The Berlin Wall began as barbed wire on August 13, 1961

East Germany began sealing the border around West Berlin overnight on August 13, 1961, stringing barbed wire across streets first and adding walls only days later. The ruling SED party wanted to stop an exodus that had already cost the GDR a sixth of its population, at least four million people, and Berlin’s open sector border was the last easy route west.

From denial to death strip

• June 15, 1961: At an international press conference in East Berlin, East German leader Walter Ulbricht made the pronouncement that later made him infamous: “Nobody intends to put up a wall!”
• August 13, 1961: Crews tear up the pavement and unroll wire along the sector line. Robert Lochner, director of the American-run RIAS radio station, who drove into East Berlin three times that night with a hidden tape recorder, recalled that every worker had a soldier with a gun behind him, there to stop the builders themselves from defecting.
• August 24, 1961: East Berlin police open fire on Günter Litfin, 24, as he swims across the Humboldthafen basin. A bullet to the back of the head kills him just short of the western bank; some 250 West Berliners gather and wait until his body is recovered.
• 1961–1989: The barrier is rebuilt again and again into a 155-kilometre ring around West Berlin. 140 people die there, 91 of them shot by GDR border soldiers. The order to shoot is lifted only in April 1989.

The name flatters the early structure. One U.S. diplomat, describing the barrier for an oral-history project, stressed that solid masonry stood only in the downtown core; the rest of West Berlin was ringed by a triple line of barbed-wire fences with razor-sharp concertina wire between them. The smooth concrete slabs most people picture came later, as the regime kept working to perfect its fortifications right up to the end.

Those fortifications held until November 9, 1989, when a botched announcement about travel rules opened the checkpoints. The Wall’s most notorious early killing, Peter Fechter’s death in 1962, happened in full view of the West.