But the Wall didn't appear overnight. The seeds were sown as early as May 1952, when the Soviets prohibited residents of the three western sectors from entering the eastern sector. Inner city phone lines were broken off, and the next year bus and streetcars followed suit. But the subways and suburban trains still continued across the city, and hundreds of thousands of East Berliners commuted daily over open sector borders. Many were even employed in the West. In the meanwhile, there was much unrest in the Soviet-occupied post-war world. On June 17, 1953, East German workers rose up, calling for free elections and the resignation of the repressive government. Soviet tanks bloodily crushed the rebellion in East Berlin and in 200 other locations in East Germany. To this day, the number of victims remains uncertain.
Strasse des 17. Juni, a major thoroughfare which runs through the Tiergarten and meets the Unter den Linden at the Brandenburger Tor, was named in honor of the those who died in the uprising. Ironically, the street now runs right past the Soviet War Memorial. The actual site of the uprising began at a construction site on Stalinallee - originally named Frankfurter Allee before the war. The name of the street was once again changed to Karl Mark Allee in 1961, and today remains an important commerical thoroughfare of the Friedrichshain district. But crushing the rebellion did nothing more than make East Germans determined to leave the GDR, and the most accessible escape route was via Berlin. During 1953, 332,000 refugees entered West Germany. Between 1954 and 1958, some 1.5 million left. Nearly two-thirds were professionals or skilled tradesmen; almost half were under the age of 25. The GDR was being drained of its youth and its skilled population. An increasing shortage of workers and specialists resulted.
Once again the Kremlin sought to eliminate the troublesome West Berlin, which they saw as a capitalist blight in the midst of their communist utopia. They briefly tried another land blockade, but West Berlin had provisions stored for one year. Soviet Party Leader Nikita Khrushchev then demanded the transformation of West Berlin into a "free and demilitarized city," and set up a deadline for the Allied forces to withdraw. The deadline came and went, and the new American president, John Kennedy, increased military spending for West Berlin and strengthened U.S. forces. So if the Soviet Union couldn't drive the West out, the only thing left to do was box them in.
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