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Berlin had already been divided into four occupied sectors at the end of WWII, and effectively into two cities in 1949, but thousands still commuted daily across the East-West border until 1961 
A huge outflow of refugees from East Germany to the West, as well as problems with currency controls and daily border-crossers, prompted the construction of the Berlin Wall (3)
Construction workers at the Berlin Wall were closely guarded by military and the worker militias established after the 1953 Uprising (4)
Temporary barriers put hastily in place were vastly expanded in the coming years. The Berlin Wall soon became Walls (5)
By the time it was torn down, the Berlin Wall was 155km long with 302 towers, 20 bunkers (6)
The first casualty of the Berlin Wall was Ida Siekmann who died jumping from a 4th floor apartment trying to cross the border (7)
The last death was Winfried Freudenberg on March 8, 1989; he died trying to cross the Berlin Wall in a hot air balloon (8)
There were 140 victims of the Berlin Wall in total including those attempting escape, border guards killed on duty by escapees or colleagues, and accidental deaths due to the militarized border, including several children who drowned (9)
The SED called it the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart” as it ostensibly defended against Western invasion (10)
In West Berlin, it was simply called the “Schandmauer” or “Wall of Shame” (11)
Just as the building of the Berlin Wall was a long-term process, so too was its destruction in 1989/90 historyned.blog/2015/11/10/an-…
For more on Berlin Wall victims, refugees and the relevance of the Cold War today, check out historyned.blog/2015/08/24/of-…
