Die Mauer (The Wall)

The Berlin Wall.  It has been my experience in talking with people once I had returned that most of them had very little knowledge about why the Berlin Wall was built.  Myself included.  Our tour guide Stefano taught me more about post war Germany and the Berlin Wall than any other history teachers I had previously encountered. (Not to say anything negative about the professors before, I'm sure I played a roll in that caper).  In learning what Stefano had to say, I was taken back at the concept of the entire war, post war, and Berlin wall all together.  Below is a depiction of a famous picture regarding the wall, I will also include an excerpt from Wikipedia to describe it.

On 15 August 1961, Schumann was sent to the corner of Ruppiner Straße and Bernauer Straße to guard the Berlin Wall on its third day of construction. At that time, the wall was only a low barbed wire fence. From the other side, West Germans shouted to him, "Komm' rüber!" ("Come over!"), and a police car pulled up to wait for him. Schumann jumped over the barbed wire fence and was promptly driven away from the scene by the West Berlin police. West German photographer Peter Leibing photographed Schumann's escape. His picture has since become an iconic image of the Cold War era. The scene, including Schumann's preparations, has also been filmed on 16-mm film from the same perspective.
Schumann was later permitted to travel from West Berlin to the main territory of West Germany, where he settled in Bavaria. He met his wife Kunigunde in the town of Günzburg.

Germany was divided in half, east and west.  West was the Allies and east was Communist.  They decided this in order to keep Germany from being strong and united after the war.  They also decided to do the same with the city of Berlin, this being the capital of Germany, in the same way east was communist and west was Allies.  So one could be in West Berlin, which was Allied territory, and still be in East Germany which was Communist.  When this began, most citizens in east Berlin fled to the west to get away from communist rule.  Over 150,000 citizens left, leaving no economy, industry, or workers.  So east Berliners needed a way to keep citizens on their side of town.  Enter the Wall.

This is a picure of rods they put in the ground to show where the wall used to be.This is a picture of myself standing next to an old part of the interior of the wall.  You can still see an old guard tower in the background.

This next picture is a part they rebuilt to the wall's exact specs to show what it really looked like and how intimidating and hard to traverse it could be.