page_title: Inner German border
section_title: Emigrating from East Germany
hierarchical_section_title: Inner German border / Crossing the inner German border / Emigrating from East Germany
caption_attribution_description: English: Deutsche Reichsbahn carriages of a Hannover-Magdeburg train wait at Oebisfelde whilst Passports are checked. Photography before 1990 may have caused problems here. The GDR emblem guarded some platform lavatories of which I have a photograph somewhere.
context_page_description: The Inner German border was the border between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1990. Not including the similar and physically separate Berlin Wall, the border was 1,393 kilometres long and ran from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia.
  It was formally established on 1 July 1945 as the boundary between the Western and Soviet occupation zones of former Nazi Germany. On the eastern side, it was made one of the world's most heavily fortified frontiers, defined by a continuous line of high metal fences and walls, barbed wire, alarms, anti-vehicle ditches, watchtowers, automatic booby traps, and minefields. It was patrolled by 50,000 armed East German guards who faced tens of thousands of West German, British, and US guards and soldiers. In the hinterlands behind the border were more than a million North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and Warsaw Pact troops.
  The border was a physical manifestation of Sir Winston Churchill's metaphorical Iron Curtain that separated the Soviet and Western blocs during the Cold War. It marked the boundary between two economic systems – capitalism and communism.
context_section_description: There was no formal legal basis under which a citizen could emigrate from East Germany. In 1975, however, East Germany signed up to the Helsinki Accords, a pan-European treaty to improve relations between the countries of Europe. An increasing number of East German citizens sought to use the Accords' provision on freedom of movement to secure exit visas. By the late 1980s, over 100,000 applications for visas were being submitted annually with around 15,000–25,000 being granted.
  The GDR's government nonetheless remained opposed to emigration and sought to dissuade would-be émigrés. The process of applying for an exit permit was deliberately made slow, demeaning, frustrating and often fruitless. Applicants were marginalised, demoted or sacked from their jobs, excluded from universities and subjected to ostracism. They faced the threat of having their children taken into state custody on the grounds that they were unfit to bring up children. The law was used to punish those who continued to apply for emigration; over 10,000 applicants were arrested by the Stasi between the 1970s and 1989.
  A report for the Central Committee's security section noted: "The emigration problem is confronting us with a fundamental problem of the GDR's development. Experience shows that the current repertoire of solutions (improved travel possibilities, expatriation of applicants, etc.) have not brought the desired results, but rather the opposite." The agitation for emigration, the report concluded, "threatens to undermine beliefs in the correctness of the Party's policies."
caption: Crossing the border by rail at Oebisfelde railway station, April 1990
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