Walter Ulbricht's Reasoning For Building The Berlin Wall

The Berlin wall was built to efficiently cut-off Soviet-controlled East Berlin from the capitalistic west and stop East-Berliners fleeing towards the west (due to better economic conditions on the other side). Throughout the decades after the initial construction, the wall was improved and upgraded to become a virtually impermeable monument to oppression. It had mines, barbed wire, electric fences and guard posts. The population of East Berlin was forced to build the wall on the night of November 13th, 1961. The entire initial construction took only one night. A vast number of citizens of the GDR were forced to do so by the government. Walter Ulbricht’s official reasoning for building the wall was for it to act as an “antifaschistischer Schutzwall”
Essentially, the wall sealed off eastern Germans within their country. Thru out the decades after the initial construction, the wall was improved and upgraded to the point of being a deadly, airtight monument to oppression. West Germany, with a social market economy and the backing of the Marshall Plan, was soon much more prosperous than East Germany, which had a planned economy which was being drained by the Soviets. In the 50s and 60s, East Germans fled to West Germany in masses to escape their brutal regime, to avoid scarcity, to reunite with family and in the hopes of becoming prosperous abroad. Mainly young, healthy and educated people moved, further weakening the East German economy. Because of this mass emigration, the East German government decided to enforce the border between Germany and Germany. Many countries have borders to prevent people from freely moving between them. West Berlin was an island in the East German territory, and it still shared the subway, the sewer system, the electricity with East Berlin. The wall would prevent mass immigration from East Berlin to West
The capital of Germany, Berlin, is also divided into four. Those zones are controlled by the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and America. In 1947 the ideological Cold War began. Tensions rise between the zones. By 1949, three zones of Germany join to become the Federalist Republic of Germany (FRG). Berlin is now split in two. NATO is formed, and by 1955 West Germany joins NATO. The response to NATO, the 1955 Warsaw Pact is created. Eastern Germany is part of the pact and tensions rise between Western and Eastern Germany. In 1961, the Berlin Wall was constructed to keep people from leaving Communist East Berlin to Democratic Western Berlin. The Berlin Wall was a physical separation of the countries, the Iron Curtain of