From the mid-1950s to 1990, thanks to the way the Allies took land in World War II, Germany was divided into two countries-one communist, one capitalist. I have a few questions:
I’m guessing that you could not visit East Germany if you were West German, or vice versa. Am I right? Were Americans not allowed to visit East Germany, as it is with Cuba?
If the answer to number 1 for both West Germans and Americans (or either), consider this: Berlin was also divided, due to the WWII thing. Did West Berlin have an airport? If so, could a plane take off from West Berlin (which is technically part of West Germany) and fly over East German airspace to the main part of West Germany?
I understand Austria and Vienna city also got a Four-Country Shuffle after the war. How come there wasn’t a West Austria and an East Austria, like the Germany Split?
There were two military air fields in the western sectors of Berlin: Tempelhof (US) and Gatow (British). A third airport, Tegel, was built in the French sector during the Berlin Airlift, which transported food and goods to the citizens of the western sector for 15 months in 1948-49 when the East German government blocked the land routes.
I can’t speak for conditions at the very beginning of the Cold War, or for what restrictions West Germans might have faced, but at least from the 1970’s forward Americans were allowed to visit East Germany.
Yes, the Soviet bloc never dared to interdict the air routes to West Berlin, which almost certainly would have meant war.
The two sides deemed Austria sufficiently “non-strategic” that they were able to agree in 1955 to withdraw their occupation forces and have Austria remain neutral (that is, not join NATO or the Warsaw Pact) in the Cold War.
To get a taste of what Austria was like under the four power occupation take a look at the film " The Third Man " starring Orsen Wells. That is set in post war Vienna and shows soldiers from the UK , USA , France and the USSR all riding around in the same Jeep on patrol in the city.
Correct, I in fact lived in East Berlin towards the end. Bizarre experience I have to say. Thank god there were Cuban bars where one could get some decent food.
There are always ways around the sort of rules, especially Cuba.
Consider:
American citizens without journalistic/diplomatic credentials were barred from vivisting Iraq since the early 90’s, yet there was Sean Penn in Baghdad last year and he’s still sleeping in his Cali bed. Now this may not be a big deal to us, but in 1948, who thinks Stalin would risk war with the Allies over a plane flying from West Berlin to Bonn?
As regards flights into West Berlin , the West German government were not allowed ( By the USSR ) to operate flights into Berlin . So Pan Am , British European Airways and Air France all set up subsidiary companies to operate internal flights between West Germany and West Berlin.
Actually, both halves were capitalist, as evidenced by their use of money and the presence of working and non-working classes. But only the eastern half had any pretentions of working towards building a communist state.
Yes and no. Citizens of Berlin did not have too many restrictions placed upon their movement within the city, and hence could easily pass the east/west border that divided it. The infamous wall didn’t get erected until the 60s. The East claimed it was a defensive measure to thwart a possible attack from the Western imperialists; the West claimed it was done to prevent citizens of the East from escaping to better living and working conditions in the West.
As for the larger land border to the west, I’m not entirely sure how hard it was to cross, but I imagine that citizens of the DDR needed hard-to-get exit visas. I’ve heard that most of them weren’t permitted to take vacations in the West, though permission to visit Hungarian territory was often granted. A lot of East Germans ended up learning Hungarian.
The restrictions on visiting Cuban territory are an invention of the American government. Cuba welcomes western tourists of all nationalities with open arms. If there were any restrictions on visiting East German territory, they probably weren’t imposed by the East German government. I have an East German travel brochure from the late 60s here, and it doesn’t mention anything about special restrictions for American citizens.
Yes, and yes.
The prevailing powers avoided one by forcing the Austrian government to declare perpetual neutrality. Perhaps they didn’t view the country as sufficiently industrialized to be worth carving up for themselves. But I’m just speculating; I’d like to know the real reason as well.
The DDR was hardly capitalist at all by any ordinary meaning of the word. If the above are your standards, well … that is something else.
Not too many restrictions? Bloody hell. Well, if inability cross between USSR and non-USSR zones is not a restriction then I don’t know what is. The wall very clearly went up in order to prevent the continuous outflow of DDR residents to the West, the DDR’s explanation is the most transparent and absurd propaganda I can imagine.
