ingly deserted. “We’re being watched, of course,” the Polizeimeister said, and pointed to places on the roofs of four houses across the border where several pieces of slate had been removed. “The Vopos made those observation slits, and they’re probably up there in one of those attics now, looking out. For them, it’s like in war. They’re always taking cover, spying from concealed positions. They like to stay out of sight, and then appear suddenly with binoculars fixed on you. If they’re not up in an attic, they may be over there on the ground, behind the hedges. Some of them are pretty clever at hiding themselves. It takes a while to pick them out. Our men on border duty work a shift of two hours on and one hour off. If you’re on too long at a stretch, you don’t see the Vopos.”
Though the flow of refugees into West Berlin was long ago reduced to a trickle, the East Germans are still strengthening the barriers relentlessly. This past summer, squads of between three hundred and five hundred Vopos could be seen at work along the wall and the zonal border nearly every day. In a great many places, barbed wire was replaced by a concrete wall, rows of tank traps made of old streetcar rails were set up, and more dwellings were sealed or demolished. Seventy concrete pillboxes with observation slits and gun ports were constructed at intervals a short distance behind “the anti-Fascist rampart,” as the East German press sometimes calls the wall. Frogmen of the East German Army strung wire fences in the Spree and other waterways, and squads of Vopos cut down the tall grass and the bushes on the East Berlin shores of rivers and lakes The border guards assigned to the waterways were equipped with new and faster patrol boats. Concurrently, some forty construction workers, guarded by two hundred Vopos, began to build, first in one place and then in another, a second wall about half a block behind the first; this was designed to help Vopos cut down refugees before they could reach the original wall, where West Berlin policemen, photographers, and journalists could witness and record the shooting. Early in August, a machine gun was installed on top of the Brandenburg Gate. According to Richard Crossman, chairman of the British Labour Party, who returned from a visit to East Germany in late August, Ulbricht plans to extend the wall along the entire zonal border, and thus turn West Berlin into “an island completely surrounded by a full-fledged national frontier.” The projected extension will cost well over twice as much as die Mauer, which already represents a considerable investment for a country whose economic situation is as precarious as East Germany’s. On the first anniversary of the erection of the wall, the West Berlin newspaper Berliner Morgenpost reported that a consensus of estimates by engineers and construction contractors placed the cost of the wall and the zonal barrier at about a hundred million West marks, or approximately twenty-five million dollars. That includes the cost of some thirty-eight hundred miles of barbed wire, which is enough, the paper noted, to fence in half of Europe.
The continuing expansion of the East German border fortifications has been accompanied by a steady strengthening of the police and Army units assigned to them. At present, the Communist barricades enclosing West Berlin are guarded by three brigades, totalling eighteen thousand men. (The West Berlin side of the border is in the hands of fifteen hundred police.) The Vopos on border duty, according to the Polizeimeister with whom I became acquainted, have changed in character, and not for the better. “Before the wall, we used to have quite a bit of contact with the Vopos,” he said. “I remember one night, on an inspection tour, I stopped at the Moritzplatz station of the U-Bahn—the border cuts right through that station—and there were two of our men and two of their men playing cards across the border. We didn’t usually get that clubby, but in those days a great many of the Vopos were people from Berlin, and we could usually find something to exchang