Mr. Gorbachev “tear down this wall!” This should be required reading in school.
Thousands of newly declassified documents about the Berlin Wall reveal the struggle and resolve of the human spirit for freedom, archivists and historians said on Tuesday.
The National Archives’ National Declassification Center (NDC) has released 11,000 pages of previously classified documents on activities in Berlin from 1962 to 1987—the years Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan delivered iconic speeches in the divided German city. The collection, culled from documents circulated by the U.S. Army, NATO, and U.S. government agencies, details the construction of the Berlin Wall and attempts by East Germans to escape to the democratic West.
The barrier, first erected between East and West Berlin on Aug. 13, 1961, originally consisted of just barbed wire and East German guards. It later evolved into a fully fortified 96-mile-long wall and accompanying “death strip” over the 1960s, including wire fences, more than 40,000 reinforced concrete slabs, trip wires, trenches, tank traps, guard dogs, and more than 100 watchtowers. East German guards had orders to shoot escapees on sight.
The wall was originally built by East German authorities to stanch a massive “brain drain” of the Soviet-backed state’s most educated and skilled workers, said Neil Carmichael, an NDC director, at a symposium on the declassified documents.
It ended up having the opposite effect, Carmichael said.
“The [human] spirit is why the wall was constructed,” he said, referring to the millions of East German workers who left the communist state for freedom before 1961. “It was the spirit that would actually destroy the wall.”