In the summer of 1979, as a new ‘spook’ fresh out of training I found myself in the city of West Berlin standing on an elevated platform near the old Reichstag building in the Western Sector of the divided city, peering over the Berlin Wall into communist East Berlin. Forty-three years later I can still picture it vividly in my mind.
On the west side of The Wall one could walk right up and stand next to It, and even reach out and touch its’ cold concrete facade if you chose to. At various places along The Wall were placed small wreathes and crosses, some containing a photograph of a German citizen along with their name. Much like what is often seen along the highways in America at the site of a fatal car accident, the small memorials that are erected by family members or friends honoring someone who died at that location.
The memorials along the western side of The Berlin Wall however marked the location and the date of the death of a German citizen, at the hands of the East German marksmen manning the guard towers inside East Berlin. Memorializing an innocent human being shot and killed for no other reason than just trying to reach freedom in the West.
Standing on the platform and looking over The Wall into the Eastern Sector one quickly noticed that unlike on the Western side where there was nothing to prevent anyone from approaching The Wall, on the eastern side one could not get anywhere close to it. A strip of ground roughly 50 yards wide (wider or narrower in other areas), separated The Wall from the streets of East Berlin. It was a ‘no-man’s land’ lit up at night that included razor wire, barricades, mine fields, sensors, and deadly booby traps, along with the ever present guard towers manned by expert marksmen with orders to shoot to kill. And all the small memorials in the west were a testament to the East German border guards proficiency with an AK-47.
I recall thinking to myself at the time how I wished that the American government could fly every single American over to West Berlin so they could all stand on the platform where I was standing, and see with their own eyes what I was seeing. No words would need to be exchanged. Just send Americans over in small groups to see firsthand the difference between the free and vibrant city of West Berlin, compared to the harsh reality of what communism offered to its’ citizens in East Berlin. The reality is far different from the romanticized version leftist college professors espouse in American universities.
It wasn’t just the stark differences one could see right there at The Wall. If anyone traveled any distance into East Berlin after passing through Checkpoint Charlie or any of the other crossing checkpoints, one could still see war damage from World War II that had not yet been repaired by the communist East German government. Along with a drabness that was always there, even on the sunniest of days.
All of the buildings looked the same (the ones that weren’t still just a pile of rubble from American and British bombers during the war), hardly ever did one see much, if any color variations anywhere. It was as though the communist government bought and used all the gray paint from every hardware store in Europe.
Most East Germans walked the streets in a sort of hunched over way, looking at the ground as they trod along the cracked and in places crumbling sidewalks. They didn’t offer a greeting if they passed someone, they just averted their eyes and continued on their way. It didn’t pay to be friendly with anyone you might encounter since you couldn’t know whether they were an agent or informer for the dreaded state security apparatus, the STASI.
Look at someone the wrong way, say the wrong thing, and you might get a midnight visit from STASI and brought in for questioning. Or even worse tortured until you confessed to something you didn’t do. Then it could be a quick trip to another wall where you were stood up facing a squad of East German Riflemen, or taken for a ride to a state prison facility where you might languish forgotten for years. Your family and loved ones never knowing your fate. That is as long as it wasn’t one of them who reported you to STASI. It was far from unheard of for family members to report on each other, STASI was so feared and had so fully infiltrated East German society.
I paint a pretty bleak picture of life under communist rule in East Berlin during the time I was there, before The Wall came tumbling down and East Germans finally gained the freedom so many had died trying to reach. But I can assure you it’s an accurate depiction with no exaggerations. The truth about communism isn’t pretty. No matter how it’s portrayed in the West.
Sadly what we are starting to see right here in America is what can only be called ‘inching our way to communism’. We have seen in recent years how the once premiere law enforcement agency in the world, the FBI has begun to appear more and more reminiscent of the STASI of East Berlin. (Retired FBI Special Agents who spent decades helping defend America barely recognize the organization that they were once proud to have been a part of).
Watching the daily news we see footage of heavily armed agents showing up in force at someone’s house in the dead of night to serve an arrest warrant (while making sure that the news media is given advance notice), and dragging American citizens wearing only their pajamas out of their homes to do a ‘perp walk’ on TV. And for no real reason other than because they’re political enemies of the current regime.
Any criticism of this regime could result in you having federal agents from a variety of government agencies looking you over with a fine toothed comb, and creating their own evidence if they can’t find anything to use against you. We indeed live in very scary times. I often remind people that the Bolshevik Revolution was NOT a popular uprising. It was a minority forcing communism on the rest of the Russian people for decades.
While there is no Berlin Wall here in America, I fear that the time might one day come if we continue along the path we are taking, when we will start to see small wreaths and crosses with the names of American patriots whose only crime was to yearn to once again live free, start to show up all around our country. Just like I saw so many years ago in West Berlin