In the beginning, the NAZI regime managed to turn the
suffering and starvation the of German people were experiencing at the end of
WWI into a time of prosperity for most of the citizenry. This came at a
horrendous price, however. Many of the German people were forced into what is
today called the Holocaust. While
ordinary Germans went about their lives giving little thought to what their
government was up to, the Nazis, led by a dictator and his fanatics,
consolidated control and undertook expansion of the borders. The result was
WWII – an alliance of nations against the collection of fascist nations named
the Axis.
As the Axis nations sought to expand into neighboring
countries, many horrors were wrought upon the unfortunate population of their
targets. When Hitler set his covetous eyes on the Eastern European countries
and Russia, he set in motion a military action that he could not win. As the
German army consolidated eastern territory, the fanatical aims of the Nazi
party wrought havoc on the concurred people.
Inevitably, Germany simply ran out of resources and manpower
to support Hitler’s drug-induced unrealistic plans. As the eastern front
collapsed and began to shrink back on Germany, the Russian dictator, Stalin
incited the Russian army to inflict horrors on the German civilians and
captured prisoners. As the Russian army advanced into Germany, many of the
civilians tried to head west into the arms of the Americans or British troops.
The German people, especially the women and girls, had good
reason to fear the onslaught of the Russian army. Various accounts of the
number of rapes exist, but most figures put it in the millions. The Russians
would not just rape a women they would subject her to repeated rapes by gangs
of men, then shoot her when they had to move on. In a small village of
Strasburg, in the Ukermark, 175 women and young girls gathered in the town
square and slit their wrists rather than be taken by the approaching Russians.
Babies were killed by smashing their little heads on walls and concrete. Huge
numbers of townspeople were simply rounded up and shot to death.
After the war, the Allies, of which Russia was a member,
divided Germany into various sectors. Germany’s capital, Berlin, had also been
divided into controlling sectors. The Russian dictator, Stalin stripped the
Russian sector in the east of Germany of any useful industrial facilities and
left the people to the devices of devout communists.
Although the Russian communists were convinced that
communism would one day cover the world, they shut off their German sector from
the “corrupting” influence of the West. Not content with controlling only the
eastern portion of Germany, Stalin gobbled up most of the countries in eastern
Europe that Germany had occupied, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania,
Bulgaria, Moldova, the Ukraine, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the newly minted
East Germany. The result was named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Although rebuilding Germany was not high on the Soviet list
of priorities, the German people dug themselves out of the rubble and by the
‘60s had become the most productive country within the Soviet sphere of
influence.
In 1948, Stalin decided that since Berlin was completely
enclosed within the Russian sector, that the entire city should be part of East
Germany. He closed the borders in an attempt to starve the western sectors into
submitting to his will. It didn’t work. The Americans airlifted food and
supplies to the western sectors of Berlin.
In 1961, Stalin’s successor, Khrushchev got a bug up his
rear, and decided to put a stop to the bleeding of young, productive people in
East Germany to the West. Overnight, he closed all borders and erected
barbed-wire barriers surrounding West Berlin. Not to keep the West Berliners
out, but the keep the East Germans in. Eventually the fence was replaced with a
fortified concrete wall. Mines and machine gun emplacements formed a kill-zone
demarcation up to the wall on the East German side. All doors and windows along
the border were cemented shut with concrete blocks.
Although the face of the East German government was that of
Germans, the power behind it originated in Moscow. East Germans would dance to
the communist tune of the Soviet Union until 1989. In that year, communism
collapsed of its own repressive policies. The Soviet Union died along with the
communist governments of its satellite nations.
The immediate events leading up to the fall of the Berlin
Wall saw huge streams of people leaving East Germany for the West. Realizing
the acute loss of manpower on the east would leave East Germany in tatters, the
government collapsed and capitulated to form a unified Germany.
At last, families on both sides of the border – and there
were thousands, maybe millions – could once more be united. It was a joyous
time.
But how do you reconcile the unification of a prosperous
modern nation with a depressed and relatively poor one. The infrastructure,
industry, and total government had to be rebuilt in the East. The wage and
income disparities had to be addressed.
Now that Germany was one nation, the people were now free to
move wherever they liked. And they did. Today the lands of the former East
Germany are all but devoid of young people. They crowd the cities of the west
where education and employment opportunities abound.
Reconciliation would not be easy, but if any people could do
it, the Germans would. And they have.
The anniversary of the fall of the wall may not be celebrated
worldwide, but it should. That day symbolizes the death of failed
Marxist-Leninist communist doctrine. It is a day the remaining communist
leaning countries should take good notes on. Marxism, Leninism, Maoism,
communism, socialism – whatever you prefer to call it – can not and will not
work.
The people of Germany have good reason to rejoice on this
day.
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