Potsdam : On the 60th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, the leader of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union Armin Laschet paid tribute to its victims on the former border between East and West Germany, said dpa international.
“Only an unjust state shoots at its own people,” said Laschet on Friday at a commemoration event at the Glienicke Bridge in Potsdam, where multiple spy exchanges between US and Soviet intelligence agencies occurred during the Cold War.
Saying he represented all the victims of the Wall, Laschet paid tribute in particular to 20-year-old Chris Gueffroy, who was the last victim to be shot as he attempted to cross the death strip in February 1989. The wall fell later the same year.
Laschet, who is the CDU’s candidate for chancellor in next month’s German election and the likely successor to Angela Merkel, recalled watching the fall of the Wall on November 9 1989 in his home town of Aachen. “I cried with joy at what you saw on television,” he said.
Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier paid tribute to the victims of decades of division and described the wall as “testimony to a hopeless failure”.
“The Wall was the unmistakable sign of an unjust state that was neither sovereign nor legitimate in the eyes of its own citizens. Basically the beginning of the end – which, however, was all too long in coming,” Steinmeier said at the central commemoration in Berlin on Friday.
“13 August 1961 was a fateful day for us Germans and for the world – and a day that destroyed hopes and dreams, that separated parents from children, grandparents from grandchildren, that intervened painfully and sorrowfully in the lives of countless individuals,” he continued.
“When we remember the building of the Wall today, we also remember the dead and injured and those arrested – all those who put their lives on the line for the sake of freedom.”
The building of the concrete barrier rapidly turned into a major symbol of the Cold War and Europe’s post-Second World War divide.
East German soldiers began the moves to build what the communist authorities described as the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier when they laid out more than 48 kilometres of barbed wire through central Berlin in the night to August 13, 1961.
Guard towers quickly sprung up in the east along the hated wall to oversee the so-called death strip between Germany’s western and eastern parts, with East German citizens essentially forbidden from travelling to the west. About 5,000 succeeded in escaping.
The Berlin Wall’s construction also came after a steady flow of East German citizens headed to the west during the first 12 years of the pro-Moscow state, which was founded in 1949.
The wall was finally swept away in a popular revolution in the east in November 1989, paving the way for Germany’s historic unification.
Steinmeier said the Berlin Wall serves as an enduring reminder to not take democracy for granted.
“Freedom and democracy are never given by nature, never achieved once and for all. Freedom and democracy must be fought for, but then protected, defended and preserved. Freedom and democracy need decisive commitment and passion.”
