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In June of the year, GDR’s top Communist, Walter Ulbricht, still denied that “anyone considered building a wall” to close the escape route to West Germany. But two months later, after he received an O.K. from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Ulbricht ordered – typically, in a cabinet meeting disguised as a Saturday night garden party – the construction of the Berlin Wall.

At midnight on August 12, East German police and army closed the border and by Sunday morning, East German troops and workers had begun to tear up streets and install barbed-wire entanglements and fences. Brazen as it was, the subsequent construction of the parallel concrete walls was carefully located inside East Berlin to ensure that the complex did not encroach on the Allied sectors.

John le Carré, the author of the classical spy novel, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” witnessed the rise of the Berlin Wall as a young British diplomat. He later wrote,

“And the Wall stayed up. It was strengthened and heightened. It was protected by mined strips and earth brushed so fine you could trace a rabbit’s paw across it. Occasionally, someone climbed over it, or crashed through it, or dug under it, or made himself a glider and flew [over] it.”

About 5,000 East Germans had managed to flee, and at least 136 had been shot dead while trying to escape, by the time the Wall came down in 1989. In the meantime, West Berlin became an isolated enclave with only four roads on which the Western powers were authorized to travel to and from the city through the hostile East Germany.

The Berlin Wall was built...

secretly, by using a dinner party as cover to begin construction.

directly through the middle of American controlled west Berlin.

by continuing construction with very little support from the communist Soviet Union.

by closing the border overnight and immediately beginning construction.

All Answers 1

Answered by GPT-5 mini AI
by closing the border overnight and immediately beginning construction.

The passage says East German police and army closed the border at midnight on August 12, and by Sunday morning troops and workers had begun tearing up streets and installing barbed wire and fences.