Willy Brandt was on a campaign trip in West Germany, running as the SPD’s candidate for the chancellorship in the upcoming Bundestag elections, when he got the news of what was happening in Berlin. He immediately flew to Tempelhof and rushed to the Potsdamer Platz. As he examined the emerging barrier, one of his aides, Heinrich Albertz, commented: “They are cutting up a city, cutting into living flesh without anesthesia.” Although Brandt felt the incision as if it were on his own body, his first concern was to calm the West Berliners. The mayor worried that any attacks on the fence from the western side would give the Soviets a pretext for marching into West Berlin.
Brandt’s opponent in the impending elections, Chancellor Adenauer, was considerably less distraught over the events in Berlin. In his view, damming the incoming flood of East Germans, whom he saw as a horde of probable SPD supporters, was hardly a cause for deep distress. As a gesture of solidarity with the city, his aides urged him to fly immediately to Berlin, but having never felt any love for that “pagan” place, Adenauer demurred. After trying to ascertain from the Western powers how they intended to respond, he issued a formal statement containing an appeal for calm: “The need of the moment is to meet this challenge from the East with firmness, but also with deliberation. Nothing should be undertaken that would complicate the situation without improving it.”
Adenauer need not have worried that the Western Allies would adopt any precipitous or provocative measures. The leaders of Britain, France, and America saw no reason for alarm in the Soviet/East German action, so long as Western rights in Berlin were not challenged. British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who was hunting in the north of England when the fence went up, refused to hurry back to London to deal with the situation. Charles de Gaulle, weekending at his country house at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, likewise elected not to return to his capital; the Berlin problem, he felt, could be addressed in the following week. President Kennedy, sailing off Hyannis Port, was not even notified of the events in Berlin until seventeen hours after the action had commenced. “How come we didn’t know anything about this?” he asked. (In fact, American intelligence operatives
The West’s placid response to the events of August 13 convinced Ulbricht and Honecker that they could begin transforming their wire fence into a concrete wall. On August 15, at the Ackerstrasse, cranes lowered a line of prefabricated concrete blocks into place, five meters to the east of the sector border. These were the first of thousands of blocks that would make up the initial Berlin Wall, which stood about six feet high in most places and ran in a zigzag fashion for twenty-seven miles between the two halves of the city. Another seventy miles of wall separated West Berlin from GDR territory to the north, west, and south.
Ambitious though it was, this structure was a backyard fence compared to the final Berlin Wall that evolved in the 1970s and 1980s—a white concrete monolith some thirteen feet high and capped with a rounded top to thwart the use of grappling hooks. Along much of its eastern side ran a broad “death strip” of raked ground enclosed by a smaller wall or electrified wire fence; anyone caught in this no-man’s-land was likely to be fired at by guards posted in watchtowers spaced at regular intervals along the border. At night, spotlights moved across the landscape, lending it a surreal touch. People commonly observed that there was something incongruously “medieval” about the Berlin Wall, but there was nothing medieval about its technology.
