Youtor
What East Berlin Did to Escapees Will Horrify You
>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=QRRzBukb6YE
Go to buyraycon.com/ADAYINHISTORY to get up to 20% off sitewide! Brought to you by Raycon • The scars of the war were still fresh when the East German regime was being established. The Soviets despised the mass of the German population and saw many of them as guilty by association of Nazi crimes. Looting, massacres, and rape were rampant during the Soviet conquest of Germany was as the soldiers took revenge on the civilians for what the fascists had done in their homeland, and these abuses continued long after the bulk of the Red Army had gone home. The East Germans were no fans of the Soviets in turn. Even if they weren’t Nazis, the average German was not a Communist either. Reports and experiences of the savagery of the Soviet advance had painted the occupiers as monsters. Despite merging the existing German Communist and Social Democrat parties into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) to rule over it, the new Soviet-designed regime was seen as a foreign occupation and was deeply resented. In this climate of distrust and hatred, it is no surprise that the regime answered those attitudes with fear, brutality, and persecution. From the very first months, the Communists worked for the destruction of the Germans. • In the months following the war, millions of Germans were expelled from newly liberated countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia. Many of these refugees poured into Berlin where the Soviet authorities showed their contempt by strictly limiting food and medical supplies to the swelling population. 12,000 Berliners died of starvation or related issues in the first year of the occupation. At the Berlin municipal elections in autumn 1946, the Communists won just 20% of the vote, placing them behind the moderate socialists and the Catholics despite the power of Soviet propaganda behind them. Stalin was displeased and used it as justification to ramp up persecution of so-called ‘subversives’, which included virtually all non-Communist political activists. • Some were arrested en-masse while others were grabbed on the street and bundled into a van, never to be seen again. The Soviets didn’t stop at their part of Berlin either with thousands disappearing from the Allied sectors into Soviet hands too. By 1949, almost 200,000 people had been sent to special internment camps, many of which were simply repurposed Nazi concentration camps such as Buchenwald. Life in the East German camps was comparable to that in Nazi ones. Prisoners were mistreated, malnourished, and overworked to death for the regime. Taking inspiration from the Soviet Gulags, guards were brutal to the inmates. While some of the inmates were former Nazis, most victims were mere opponents of the Communists. Somewhere between 60 and 80 thousand people died in these camps by 1950. These camps were closed over the 1950s and their surviving inmates were either released or moved to other prisons in the Soviet Union’s vast Gulag network. • #eastberlin #coldwar #history #hitler • • Sources: • Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, (2003) Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989, (2007) Iain MacGregor, Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth, (2019) Jens Gieseke, (trans. David Burnett), The History of the Stasi: East Germany’s Secret Police, 1945-1990, (2001; trans. 2014) Nina Willner, Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall, (2016) • Copyright © 2025 A Day In History. All rights reserved. • DISCLAIMER: All materials in these videos are used for entertainment purposes and fall within the guidelines of fair use. No copyright infringement intended. If you are, or represent, the copyright owner of materials used in this video, and have an issue with the use of said material, please send an email to [email protected]
#############################
