Up to the time I enlisted in the Air Force at age nineteen, I had rambled through only two states, both with names ending in Dakota. After my basic training in Texas and a later course in weather observing in Illinois, I was shipped (on a seven-day waterlogged and bumpy cruise) to Germany for my three-year assignment with a weather squadron. I began planting footprints in other countries soon after I arrived.
As I neared the end of my lengthy stay in Germany, still having an itch to travel, I set out to explore unseen targets, namely Berlin, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam. I was reminded of this plan recently when I unearthed my 201 file (a three-quarter inch thick relic that contains all of my military orders) and found evidence that my 20-day trip to visit those three cities began on February 21, 1955.
In the file were the yellowed documents, written in both English and Russian, that had enabled me to travel through East Germany to Berlin, the city at the time lying deep within the Russian-controlled part of post-war Germany. I didn’t have a passport then, didn’t need one as a U. S. airman able to travel freely through most of post-war Europe, but without my bilingual documents I would not have been able to penetrate the Russian zone and get to Berlin.
Other than a number of train stops within the Red zone, where my papers were checked determinedly by grim-faced Russian soldiers, my trip to Berlin was uneventful. I disembarked in West Berlin, the section of the city that had been subdivided after the war into American, British, and French occupation sectors. I found a small hotel in the American sector, dropped off my suitcase, and wandered through the neighborhood. The city had been heavily scarred by bombardment during WWII, and rehabilitation efforts were in full swing throughout the area. Heavy machinery rumbled. Flocks of cranes poked into the sky.
It was dark by the time I found myself in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which stood roughly on the border between West and East Berlin (the latter under Communist control and the grim Wall yet to be built). The Gate had been heavily charred and nicked by bombings so it wasn’t a handsome sight, yet the colossus retained its elemental grandeur. It stretches over 200 feet across a broad avenue and rises up over 60 feet, where it was topped at that time by the tangled remains of four life-sized horses pulling a goddess in a chariot. Five separate passageways lead through the Gate, which is almost 40 feet deep.
As impressive as that huge gate was, the scene around it somehow affected me more. I stood facing the gate from the west. Beyond it to the east stood a clutter of buildings still shattered by the bombings that had ended a decade earlier. Restorative efforts had been minimal. Few lights were visible in that depressing scene, and a gloomy darkness loomed above it all. In contrast, the buildings behind me, a good number rebuilt, were ablaze with light, and the gleaming sky reflected their brilliance.
The difference between East and West Berlin was that stark. No wonder a continual stream of East Germans crossed daily into West Berlin and did not return, a continual one-way flow until the infamous Wall was built in 1961 to stop the bleeding. By that time some three million East Germans had fled to the west through West Berlin, many staying in that city and others making their way through East Germany to freedom.
Why had they fled? For a number of reasons. The Russians had gutted East German factories and lugged the equipment home. Communists naturally had taken over the government. Private property was seized from landowners and redistributed to workers. Industrial and crop production, suddenly under control of the state, plummeted. The economy, with the newly minted Ostmark, was tanking. Meanwhile, the western part of Germany, being reconstructed by the Allies (the United States, Britain, and France), was blooming with Capitalism.
That’s all for now. I have a more personal story to relate from that particular time Berlin, along with other stories from that same journey, but I’ll hold those for a while, because I had another close encounter with the Brandenburg Gate, one that’s scratched deep in my memory and demands to be told next. Stay tuned.
