The Berlin Wall by Frederick Taylor

Author:Frederick Taylor [Taylor, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Use of cement and brick had commenced the previous Friday, but records show that the leadership in East Berlin was still not necessarily committed to the massive, deadly engineering project that the border would later become. Although approval had been given for a cement wall, about the height of a human being, to be erected in the built-up areas of central Berlin (beginning with the Potsdamer Platz and extending over the next few days as far as the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag), the barrier would for the next few weeks still consist mainly of barbed wire, wood and cement slabs and bollards placed across traffic routes, closely patrolled by armed police. The cementing-up of the doors and windows of buildings bordering the West also proceeded apace within a few days of the formal border closure.

Meanwhile, the escape rate continued at a level that Ulbricht and the leadership found distressing, humiliating, and even—strange as this may seem—surprising. Around 417 East Germans would manage to reach the West during the month following 13 August.

Many of them were former ‘border-crossers’ who had jobs, friends and family in West Berlin. They had a motive, and they knew where they were going.

Just such a perfect escape candidate was Ursula Heinemann, seventeen years old and a waitress at the Plaza Hotel on the Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin. Every day since she left school, she had commuted with the S-Bahn from the family flat in the East Berlin suburb of Johannisthal, heading over the sector border—which lay just a little over a kilometre northwards—into the borough of Neukölln in the American sector, and from there to work.

Ursula had been shocked by what happened on 13 August, but with the courage of youth she had no intention of passively accepting her fate, She could see that the situation on the nearby Teltow Canal was frightening, Guards were stationed along the banks, motor boats patrolled the waters, She travelled with a girl friend the long route around the rim of Berlin in the middle of that week of enforced idleness, to see if things looked a little easier at Gross Glienicke, which sat on the border near Potsdam. They didn’t. A day spent doing casual waitressing work at a beer garden frequented by border guards, some of whom affirmed their intention to shoot at escapers, convinced them that they were risking too much. Two days later, some close relatives, both disillusioned Communists, told her to ‘Get out and over to the West as quickly as you can’, Once the East German state got around to dealing with her, as a known bordercrosser, she would probably be shipped off to some collective farm in Mecklenburg or Thuringia.

It was on Saturday 19 August, the day of Johnson and Clay’s arrival, that Ursula and her mother took a walk, They headed north-west, with a cemetery and crematorium on their right and woods to their left, crossing a bridge that took them to the far side of the branch canal, the Britzer Zweigkanal, that connected the main Teltow waterway with the river Spree.

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