Design for a Nightmare

Much of the barbed wire is gone, and the ugly grey cinder blocks are rapidly giving way to trim slabs of concrete. Just a few feet away, workmen are busily dismantling the forbidding old wooden watchtowers and replacing them with neat rectangular structures that look more like mountaintop tourist lookouts than machine-gun nests. At first glance, the scene is strangely placid; Western visitors can hardly believe that they are at the edge of Berlin's infamous Wall.

Less Plausible. A closer look reveals the harsh realities. For all its outward appearance, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht's New Wall is even less passable--even, in fact, less plausible--than the crude barrier that first shocked the world six years ago. Ulbricht's new design (see diagram) has been conceived with chilling efficiency; to test it, the East Germans erected a prototype at an army camp, rounded up some of the country's best athletes and let them try to cross the barriers without interference. None could makeit. Ulbricht has already completed nearly a third of what he calls his "modern border," hopes to rebuild the entire 99.5-mile ring around West Berlin by 1970.

Ulbricht's blueprint envisions nine successive rows of obstacles within a strip, 300 or more ft. wide, abutting the border; each row, as in some medieval ordeal, is progressively more difficult. If an escapee manages merely to get near this highly guarded obstacle course, which varies with the terrain, he comes up almost immediately against two 5-ft.-high fences: the first keeps out stray animals, the second needs only the slightest touch to set off a cacophony of alarms. Just beyond them is a dog run, where 247 German shepherds already prowl sectors of the border. The escapee may also stumble over wires rigged to trigger flares.

"Antifascist" Ditch. By now he is directly under the glaring searchlights and Russian-made machine guns of Ulbricht's 15,000 Grepos (Grenzpolizei or border guards). Each watchtower is manned by two sentries who are under orders to shoot to kill. In case of heavy firing from either East or West, the Grepos can retreat to 188 new concrete bunkers, which have been built alongside and in front of the towers. A few steps farther is an asphalt pavement, just wide enough to enable armored vehicles to race up and down the border; it is followed by an area of plowed earth and then by Ulbricht's "antifascist" tank ditch, which has actually been dug to stop vehicles that might try to escape from his own East.

For the final dash, the escapee must cross the new version of the old Death Strip. This is now, variously, a 100-ft. lawn or a cinder covering, where powerful mercury-vapor lamps make even the most fleeting figure an easy target at night. In some places, there is the added hazard of hidden 6-in. steel spikes. In the unlikely event that he gets this far, the escapee finds himself before the New Wall itself. It is not only smoother and higher (15 ft. v. 9-12 ft.) than its predecessor but is topped by a 15-in.-wide pipe that, unlike the old barbed wire, makes any hand grip impossible. The Wall is now nicely whitewashed; besides the esthetic consideration, this gives the Grepos a better backdrop for shooting.

The Wall has already effectively ended the great exodus of East Germans; no more than 3,500 civilians have been able to get through since 1961, though it is a telling indictment of Ulbricht's rule that 499 of his supposedly reliable Grepos have also fled. Ulbricht's New Wall is meant to look less patently hideous to the West, which cannot see the Kafkaesque nightmare behind it, but it will probably cut off completely even the hope of escape. The message that Ulbricht wants to deliver to his own people and to the Germans across the border is that there is also no hope that either the Wall or his Communist regime will wither away.

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