Читать книгу The Cold War: History in an Hour - Rupert Colley - Страница 10

Berlin: ‘You should not and cannot abandon this city and this people’

The Marshall Plan also contributed to the unravelling of the fragile co-existence between East and West Berlin. In June 1948, the US and Britain announced proposals for establishing the new country of West Germany, and on 23 June introduced a new currency, the Deutschmark, into West Berlin. This immediately caused economic chaos in the Soviet sector as people clambered to exchange their old money for the new currency. The Soviets responded on 24 June by cutting off all road, rail and canal links between West Germany and West Berlin. The Berlin Blockade had begun. ‘People of this world,’ said the mayor of West Berlin, ‘look upon this city and see that you should not and cannot abandon this city and this people.’

If Stalin’s aim was to force the Western powers out of Berlin, it backfired. During the 323 days of the Berlin Airlift (pictured below), US and British planes supplied West Berlin with 1.5 million tons of supplies, a plane landing every 3 minutes. Three years earlier, the Allies had been dropping bombs over Berlin, now, the West Berliners joked, they were dropping potatoes. On 12 May, 1949, Stalin, knowing he couldn’t risk shooting down the planes, and realizing the PR disaster he’d caused, lifted the blockade.

The Berlin Airlift: Berliners watching a US plane land at Berlin Tempelhof Airport, 1948

The political division of Germany became official on 23 May 1949 with the formal proclamation in Bonn of the ‘Federal Republic of Germany’ (West Germany). Five months later, in response, came the proclamation of East Germany with its somewhat misleading title, the ‘German Democratic Republic’.