Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Thoughts on the anniversary of the "fall of the wall"

The war against fascist Germany came to an end when the red Army stormed 
Berlin, captured Hitler's bunker and wiped out the seat of Nazism. Shortly 
afterwards, the victorious Soviet leadership allowed their Anglo-US allies 
in the anti-fascist alliance to enter the city that the Soviet army had 
captured at such cost.

Like Vienna, the German capital was to be divided into four zones of 
occupation (Soviet, British, US and French), as were both Austria and 
Germany. This had been agreed at the Yalta conference of the Big Three 
(Churchill, Stalin and Rosevelt), whose decisions in no way envisaged the 
permanent partition of Germany.

Nor did the boardrooms of Wall St and the City: their goal was to push the 
beastly Bolsheviks back from the Elbe all the way to Moscow and beyond — 
hopefully into oblivion!

The four-power occupation of Berlin and Vienna was not allowed to operate 
successfully. The denazification process was made inoperable in the three 
Western zones of Germany.

The operation of Berlin underground by the authorities in the Eastern 
(Soviet) sector was sabotaged whenever the trains ran through the western 
parts of the city, culminating in the planting of a bomb on a train. The 
underground had to be restricted to the east.

The currency in the western zones was arbitrarily changed, effectively 
creating two Germanies. Even the status of Berlin as the capital of Germany 
under four-power occupation was unilaterally changed, with the Berlin 
airlift attempting to force the de-facto recognition of the western part of 
the city as an official outpost of the western part of the country.

The division of Germany was brought about by the West, as the means of 
securing German capitalism from Bolshevik collectivisation, and to allow 
Germany to be rearmed, reunited and relaunched against the Bolshevik 
scourge in the East. Unfortunately, it did not go according to plan.

Throughout the 1950s the West poured money into Western Germany, to re-
establish the great German corporations that US and British capital had 
maintained strong links with right through the War, and to simultaneously 
score propaganda points off the capital-deficient east.

In the east of Germany, education, the judiciary, the landed estates, the 
factories, all had been denazified. All the former supporters of Hitler and 
co who lost their positions or their property looked for the chance to go 
to the west.

It wasn't hard to find, for although the border was closed (and mined on 
the Western side), in Berlin it was wide open. Over 70 Western intelligence 
services had stations in west Berlin. It was a gateway to all of Eastern 
Europe.

The Western powers had irrevocably divided the country by formally 
establishing the Federal Republic of Germany out of the three western zones 
and installing the pro-Nazi Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor.

The anti-fascists of the largely rural eastern zone then founded the German 
Democratic Republic, which the West of course refused even to recognise.

For a decade, the attempts of the new GDR Government to industrialise and 
rebuild the economy of the eastern region were systematically frustrated by 
massive, well-orchestrated sabotage from the West, by way of west Berlin.

If the GDR Government announced plans to develop ship-building or chemical 
industries, specialists in those industries would soon receive letters, 
notes under doors, visits from "friends", offering extremely well-paid 
positions in the West, complete with large flat and flash car.

Times were tough and many took these offers, as they were meant to.

They simply crossed over into west Berlin and went to the addresses they'd 
been given and that was that. A well-organised brain-drain was bleeding the 
GDR's economy through an open wound called the border with west Berlin.

The decision to close the open border between East and West Berlin was made 
at 4pm on August 12, 1961. It was put into effect without any announcement, 
at midnight the following Sunday.

The West was caught flat-footed. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of agents were 
stranded on the wrong side of the new border — the hastily erected "wall".

The blackmarketeering in East Berlin using Western currency that had been 
encouraged by certain Western agencies came to a shuddering stop.

From the day the Wall was erected the economy of the GDR never looked back. 
It developed steadily to become the tenth leading industrialised country in 
the world.

In comparison, from the day the Wall came down, the economy of eastern 
Germany went down the drain. Its people lost their industries, their 
agriculture, their jobs, their public housing, free health care, union 
holidays, free education, government funded arts and culture.

The people who glibly rejoice in the 10th anniversary of the "fall of the 
wall" on November 9, 1989, in the ending of the "partitioning of Germany", 
should remember who divided Germany in the first place, and should spare a 
thought for the working people of eastern Germany, the victims of the "fall 
of the wall".

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