LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Berlin Wall: West Berlin
built 627 days ago
In the summer of 1961 Ulbricht persuaded the Russians that force was the only way to stop it. On August 13, 1961 the Berlin Wall went up. It was a humiliating admission of failure which long remained one of the ugliest sights in Europe. Ulbricht later admitted to visitors that it was his greatest propaganda defeat and that every bullet which the GDR fired at an escaper was a self-inflicted wound. But he claimed he had no alternative. Certainly the official GDR line at the time that the Wall was a "frontier of peace" was half-true in the sense that the Wall was no different from any other part of the heavily guarded frontier between Eastern Europe and the West which until recently ran all along the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. It seemed worse in Berlin because it was and is so visible, and bisects a city with all the obscenity of division which that entails.
Source:
To anyone who remembers the surreal presence of the Berlin Wall, its absence now seems little short of miraculous. Walk from the Tiergarten, once in the West, across Pariser Platz, once a wasteland, and have a beer on the Unter den Linden, once in the East. Now it takes a few minutes; before November 1989, it wouldn't have been possible at all. Or drive through Berlin's western suburbs: Although there are neighborhoods where the streets form odd patterns, it is no longer possible to say which house was on which side of the border back then, so thorough has been the renovation and regeneration of the landscape. And yet at the time, the concrete structure of the Wall seemed so permanent, so indestructible.
Source:
The Berlin Wall was erected in September 1961 to prevent the outflow of skilled manpower from the German Democratic Republic and other Soviet bloc countries into the Western-controlled sectors of the city and thence into the West as a whole. It came to symbolize the Cold War and the rigid division of Europe into two armed camps. Its removal in November 1989 had precisely the opposite implications, culminating in German unification and the end of the Cold War. 
Source:
The Berlin Wall was begun in 1961 to stem the flow of skilled East Germans leaving without permission for the West. From around 2,500,000 "Republikflucht" before the wall (between 1949 and 1962) to a mere 5,000 between 1962 and 1989.
Source:
During the Wall's existence there were around 5,000 successful escapes into West Berlin; 192 people were killed trying to cross and around 200 were seriously injured. Early successful escapes involved people jumping the initial barbed wire or leaping out of apartment windows along the line. These quickly ended. Other successful escape attempts included 57 people who escaped through a 145 metre long (475 feet) tunnel dug by West Berliners, on October 3, 4 and 5, 1964; and two escapes made by sliding along aerial runways (one by two men, one by a family). One man drove a very low sports car underneath a barricade at Checkpoint Charlie. One of the last escapes occurred when two men flew fixed wing ultralights across the Wall to rescue their brother.
Source:
A wall that separated West Berlin, Germany, from East Germany, which surrounded it until 1989. At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies divided Berlin, the German capital, into four sectors. The eastern, or Russian, sector became the capital of communist East Germany. The French, British, and American sectors continued as a prosperous Western “island†city surrounded by East Germany. From then until 1961, many East Germans, sometimes two thousand a day, fled to West Berlin, often with nothing more than the clothes they had on their backs. In the summer of 1961, the wall was built, and East Germany forbade its citizens to cross the wall, at the risk of being shot immediately by border guards.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
West Berlin