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Hours Leading up to the Building of the Wall: Berlin Wall, Past and Present

Events Leading Up to the Building

Building of the Wall

Escape Tactics

Leading to the Fall

Fall of the Wall

Master Outline

Bibliography

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What Do You Think?

Hours Leading Up to the Building

Movement toward the building started on Saturday, August 12 1961. Under the leadership of Erich Honecker the mission was kept very secretive. Only about twenty top level officials knew anything at all. All others were told that they were preparing for "exercises". In order to keep paper trails to a minimum no code word was ever issued and very little was written down. When things had to be written down it was hand written by only one person. In the planning the leaders were worried about the possibility of war. In order to minimize this chance they implemented many initiatives. One was to have to have East Army units ready for anything. Also there were bilingual Soviet-German staff to "trivialize" the actions to the people. A third way East Berlin leadership reduced the chance of war was to make the actions look like a police initiative. The appearance that it was simply police crowd control, caused the people to not think much of the action. Also the 10,000 person front line was People' Police and the Riot Police. These military units along with the militia known as Battle Groups of the Working Class, were chosen as the most visible armed section of the movement. This was to make it seem less warlike.