Imagine losing a thousand citizens a day — most of them young, educated, skilled, and in the professions. That was East Germany in the summer of 1961, with its population draining out through the open sector boundary in West Berlin, the hole in the Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall was built to stop the hemorrhage. The East German regime, with Soviet approval, sealed the boundary with barbed wire on August 13, 1961; the country had lost roughly 3.5 million people to the West since 1949, about 15 percent of its 1949 population.
The numbers told the story. Between the founding of the two German states in 1949 and the wall’s construction in August 1961, East Germany lost about 3.5 million people to the West, the equivalent of roughly 15 percent of its 1949 population. The refugees were not a cross-section. They were disproportionately young, technically trained, and disproportionately in the professions — doctors, engineers, teachers. Whole medical faculties emptied. The labor force in critical sectors shrank to the point where the state could not plan for the future.
The geography made Berlin the choke point. East Germans could travel to West Berlin without restriction and from there take transit flights or trains to West Germany. The city was a hole in the Iron Curtain. The East German regime tried smaller measures first — closing inner-city crossings, declaring East Berlin off-limits to young people — but each one produced new defection routes.
The political calculation belonged to Khrushchev. He had long feared the propaganda cost of a wall, but by July 1961 he had concluded that the alternative — a bankrupt, depopulated East Germany that could not maintain itself — was worse. The Politburo in Moscow gave Ulbricht the go-ahead in early August. Construction began in the small hours of August 13. The wall that the world came to know, the “Border Installation 75” of reinforced concrete segments, came later in the 1960s and 1970s.
For the longer story of the wall’s construction, its human cost, and its fall, see the article treatment.