Why did the communists initiate the Berlin Wall/Inner German Border?
The communist mainly did this in defense of securing a part of Germany to itself. As mentioned in the previous post, Germany was seen by both US and USSR as an important asset in determining the fate of recovering Europe. Whoever had control of Germany, would set a trend for Europe. Hence it was important for both communist and capitalist to prevent German reunification under the hands of the other party. The communist were thus very strong-headed and would turn to all means to secure East Germany. Their economy were virtually on the edge of collapse with so many intellectual youths migrating to West Germany and many East Germans who were in search of freedom were defecting and seeking West Germany for help. If too many East Germans defected, very soon the whole of Germany would be in favor of the capitalist way of ruling their country and the Soviets would lose an important foothold in their quest to spread communism around the world. Hence the best solution was to prevent this migration of civilians by building a wall to restrict them.
How did the West react to this?
President John F. Kennedy was virtually helpless. He did not really did much and simply accepted this as a fact of international events. This was mainly because he wanted to avoid a conflict. All he could do was to defend the West Germans in Berlin by sending troops to West Berlin. He did not want to try and defend the East Germans as he knew that some of them prefered the Soviets and knew that by doing so would result in a humiliating failure. Furthermore, Kennedy knew that West Germany was practically far from the Soviets grasps as he knew many East Germans who migrated over before the wall had allowed West Germans to perceive a bad impression of the Soviets. Kennedy even made use of this fact to produce propaganda posters that showed how the Wall was a form of restriction method adopted by the Soviets.
Post By Poh Yu Quan
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