In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy paid a memorable visit to West Berlin, the divided city deep inside communist East Germany.
In the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, the people of Berlin were awakened by the rumbling of heavy machinery barreling down their street toward the line that divided the eastern and western parts of the city. Groggy citizens looked on as work details began digging holes and jack hammering sidewalks, clearing the way for the barbed wire that would eventually be strung across the dividing line. Armed troops manned the crossing points between the two sides and, by morning, a ring of Soviet troops surrounded the city. In one night, the freedom to pass between the two sections of Berlin had been abruptly halted.
Running through cemeteries and along canals, zigzagging through the city streets, the Berlin Wall was the tangible result of a showdown between two competing ideologies in the post-war world. Just two months earlier, in June 1961, President Kennedy had traveled to Vienna, Austria for a summit with Nikita Khrushchev. Not only was the summit unsuccessful in its goal of building trust between the two countries, but it also increased tensions between the two superpowers--particularly in discussions regarding the divided city of Berlin.
Berlin was at the heart of the Cold War. At the end of World War II, the Allied powers (the U.S., France and England) and the Soviet Union divided Germany into two zones. West Germany, occupied by the Allies, was a capitalist democracy. East Germany, occupied by the Soviet Union, was a rigidly controlled communist state. The city of Berlin, located in East Germany, was also divided. Though surrounded by East Germany, half of Berlin—West Berlin—was actually part of West Germany. Many East Germans who did not want to live in a communist country were moving to West Berlin, where they could either settle or find transportation to the west.
During the June 1961 Vienna summit, Khrushchev threatened Kennedy that he would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, effectively cutting off Allied access to West Berlin. Kennedy was startled by Khrushchev’s combative style and tone and unsettled by the premier’s threat. In a July 25 address to the American people President Kennedy announced that the United States might need to defend its rights militarily with Berlin:
So long as the communists insist that they are preparing to end by themselves unilaterally our rights in West Berlin and our commitments to its people, we must be prepared to defend those rights and those commitments. We will at times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us. Either alone would fail. Together, they can serve the cause of freedom and peace.
President Kennedy also ordered substantial increases in American intercontinental ballistic missile forces, added five new army divisions, and increased the nation’s air power and military reserves.
By 1961, four million East Germans had moved west. This was not only a symbolic problem for Khrushchev—an illustration of the dissatisfaction of East Germans with their way of life—but an economic one as well, since East Germany was losing its workers. To stop the flood of people into West Germany, Khrushchev ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. The massive wall of concrete blocks divided the city of Berlin in half, and provided a physical symbol of the Iron Curtain. In 1962, the Soviets and East Germans added a second barrier, about 100 yards behind the original wall, creating a tightly-policed no-man's-land between the walls that would eventually claim the lives of 263 people attempting to flee to the West.
The escalation of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States continued. Though Kennedy chose not to challenge directly the Soviet Union’s building of the Berlin Wall, he reluctantly resumed testing nuclear weapons in early 1962, following the lead of the Soviet Union.
In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy visited Berlin and was greeted by ecstatic crowds who showered his entourage with flowers, rice and torn paper. In the Rudolph Wilde Platz, Kennedy gave one of his most memorable speeches to a rapt audience:
There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.
No other American politician had met with such joy and enthusiasm on a visit to Germany. Shortly after President Kennedy’s death in November of 1963, the square where he had made his famous speech was renamed the John F. Kennedy Platz.