1 gen 1961 anni - Soviets construct the Berlin Wall to divide Eastern (communist) and Western (capitalist) sections of the city

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Already strained by the Bay of Pigs incident, U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated further in June 1961 after Khrushchev stopped movement between Communist-controlled East Berlin and the city’s Western sector. Kennedy responded by dispatching 40,000 additional troops to Europe. In mid-August, to stop the exodus of East Germans fleeing to the West, the Communist regime began constructing the Berlin Wall, policed by border guards under shoot-to-kill orders. Kennedy again responded, though this time rhetorically, by criticizing the wall in a June 1963 speech in West Berlin, calling it “the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system.” Until the 12-foot-high concrete barrier came down in 1989, it served as the supreme symbol of the ongoing Cold War.


A West Berlin resident walks alongside a section of the Berlin Wall in August 1962, a year after its construction. The wall divided the Soviet-controlled zone, which became East Berlin, from the three zones controlled by the United States, Britain, and France, which became West Berlin. Berlin itself lay in East Germany, the independent state created in 1949 from the Soviet-occupied portion of Germany.

READING THE IMAGE: What do you notice about the materials in and around the wall? What purpose do you think the loud speakers on the East German side might have served?

MAKING CONNECTIONS: The wall divided neighborhoods and neighbors, but it also divided two nations, East and West Germany. How would the construction of the Berlin Wall be explained from the point of view of the Soviet Union? How would it be explained from the point of view of the United States? How did other events in the early Cold War impact the decision to construct the Berlin Wall?

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