For the History Channel, I wrote about the physical and ideological barriers that epitomized the Berlin Wall’s history.
Few symbols better captured the Cold War divide between western Europe and the Soviet bloc than the Berlin Wall, a concrete and barbed wire barrier that divided Germany’s largest city for nearly 30 years.
As World War II wound to a close, Germany and Berlin were divided into four zones, each administered by one of the allied powers. Because Berlin was in Germany’s eastern half, the city’s British, French and U.S.-administered zones were fully surrounded by the Soviet-run areas. The Soviets set up a communist-aligned state in East Germany and sealed the border to halt the migration of up to one-sixth of East Germany’s population to the West.