Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

A second issue binding the Americans to Europe was the problem of Berlin. Thanks to the defeat of the blockade in 1948–49, the former capital of Germany remained something of an open city; East and West Berlin were linked by phone lines and transport networks criss-crossing the various zones of occupation. It was also the only transit route from East Europe into the West. Germans fleeing west could come to East Berlin from anywhere in the German Democratic Republic, make their way from the Russian Zone of occupation into the Western Zones and thence along the road and rail corridor linking West Berlin to the rest of the Federal Republic. Once there, they were automatically entitled to citizenship in West Germany. The journey was not entirely risk free, and refugees could bring only what they could carry; but neither consideration inhibited younger East Germans from undertaking it. Between the spring of 1949 and August 1961 somewhere between 2.8 and 3 million East Germans went through Berlin to the West, around 16 percent of the country’s population. Many of them were educated, professional men and women—East Germany’s future; but the numbers also included thousands of farmers who fled rural collectivization in 1952, and workers who abandoned the regime after the violent repression of June 1953.