'For Chris Gueffroy, and all the others'
09 Nov 2009
The UK Ambassador in Serbia, Stephen Wordsworth, shared his recollections of the fall of the Berlin Wall to coincide with the 20th anniversary on Monday 9 November.| Speaker: | Stephen Wordsworth, UK Ambassador to Serbia |
On 7 November I attended a concert hosted by my German colleague, marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It brought back a lot of memories.
Twenty years ago I was the Head of the Section in the Foreign Office in London dealing with the UK’s relations with the German Democratic Republic (GDR – East Germany) and all of Berlin. Berlin was still formally under occupation by the four victorious Powers of the Second World War – the USA, the USSR, Britain and France.
The three Western Sectors of Berlin – ‘West Berlin’ – were a fragile island of freedom, surrounded by a repressive Communist dictatorship and massive concentrations of Soviet, GDR and other Warsaw Pact forces. West Berlin was not legally part of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).
In practice, it largely governed itself, under an elected Mayor. The West Berlin Senate adopted laws passed by the FRG parliament in Bonn (then still the FRG capital). But this process had to be approved by the three Western Allies’ ‘Commandants’. These were the senior military officers appointed to supervise the administration of the Western Sectors, assisted by teams of diplomatic and military staff.
West Berlin could be reached only by special land and air corridors. Land traffic was controlled at three checkpoints – ‘Alpha’ on the inner-German border; ‘Bravo’ between the GDR and West Berlin and, most famously, ‘Charlie’ between the Western and Soviet Sectors. Only one airline from each of the USA, Britain and France could fly into West Berlin – no German airline was permitted to do so.
The Soviet Union did not officially accept even the right of the Western Allies’ airlines to fly into West Berlin, arguing that the Corridors were for military flights only. So every time a Western civilian passenger aircraft was about to enter the Corridors, a little pantomime was played out in the Berlin Air Safety Centre – an office in a dusty corner of the otherwise abandoned Berlin courthouse, the cavernous building that had once housed the Nazi show trials. There were four desks in the office – one controller from each Occupying Power.
The relevant Western officer passed details of the flight from the telex machine to his Soviet counterpart. The latter would accept the paper, stamp it ‘Safety of Flight Not Guaranteed’, and pass it back. This preserved the Soviet position. Having made his point – several times every day, every day for many years – the Soviet controller would then pass the flight details to the Warsaw Pact air defences, to ensure that, in reality, there were no incidents.
The first time I went to Berlin, in 1988, all the post-War structures were still in place, and functioning much as they had done for over forty years. The Wall divided the city. The Western side of it seemed bad enough – a brutal and blank divide, watched over from the East by tall towers and armed guards. But on the Eastern side it was much worse. Large areas had been cleared of war-damaged buildings and left empty, to prevent escapes.
Away from the centre, the barrier was in many places multiple fences of concrete posts and wire, with guard dogs running up and down between them, and more watch towers and guards. I went out one afternoon in a convoy of Land Rovers with a British army team on a ‘Wall and Wire Patrol’ – again, a routine that was carried out for many years.
Coming around one corner, we encountered a GDR patrol on the Western side of the Wall. It was not an invasion – the GDR/Soviet authorities had built the Wall a few metres inside the real dividing line, so that they could come over and make any repairs on the ‘Western’ side while still being on ‘their’ territory. We stopped and watched them; they watched us watching them. We all took photographs. Then we drove on.
Some aspects of life then were so bizarre that they are almost humorous. Visiting family members of Western Allied officials were issued with ‘Orange Cards’. These allowed them to cross through the Wall to the Eastern Sector – East Berlin – without having to display their passports to the GDR border guard, who, from our perspective, had no right to check on our movements between parts of Four-Power Berlin (the GDR claimed that East Berlin was part of the GDR – we never accepted this). My son, then aged just two, was duly issued with his card, and so became part of the Allied force of occupation. We still have it, with his baby face picture.
But life was far from funny for all the divided families in Berlin, and for all the other people who had to live under Soviet control in the GDR, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The suppression of democracy, and the shocking inefficiency and poverty of the Soviet-imposed economic system, were underpinned by brutal KGB-supervised secret police services. In the GDR, this was the Staatssicherheit or Stasi, a worthy successor to Hitler’s Gestapo. Dissent was crushed. Family members were recruited to inform on each other. Except for the elderly, or loyal servants of the totalitarian regime, overseas travel was virtually impossible. Eastern Europe became, for most people, a vast prison.
By the time I visited, in 1988, pressure for change was growing. The year before, President Reagan, speaking in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, had issued his famous challenge to the Soviet leader – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Within a year, change had become unstoppable.
In August 1989, Hungary allowed GDR citizens to cross its territory into Western Europe. Thousands streamed out. The prison was crumbling. Gorbachev visited East Berlin in early October. Officially, he was there to mark the GDR’s 40th birthday. In reality he was there for its funeral. He famously reminded the GDR leader, Honecker, that history punishes those who act too late. Within two weeks, Honecker had resigned. A few weeks more, and the Wall was open.
From early 1990, I was posted to our Embassy in Bonn, reporting on German internal political affairs, and so had a front row view of the unification process that year. Once, as I drove through the massive but abandoned GDR border fortifications, I realised that my car stereo was pushing out the ‘Meat Loaf’ track, ‘Everything is Permitted’:
Everything is permitted,
There is nothing out of bounds,
There are no limits or no fences,
There is always some way round…
I got to my meeting in Weimar, and as I arrived I saw a young couple. They were still dressed in the shabby GDR clothes I had seen many times before, poorly fitting, and all grey, beige and brown. But their young son had new clothes, and a brand new, brightly painted bicycle. I can still picture his happy face.
Chris Gueffroy? He was the last person to be shot and killed by GDR border guards at the Berlin Wall, as he tried to escape to the West, on 6 February 1989. I vividly remember the news coming through to my desk in London, and I have never forgotten his name. He was twenty years old. The guards who shot him were given medals by their commander, and prize money.
In just over eight months, the Wall and all the horrors it represented were gone. Two more years, and the Soviet Union, which had created the whole foul system, was gone too, as the people of Russia and the other ‘Soviet republics’ re-claimed their own freedom."
More information
Ambassador Wordsworth was based in London in charge of the UK's relations with the German Democratic Republic, which was also known as East Germany, when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.
