Between 1959 and 1962 Boelcke was in receipt of a research scholarship for the Bonn-based &lt;a href="German%20Research%20Foundation"&gt;German Research Foundation ("Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft" / DFG)&lt;/a&gt;. During the 1950s the political administrative borders between East and West Berlin were progressively reinforced with physical barriers, and it became harder for Berliners to view their city as a single entity. Nevertheless, until the sudden appearance in August 1961 of the Berlin Wall it was not impossible for East Germans to cross over to West Berlin and from there to make their way to a new life West Germany in pursuit of greater freedom and prosperity. Between 1953 and 1961 several million East Germans did just that, leaving behind them an intensifying labour shortage. At some point between 1959 and (probably) 1961, Willi Alfred Boelcke became one of the intra-German emigrants. Sources are silent as to the extent and duration of his debriefing. In 1967 he received his habilitation (higher university degree) from the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim. His degree topic this time was "Constitutional changes and economic structures" covering the medieval and modern periods, taking examples from the traditionally aristocratically ruled central German lands covering approximately the modern territories identified during much of the twentieth century as Thuringia and Saxony. Other things being equal, the habilitation opened the way to a lifelong career in the West German universities sector. He accepted a professorship in Economic and Social Historian at the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim in 1969 and remained in the post for more than a quarter of a century, until 1994.