lly that the East German authorities had met that morning and had probably reached a decision to close the border. On that day and the next, thousands of refugees made their way to West Berlin, bringing the total for the first twelve days of August to more than forty-five thousand.
Shortly before two o’clock the next morning—a Sunday—East German armed forces began sealing off the sector border. The undertaking was handled as if it were a military operation of high risk. Under cover of darkness, some forty thousand heavily armed soldiers and police, supported by tanks, armored cars, personnel carriers, trucks equipped with water cannon, and other military vehicles, took up positions along the border. By dawn, the troops had strung up thousands of feet of barbed wire; felled trees across streets; cut streetcar tracks and turned the ends up to make crude bumpers; and torn up paving stones and dug trenches across avenues and squares. East Berlin took on the aspect of a besieged city. Until August 13th, it had been possible to cross the border at the Brandenburg Gate and at eighty other points, as well as on the subway and elevated. Now the Brandenburg Gate was closed, and so were all but twelve of the other crossing points. (These were later reduced to seven.) That same day, the East German authorities stopped direct subway and elevated travel between the two parts of the city and issued a decree forbidding any inhabitant of East Germany or East Berlin to set foot in West Berlin. A subsequent decree had the effect of barring West Berliners from crossing into East Berlin. West Germans and foreigners are still allowed to visit East Berlin, and so, of course, are Allied personnel.
At first, considerable portions of the wall consisted of nothing more than knee-high coils of barbed wire or shoulder-high fencing nailed to wooden poles. For a few days, dozens of East Germans found their way around or through these obstacles without great difficulty. Many others made it by swimming across the Spree or some other waterway. In those days, the East German border guards were neither as alert nor as ruthless as they have since become, and East Berliners could talk through the improvised barrier to relatives and friends, and even exchange parcels with them. Once the East German authorities realized that their coup had succeeded, however, they lost no time in stiffening the flimsy barricade with concrete. In addition, they not only ordered East Berliners not to go near the wall but insolently warned West Berliners against approaching within a hundred metres of it, “in the interests of their own safety.” To try to make this stick, the Vopos started firing warning shots whenever small groups of West Berliners congregated near the wall. The Western commandants thereupon dispatched troops in battle dress to the sector boundary, and kept them there until the East Germans stopped trying to enforce that injunction. By then—about a month after the border was sealed off—East Berliners had been forbidden to wave in the direction of the wall, even if they were blocks away from it. (As recently as this July, eight East Berliners were taken into custody during one day for waving.) At former crossing points, where large numbers of West Berliners hopefully continued to gather, the East Germans erected high wooden screens, completely blocking the view into the “workers’ paradise.”
On August 13th, the East Germans also began a systematic evacuation of dwellings situated on or near the border. Private houses were demolished to make way for a so-called “death strip,” or no man’s land. Searchlights were installed to illuminate the death strip at night. Hundreds of East Berliners owned small plots of land along the border, where they had cultivated gardens and, in many cases, had built small cottages of some kind for use on weekends. The garden areas, too, were levelled and bulldozed by Vopos, who were sometimes urged on by Communist fighting songs issuing from a sound truck. The apartment houses on the border presented a more difficult problem. In several pla