Crossing to the West was for virtually impossible for anyone not on official business. Some older folks with family on the other side were allowed to cross for personal visits, but that is it. DDR citizens were not generally allowed across the Wall period.
Of course, Czech and Hungrian visits were part of the East Bloc so few problems occurd until c. 1988/9 when they opened their borders to the West, and Many DDR residents took the opp to flee.
Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. The DDR imposed all kinds of restrictions - my memory fades on this, but one was not at all free to travel about, getting the visa to begin with required showing good purpose, and once there they held my passport for long periods. I also recall the funny guys in the black car who always seemed to follow me. Stasi.
The DDR (and the Soviet Union, for that matter) was capitalist by their own admission. They claimed to be building communism, not to have achieved it.
Am I the only one who sees a glaring contradiction here? If East Berliners were utterly unable to leave the USSR zone, then how is it that there was a continuous outflow of them? Clearly whatever measures were in place before the wall was erected weren’t restrictive enough.
The fact of the matter is that the border was open before 1961. There were perhaps a hundred or more places to cross anywhere along the border. People routinely lived in one half of the city and worked in the other. Both the East and West governments had checkpoints on the surface roads, though they stopped mostly private vehicles. It was possible to cross the border on the city’s public transportation network of subways and buses, which were very seldom stopped. In total about half a million people a day crossed the border.
You don’t need to take my word for it, though. I didn’t live in Berlin prior to 1961; I’ve only spoken with people who have. The information they provide is widely available in books and websites about the Berlin Wall.
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**Disregarding the restrictions on internal travel and the holding of passports, which have nothing to do with the OP’s question of whether it was possible to get into the country, how exactly were the restrictions on getting a DDR tourist visa any different from those currently imposed by practically every other country in the world? The US, for example, is extremely paranoid about letting people into their territory; I’ve personally known four professors and graduate students who were refused entry (in three separate incidents) to attend conferences, even when they had a valid passport (in one case from Canada), evidence of sufficient funds, a return ticket, etc. I’ve applied for many visas and travelled across dozens of borders in my life, and the US border is the only one at which I am routinely strip-searched, interrogated, and detained an hour or more. (And this was before the WTC attacks, mind you.)
What can I say, if you take this as your standard, it requires far more education than I have the patience to give to correct it.
Well primo, I was largely addressing post 61, secundo, yes the measures in place to restrict flow were not restrictive enough, ergo… the Wall and those long lines of mined and wired border running long the DDR-BRD border.
Yes, much of this was possible, and many used it to flee the East Zone to get the hell out of the wonderful socialist paradise.
Then please feel free to provide the citations with relevant observations on travel in the Comintern nations, although the obs. with 1961 seems a bit odd to me insofar as the balance of the DDR history was post-wall.
How were they different? Politics my young lad, politics. One can not abstract away from the dual aspect of hard to get visas with controls on movement and the like. Part of the package it was.
Standard of what? I simply reiterated the official stance of the GDR government. I didn’t endorse it. In fact, I seem to recall mocking it as being rather pretentious.
Odd, then, that you would get your panties such in a bunch over a statement of mine that clearly referred to the pre-wall period.
This has nothing to do with the Berlin discussion. The OP wanted to know whether there was unimpeded movement in Berlin after its post-WWII partitioning. The answer is mostly yes before the wall, mostly no after. Why are you trying to make things so complicated by dragging internal passports of unrelated regions into this?
Trying to get back to the original post’s questions…
The following is my experience as a West German in the 1970s/1980s:
West Germans could travel to East Germany but a visa was needed (e.g. to visit relatives or for business trips to East German companies). You could even spend your vacations in East Germany if that appealed to you (it appealed to very few people).
Trips to East Germany were expensive because you had to change a certain sum of West German marks per day into East German marks at the official rate of 1:1. This was effectively a hefty tax on days spent in East Germany because
there was no worthwhile way to spend this amount of East German currency - necessities were cheap and luxury items/services only available for Western currency
there was no possibility of changing unspent East German money back
you were not allowed to take unspent East German money out of the country (it was virtually worthless outside East Germany anyway.)
