AP® European History · Unit 9 · Topic 9.3
Berlin: Blockade, Wall, and a Divided City
Berlin sat 100 miles inside Soviet-controlled East Germany but was split into four occupation zones, making it the one place East and West physically touched, so every Cold War tension showed up there first.
After World War Two, the Allies split Germany into four occupation zones, and Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, got the same four-way split: American, British, and French sectors in the west, Soviet in the east. In 1948 the Soviets cut off all road and rail access to West Berlin, trying to starve the western powers out of the city. The US and Britain answered with the Berlin Airlift, flying food, coal, and medicine through three narrow air corridors for eleven months. Daily tonnage climbed from a few hundred tons early on to well over the target the Allies needed to sustain the city, and the Soviets lifted the blockade in May 1949 having gained nothing.
The standoff did not end the division; it hardened it. West Germany and East Germany formed as separate states that same year, and West Berlin stayed a free, prosperous island inside Communist territory. That gap in living standards and freedom sent a steady stream of East Germans, many of them doctors, engineers, and skilled workers, walking across the still-open sectors into West Berlin and out to the West. By 1961 the losses were draining East Germany's economy, so overnight on August 13, 1961, East German troops strung barbed wire straight through the city, soon rebuilt as the concrete Berlin Wall, sealing the last open door between the two Germanys.
Berlin now stood as the physical symbol of the Iron Curtain for the next three decades, the backdrop for Kennedy's and Reagan's Cold War speeches, until the Wall fell in 1989 and the two Germanys reunified in 1990, setting up the wider European reunification and integration covered next.
Key terms
- Occupation sectors
- The four zones, American, British, French, and Soviet, that divided Berlin after 1945 among the wartime Allies.
- Berlin Airlift
- The 1948-1949 operation flying supplies into West Berlin through air corridors after the Soviets blockaded land routes.
- Air corridors
- The three narrow air routes the Soviets permitted, which Allied planes used to bypass the ground blockade.
- Berlin Wall
- The barrier East Germany built starting August 1961 to seal off the remaining open crossing points into West Berlin.
- Iron Curtain
- The ideological and physical divide separating Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe from the democratic West during the Cold War.
Watch it explained
- How it worksShow me Berlin's four occupation sectors and the air corridors that fed the western half in 1948.
- Worked exampleTrace tonnage flown into Berlin per day across the eleven months of the airlift.
- How it worksWalk me through the wall going up overnight in August 1961 and where it cut the city.
- How it worksHow did the flow of people out of East Germany force the wall to be built at all?
Check yourself
End of topic.