LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Berlin Wall: East Germany
built 628 days ago
The Berlin Wall was built the night between the 12th and 13th of August 1961, in East-Germany Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Thos picture shows the Wall at Sebastianstrasse in Kreuzberg (district within Berlin). This photo was taken September 13, 1961. Click on the picture to make it larger.
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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the history of imprisonment in Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union have shown two distinct phases. At first, prison populations decreased as political prisoners were released and new prison directors were appointed. Existing staff, in greater or lesser numbers, were dismissed or chose to leave and penal executive codes were introduced or planned, to fulfil their main objective in their attempts to become members of the Council of Europe. In the second phase, as argued by King, "prison systems have been required to respond to the anomic problems of fledgling market economies; in the inevitable timelag between the establishment of new systems of production and distribution, criminal activity is perceived to be filling the vacuum created by the collapse of the old communist systems."11 Thus, prison populations grew dramatically. The prison population in Poland has increased by more than fifty per cent in four years, but without creating problems with overcrowding. Increases in the size of the Russian prison population, on average over the past five years, have been "equivalent to adding the 1995 prison population of England and Wales every year to a system that is already vast."12 The Russian incarceration rate now exceeds that of the United States with 690 prisoners per 100000 of the population.13
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The impetus for the creation of the Berlin Wall came from East German leader Walter Ulbricht, approved by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, but with conditions imposed. Ulbricht's proposal for a second air blockade was refused and the construction of a barrier was permitted provided that it was composed at first of barbed wire. If the Allies challenged the barrier, the East Germans were to fall back and were not to fire first under any circumstances.
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Anyone moving round Berlin today can hardly imagine how, for almost 30 years, a Wall and barbed wire cut through and divided this lively, vibrant and cosmopolitan city. Even the people who live here now find it hard to retrace the course of the Wall. In the ten years since 9 November 1989, the day the Wall came down, the two parts of Berlin have grown together. The Wall was built by the GDR régime in order to prevent its residents from fleeing the territory. On 13 August 1961 a government had its citizens walled in because it could no longer tolerate them voting with their feet. Thus, the division of Berlin, the division of Germany and Europe was sealed.
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Fifteen years on, Berlin's wall still casts its shadow; On 9 November 1989, the world celebrated as the Iron Curtain began to fall. But the cost has been high, and a wave of nostalgia for the Communist East is sweeping Germany. Tony Paterson reports.(Foreign News)
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On August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old citizen of East Berlin, bled to death after he was shot down by a East Berlin border patrol in his attempt to escape over the wall. The last to die was Chris Gueffroy on June 2, 1989. Many attempted to escape over the 28 years of the wall's existence.
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