Of course if you were a refugee from East Germany or considered politically undesirable you didn’t get a visa.
For West Germans with residence in districts near the border there was a simplified and less onerous program for getting a permit for a certain number of trips to the districts of East Germany within a certain distance of the border. We used this to visit relatives from time to time. Entering and leaving East Germany were the most painstaking border searches that I experienced (I remember because I am ticklish ).
Under a transit treaty West Germans and West Berliners could use a number of designated transit roads between West Germany and West Berlin without a visa, but they had to strictly stay on that road. Also there were transit trains which only stopped twice in East Germany: to pick up and drop off the border guards. You needed a passport for road or rail transit but did not need to apply for the visa in advance.
East Germans were only allowed to travel to West Germany if deemed politically reliable (i.e. expected to return). The main exception were pensioners - once you were retired from work East Germany didn’t care if you stayed or went to the West. There was a joke a the time that the division of Germany would surely end in 2014. Why? Because the East German state (the German Democratic Republic) would then turn 65 and would be allowed to travel to the West.
West Berlin had two airports (the old one at Tempelhof and the newer at Tegel). Because of the Four Power status of Berlin the Western Allies (i.e. US, UK and France) had a right of unhindered air access to Berlin. That meant that the air transit between Berlin and West Germany was an oligopoly of these three nations’ ailines.
Air travel was the only way to travel between West Berlin and West Germany for people who had escaped from East Germany because they would have been nabbed by the East German border guards when using the rail or road transit routes.
I never made it to Wall-era Berlin, but an Italian friend recounted his experience from the early '80’s. He was granted a tourist visa which was good only for a day trip, so he had to be out by midnight or risk turning into a pumpkin. He was also required to exchange some ridiculous amount of money into East German marks, which he was not allowed to exchange back into lira at the end of his trip and not allowed to remove from East Germany. The problem was that there was nothing worthwhile to spend it on. He was fortunate in that he is fluent in German and so managed to spend some of it on books (which were ridiculously cheap, if you could find anything at state prices that you would actually want to read, in Socialist countries). So toward midnight, he and his friend went to the most expensive restaurant they could find, ate and drank like pigs, and left the rest of their currency for the waitress. I imagine waitress jobs near the border checkpoints were rather coveted.
And FTR, East Germans travelled frequently throughout the rest of the East Bloc: Poland, Hungary, Russia, etc. I iwll never forget where I was when we got the word that the Berlin Wall had come down; I was on an Intourist bus in Leningrad, on my way to the train station for a trip to Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. At first we didn’t believe the news; in the USSR, rumor was rampant in the absence of reliable information. Finally we did get some actual information, and then we talked with a group of East Germans in the hotel in Kiev a few days later. (None of them spoke English, but a couple of us spoke German.) We were like, “Guys, you’re going in the wrong direction!” Their response: “Yeah, we know, but we’d already paid for this trip and didn’t see the point in wasting it; we can go west later.”
And yes, visa and internal passport issues were QUITE relevant for travel around the East Bloc, and between east and west, which would become abundantly clear the second you were stared down by a Czech border guard toting an AK-47. I very nearly got my head blown off over a bag of Pepperidge Farm chocolate chip cookies. I hear they’re much friendlier in Prague these days, thank God.
In the 1970’s I and my family drove through East Germany on the way to Poland to visit relatives. At the West/East German border we had to buy a transit visa and car insurance because East Germany was not recognised as a country by the western powers. We and the car were searched and then we travelled along the Autobhan that also led to West Berlin. At the turn-off to that city we were stopped and questioned again and then we went on our way to the Polish border. Passing through East Germany to Poland was quite simple. Coming back was just the same with us having to buy another visa and more car insurance.
Believe it or not one of our Polish relatives spent her honymoon in East Berlin. Not the most romantic places I would think.
I see a contradiction too. I suspect that collounsbury didn’t read your post very carefully and was more interested in sharing his knowledge on the subject.
In any event, it seems we all agree that (1) between the end of WWII and 1961, people could travel around Berlin without a lot of trouble (2) After 1961, it became more difficult to leave East Berlin.
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