 drain of manpower—perhaps the erection of a wall—was imminent. In fact, Ulbricht had suggested as much, though only in the customary reversible Communist terms. In mid-June, he had said flatly at a press conference, “Nobody has the intention of building a wall.” More clues turned up in July. The East German newspapers approached hysteria in their agitation against “slave trading.” More and more “boundary walkers” were stopped at the border or required to surrender their identity cards. By the beginning of August, the East German border police had been reinforced to six times their former strength. It was estimated that in the week between July 29th and August 4th every second Berlin-bound refugee was intercepted. Nevertheless, 10,419 refugees—a record number—got through. As the next week began, West Berlin newspapers reported that Ulbricht was in Moscow and that he had asked Khrushchev to permit the blocking of the border forthwith. A few days later, the newspapers announced that Khrushchev had sent his secret-police chief to East Berlin. At this time, too, the East German press was printing a great many letters from individual citizens and resolutions from groups demanding the immediate closing of the border; this was a telltale sign, for a similar spate of “spontaneous” communications had preceded every coercive measure undertaken in East Germany. All these portents contributed to the building up of a now-or-never mood among East Germans who had considered fleeing, and they left by the thousands. They swamped Marienfelde, the refugee reception center in West Berlin. The British Army set up tents around the center to shelter the multitudes waiting to be admitted; the American Army supplied as many as twenty-five hundred field rations a day to help feed them; and Pan American, Air France, and British European Airways—the three airlines that are permitted to provide service to West Berlin—flew about a thousand refugees a day to camps in West Germany. On August 11th, the West Berlin newspapers said quite specifically 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