Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [21]
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In Soviet zones the task of weeding out Nazis tended to be swift and harsh. In the west the Allies held war-crimes trials in courtroom 600 of Nuremberg’s Court House (open to visitors today).
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THE 1950S
The economic vision of Bavarian-born (from Fürth), cigar-puffing Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) unleashed West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder. Between 1951 and 1961 the economy averaged an annual growth rate of 8%.
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For an informative overview of the Berlin Wall, see www.berlin.de/mauer on the Berlin city website.
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Erhard was economic minister and later vice-chancellor in Konrad Adenauer’s government. His policies encouraged investment and boosted economic activity to support West Germany’s system of welfare-state capitalism. He helped create the European Coal and Steel Community to regulate coal and steel production with France, Italy, West Germany and the Benelux countries, and in 1958 West Germany joined the European Economic Community (the EU today). Adenauer’s deep-rooted fear of the USSR saw him pursue a determined policy of integration with the West.
In East Germany, Stalin’s death in 1953 raised unfulfilled hopes of reform. Extreme poverty and economic tensions merely persuaded the government to set production goals higher. Smouldering discontent erupted in violence on 17 June 1953 when 10% of GDR workers took to the streets. Soviet troops quashed the uprising, with scores of deaths and the arrest of about 1200 people. Economic differences widened into military ones when West Germany joined NATO in 1955 and East Germany moved into the fold of the Warsaw Pact, where it remained from 1956 to 1990.
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THE WALL
The exodus of young, well-educated and employed East German refugees seeking a better fortune in West Germany strained the troubled GDR economy so much that the GDR government – with Soviet consent – built a wall to keep them in. The Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s most potent symbol, went up between East and West Berlin on the night of 12 August 1961. The inner-German border was fenced off and mined.
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Berlin and the Wall by Ann Tusa is a saga about the events, trials and triumphs of the Cold War, the building of the Wall and its effects on the people and the city of Berlin.
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Having walled in what was left of the struggling population (330,000 East Germans had fled to the west in 1953 alone, and in 1960 almost 200,000 voted with their feet), the East German government launched a new economic policy in a bid to make life better. And it did. The standard of living rose to the highest in the Eastern bloc and East Germany became its second-largest industrial power (behind the USSR).
The appointment of Erich Honecker (1912–94) in 1971 opened the way for rapprochement with the West and enhanced international acceptance of the GDR. Honecker fell in line with Soviet policies (replacing reunification clauses in the East German constitution with a declaration of irrevocable alliance to the USSR in 1974), but his economic policies did promote a powerful economy until stagnation took root in the late 1980s.
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‘Berlin is the testicle of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin’.
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, SOVIET COMMUNIST PARTY SECRETARY (1953–64)
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ON THE WESTERN SIDE
Meanwhile, West Germany was still in the aged but firm hands of Konrad Adenauer, chancellor from 1949 until 1963, and whose economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, once the Father of the Economic Miracle, was now importing foreign workers. By doing this he was making a post-hoc name for himself as the father of a multi-ethnic German society. About 2.3 million Gastarbeiter (guest workers) came to West Germany until the early 1970s, mainly from Italy, Spain, Turkey, Portugal, Morocco