tion of being the only country in Europe, if not in the world, that had both an excess of births over deaths and a steadily declining population. The mass emigration was not only politically embarrassing but economically crippling. For the first few years following the Second World War, exact records were not kept of the numbers and occupations of the refugees. After the early nineteen-fifties, however, sixty-one per cent of those who fled had been gainfully employed. Among the émigrés were a hundred and fifty thousand farmers and farm workers; forty-seven hundred doctors and dentists; eight hundred judges, lawyers, notaries, and state attorneys; more than seventeen thousand teachers; and an almost equal number of engineers and technicians. About half of all the refugees were under the age of twenty-five; thirty thousand were students. Though East Germany could ill afford to lose any of its people (its population is now seventeen million, and that of West Germany fifty-three million), it was the exodus of young workers that was of most concern to the regime and its leader, Walter Ulbricht. As he complained in Pravda last year, “It cost us more than thirty billion marks [about $1,500,000,000] just to prepare a labor force, which was then recruited by West Germany.” Two weeks before the wall went up, he told a reporter from the London Evening Standard, “This is no political emigration but filthy man-trade, which is carried out with large sums of money invested by Bonn authorities, West Germany monopoly capital, and the United States spy centers in West Berlin.” Ulbricht and his colleagues also described the mass departure as “filthy head-hunting” and “filthy slave trading,” and they did what they could to stop it. One step was to pass a law in 1956 making Republikflucht (fleeing the republic) a crime punishable by three years’ imprisonment. (The Constitution of the German Democratic Republic guarantees the freedom to emigrate, which it calls “one of the truly basic freedoms.” However, like so many other Communist guarantees, this one contains a joker, for the Constitution also says that the right to emigrate can be restricted by law.) As another step, East Germany established elaborate security measures three miles in depth along its eight-hundred-and-sixty-mile border with West Germany. Yet as long as the escape route through Berlin remained open, the flow of refugees could not be staunched. It was not difficult for an East German to travel to East Berlin, and, once there, he needed only to buy a ticket on the U-Bahn (subway) or S-Bahn (elevated) and ride to West Berlin. Some refugees walked across the border; others took a taxi. All of them ran the risk of encountering spot customs checks by the East German border guards. From time to time, the Vopos—an abbreviation for the Volkspolizei, or People’s Police, and now, by extension, the usual term for all East German armed forces on border duty—arrested intended refugees who had given themselves away by nervous behavior or suspicious luggage, or had been denounced by informers. However, the great majority of refugees from East Germany used the Berlin route successfully. It was open to almost anyone who was ready to leave behind him, among other things, his job, his home, and his personal possessions.
The number of East Germans willing to accept these terms in order to get out of the country averaged about nineteen thousand a month from 1950 through the first half of 1961. In July of that year, 30,415 people crossed over. And in the first days of August, the stream of refugees reached flood proportions. The deluge was partly a response to the discouraging outcome of the Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting in Vienna in June, and partly a response to events within East Germany, such as a rise in the work quotas, a speedup of the collectivization of agriculture, and an intensified campaign of harassment of the “boundary walkers”—some sixty thousand people who lived in East Berlin and worked in West Berlin. Thanks to hindsight, it is not difficult now to see that some measure to stop the