question was asked at that time, ‘what does this mean?’ He said, ‘Well just what I said. Everybody will have a right to a visa. You can get that visa. There will be no exceptions and they can move back and forth.’ One of the journalists said, ‘Does that mean immediately?’ He looked at the paper and said, ‘Yes, that means immediately.’ The idea, of course, was to try to reassure dissident elements that nobody was going to be disadvantaged by being an East German citizen. You won’t have to sneak out through the back door, for ‘we are strong and self-confident.’”

“Home Depot-type stores started to proliferate. There were huge traffic jams around the latter as the East Germans began to buy materials to fix up their houses. The gray streets of Dresden, Leipzig, and East Berlin began to bloom with color. …Once unification happened, the large cultural facilities of the Mission in Berlin became available to everybody. One touching incident occurred when the Wall opened, an East Berlin woman went back and returned library books to the American library in West Berlin that she had taken out before the Wall went up and had been unable to return. There were things like that. People remembered.”

“Ambassador Walters knew Germany and he knew the German psyche. The gist of his remarks in that staff meeting were, ‘I understand, of course, that it is policy not to promote reunification of Germany in any rapid way. But don’t you ever forget that when a German goes to sleep at night, the last thing he thinks about before he falls asleep is a unified Germany.’ I agreed with him. I felt, too, that as we could begin to see that the system in Eastern Europe was beginning to erode, Gorbachev, perestroika, and glasnost, nobody understood what the consequences were going to be.”

Note: National Museum of American Diplomacy note: This audio clip and transcript contains culturally insensitive language.

“President Bush was severely criticized here at home the day the Berlin Wall fell for not getting up from his desk and as he would say, ‘dance on the Wall.’ Well, he was self-confident and mature enough not to rub salt in Gorbachev’s wounds. I happen to think he was exactly right. I understand that our public probably did not understand that, and he was criticized for it. From their moccasins, I can see why they felt he should be out popping champagne, this was wonderful, something the West had been waiting for forty years. But, he did the right thing at the right time. Gorbachev knew what he was doing when President Bush did that. So, again, this cements the relationship that builds the trust. I think we all were lucky that these men on both sides were in those positions and those jobs at this time of enormous change…[Gorbachev] wrote’ himself out of a job and behaved incredibly the night that the Berlin Wall fell by basically telling the 375,000 Russian troops stationed in East Germany to stand down. He let it happen. …Baker’s skill in my mind was in being able to anticipate and understand his adversary’s political constraints. To understand how far the person sitting across the table you are negotiating with can go within his own political universe, I think is very important. Baker was very good at that.”

“Walters proposed a meeting to discuss an on-going topic the ‘Berlin Initiative’ at the old Allied Kommandatura building, in West Berlin, which hadn’t been used since 1948 when the Soviets marched out. The four ambassadors arrived and had their picture taken, which appeared in the press. The symbolic value of the four victorious powers of World War II meeting to decide the fate of Germany was too much. West German Foreign Minister Genscher was furious. The President had taken a leadership decision, in spite of what the British, French, and Russians were saying and their concerns. President Bush focused on our commitment to West Germany, the democracy that had been built up, and the fact that we’d had something like 15 million soldiers in West Germany. We watched the results of the revolution toward unification move from our hands in East Germany to the capable hands of Secretary Baker, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Robert Zoellick, Bob Blackwill, and Phil Zelikow, who were working with their counterparts in West Germany.”

“When German unification became a potential reality, there was a certain amount of skepticism and caution that immediately became apparent in Paris and London. Even Margaret Thatcher clearly was a little bit concerned about a rush toward German reunification, what that would mean in Europe. There wasn’t any doubt in the United States. We acted from the first day as if we believed – and we did believe – what we’d been saying for all those many years. We supported Helmut Kohl and his efforts to move quickly toward unification. We won a lot of credit with Kohl, with the government in Bonn, because of that. …The name Two-Plus-Four was meant to show not only that it was different from the four-power conferences of the ’40s and ’50s, that there were two German states, two were before the four. It wasn’t the four plus two, it was the two plus four. It was the self-determination of the German people expressed through their representatives in the two German states plus the four powers that had residual rights to Germany.”

“And we started planning for merging the embassy in East Berlin with the Mission in West Berlin and that happened very quickly. It went very fast because we didn’t want the [State] Department to get it wrong. The Germans helped us; I’m looking at this from an admin point of view because they announced that when unification came there would no longer be Missions in Berlin, all the foreign presences there would have to be accredited in a different way.
[The Germans sought one kind of diplomatic presence—an embassy—in the capital of their reunited country, not the special Missions to Berlin that belonged to the Allied powers.] …We went to the [State] Department, we said, ‘Look, whether you like it or not the Germans say there is going to be one diplomatic presence in Berlin as of October 1, 1990, and we’ve got to figure out what it is.’ Those are big secrets. When you’re talking about which Americans are going to stay in Berlin and which ones aren’t and who’s going to get what title in one section, you better believe we had to treat that as ‘top secret.’”