On the 27th of November 1958, Berlin was the scene of another international crisis when Nikita Khrushchev issued an ultimatum to the three western powers, giving them six months to turn West Berlin into a " demilitarized free city " (Khrushchev, 453). This ultimatum marked the start of a long crisis which came to a head with the building of the Wall. Talks on Berlin between the Soviets and the West, first in Geneva (May-August 1959), then in Paris (May 1960) and finally in Vienna (June 1961), failed to produce results (Khrushchev, 457).

Meanwhile, tension continued to rise around Berlin, as refugees continued to flock out of East Germany, destabilizing the regime. Walter Ulbricht repeatedly asked Khrushchev for permission to take radical steps. At the meeting of Communist Party heads in Moscow on the 5th of August, he finally got what he

People in the east were so unhappy with life in communist East Germany that they would risk their lives to get out. During first two years that the wall separated Berlin, 16,500 people had managed to escape alive (Heaps, 27). However the wall was responsible for many German deaths. In the first two years sixty-eight people were shot to death, and 618 more were fired at (Heaps, 30). The attempts to flee, and most definitely those that resulted in death, reinforced the outrage and discontent produced by the wall.

Therefor the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 was unjustified in the sense that it was not in the best interest of any human being in that area. There were an abundant amount of faults to the wall as apposed to the scarce few pros. The Berlin Wall, was made of barbed wire and reinforced concrete, but it was also made of ignorance.

As a result of discontent with the economic and political conditions (forced collectivization of agriculture, repression of private trade, supply gaps), an expanding amount of people left the German Democratic Republic (Speier, 133). From January to the beginning of August 1961, about 160,000 refugees were counted. Also, the international political situation was tense. On the 27th of November, the Soviets had delivered their Berlin ultimatum, demanding that the western allies should withdraw their troops from West Berlin and that West Berlin should become a "Free City" within six months (Wyden, 342). On 1959-02-17, the threat of settling a separate peace treaty between the USSR and the German Democratic Republic followed. The meeting between US President Kennedy and the Prime Minister of the USSR, Khrushchev, on June 3rd and 4th in 1961 in Vienna ended without any noticeable results. (Wyden, 350)

By nightfall on the 13th of August 1961 the Warsaw Pact nations (the Soviet Union and it's European satellites) instructed that the government of East Germany "take action to introduce a system on the boarder of West Berlin that will effectively check the subverse action against the countries of the Socialist [communist] camp and install a reliable watch and control system around the whole area of West Berlin, including it's boundaries with Democrati

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1486
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)