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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Were the armed guards there to keep the western trains from stopping or for keeping easterners from escaping via the tunnels?

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I think this is one of those cases where the most correct answer is simply "yes".

Realistically, the guards were put there to halt the transfer of people, goods, and currency: to be the physical manifestation of a hard border. Although, the motivation for this border (who it benefits, is it to keep "others" out vs "us" in) was a dynamic concept that evolved over time.

However, if you integrate the motivation function over the entire time of separation, which is one way of reducing the complexity, the primary result is to keep easterners from escaping. In the early days of widening division, there was a mass migration of people fleeing "The East"; each person carried a multitude of reasons for their flight. One effect of the border was to halt this flow.

There were easterners who sincerely viewed this differently, and wanted to keep westerners out (especially the "spies"!); however, their perspectives were definitely a minority, and don't survive the integral.

The thing that really drove this home for me was the way the wall was built literally overnight with no warning to the public to prevent people from fleeing.

This fact, that "the wall was built literally overnight", also reflects how ad-hoc and dramatic the decision to raise the wall actually was. At the time, people had no idea how "real" the newborn borders were going to be, because something like that had literally never happened before, there was no precedent.

If you're interested in the topic of the east/west German border's materialization over time, I'd recommend you to Edith Sheffer's excellent book on the subject [0]. It focuses on adjacent villages in Thuringia, and how they took turns coping with, helping create, and profiting from the existence of the border.

It's a great illustration of Simpson's paradox [1]: something that looks kind of simple on the surface (of course there would be a border between NATO and Warsaw Pact), becomes more complicated when you glance at the details (the people living on either side were mostly German citizens, with ideas and ambitions and fulfilling lives).

Then, you zoom in on the details (individual people, families, towns, neighborhoods), and again you're presented with something comprehensible. For example, a mayor can get special funding from the Marshall Plan, by emphasizing the propaganda opportunity of building attractions near the border; to get this money, it's helpful to sell the idea of a fundamental difference between east and west; once the attractions are built, there is now a real difference between east and west, whereas before it was imaginary. When you zoom out, it's these little independent assertions of autonomy and appeals to authority that motivate the creation of a border. Super fascinating stuff.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Burned-Bridge-East-Germans-Curtain/dp...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

Don’t forget keeping spies at bay. Berlin was a notorious hotbed of espionage, for obvious reasons, and East German authorities had already enough trouble controlling the existing checkpoints without having to add new ones.

You really think only East Germans had issues with espionage?

As the parent comment referred to the Geisterbahnhöfe as in East Berlin, it stands to reason that they were patrolled by East German guards, hence discussing the reasons for East Germans to keep them closed.

(As an aside, why do you feel the need to be so confrontational...?)

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