Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain is depicted as a black/white line. Warsaw Pact countries on one side of the Iron Curtain appear shaded red; NATO members on the other are shaded blue; militarily neutral countries are shaded grey. The black dot is Berlin. Yugoslavia, although it was communist-run, remained largely independent of the two major blocs and is shaded green. Communist Albania broke contacts with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, aligning itself with the People's Republic of China after the Sino-Soviet split and is stripe-hatched by grey.
The Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological conflict and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The term symbolized efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the west and non-Soviet-controlled areas. Analogous terms[edit] Other analogs include: A field of cacti surrounding the U.S. Pre–Cold War usage[edit] Iron Curtain Speech by Winston Churchill. East Germany. The German Democratic Republic (GDR; German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik [ˈdɔʏtʃə demoˈkʀaːtɪʃə ʀepuˈbliːk] or DDR), colloquially known in English as East Germany, was a state within the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War period. From 1949 to 1990, it administered the region of Germany which was occupied by Soviet forces at the end of the Second World War—the Soviet Occupation Zone of the Potsdam Agreement, bounded on the east by the Oder-Neisse line. The Soviet zone surrounded West Berlin, but did not include it; as a result, West Berlin remained outside the control of the GDR.
The German Democratic Republic was established in the Soviet Zone, while the Federal Republic was established in the three western zones. The East was often described as a satellite state of the Soviet Union.[3] Soviet occupation authorities began transferring administrative responsibility to German communist leaders in 1948, and the GDR began to function as a state on 7 October 1949.
Naming conventions[edit] Berlin Blockade. The Berlin blockade (24 June 1948 – 12 May 1949) was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under allied control.
Their aim was to force the western powers to allow the Soviet zone to start supplying Berlin with food, fuel, and aid, thereby giving the Soviets practical control over the entire city. In response, the Western Allies organized the Berlin airlift to carry supplies to the people in West Berlin.[1][2] Aircrews from the United States Air Force, the British Royal Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Royal Australian Air Force, the Royal New Zealand Air Force, and the South African Air Force[3]:338 flew over 200,000 flights in one year, providing up to 4700 tons of necessities daily, such as fuel and food, to the Berliners.[4] Postwar division of Germany[edit] Sectors of divided Berlin. Berlin Wall - The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall.
What Was the Berlin Wall? The Berlin Wall was both the physical division between West Berlin and East Germany from 1961 to 1989 and the symbolic boundary between democracy and Communism during the Cold War. Dates: August 13, 1961 -- November 9, 1989 Also Known As: Berliner Mauer (in German) Overview of the Berlin Wall The Berlin Wall was erected in the dead of night and for 28 years kept East Germans from fleeing to the West. A Divided Berlin At the end of World War II, the Allied powers divided conquered Germany into four zones, each occupied by either the United States, Great Britain, France, or the Soviet Union (as agreed at the Potsdam Conference).
As the relationship between the Soviet Union and the other three Allied powers quickly disintegrated, the cooperative atmosphere of the occupation of Germany turned competitive and aggressive. This same division into West and East occurred in Berlin. Mass Emigration Nearly the opposite was true in East Germany. The Berlin Wall Goes Up.