Seventh-day Adventists view Rome prophetically as having had a pagan phase and a papal phase. It is useful to think of World War II as having had a short hot war phase and a long cold war phase. The hot war ended very unsatisfactorily for the people of Eastern Europe.
The Americans came to liberate the people of Western Europe, and after having done so, committed $12 billion in aid to help them rebuild ($100 billion in today’s dollars). The Russians “liberated” the people of Eastern Europe from the Nazis, but then they didn’t go home.
As Churchill put it, in his famous 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri:
“A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies. . . . It is my duty . . . to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."
Churchill’s “Iron Curtain speech” was, if anything, too optimistic about the fate of Eastern Europe. The communist Soviet Union was even then in the process of imposing a totalitarian form of socialism, one that was every bit as bad as Nazism, on Eastern Europe. They made Eastern Europe into a series of slave states controlled from Moscow, and they would have done the same to Western Europe, had not the American military been onsite to stop them.
And so it remain for the next 44 years. Any attempts to reform the soul-crushing slavery of socialism, or to deviate from the Soviet plan, were crushed by Russian tanks, as in Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
At the end of WWII, the Western part of Berlin was occupied by the Western allies: American, British, and French, and the Soviets occupied the Eastern part of the city. The allies stayed in place, even though the line dividing communist East Germany from free West Germany was well to the west, making West Berlin an island of freedom in a Soviet slave state. In 1948, the Soviets cut it off and refused land traffic through East Germany to Berlin, but the Western powers, principally the United States, saved West Berlin with a massive airlift.
West Berlin became the the favorite escape route of those seeking freedom. Between 1945 and 1961, some 3.5 million East Germans escaped communist tyranny through West Berlin, a number constituting approximately 20% of the entire East German population. The communists had to do something, or they wouldn’t have any people left. So they built the Berlin Wall, and fortified it with guard towers, machine guns, and barbed wire. Berlin soon went from being the easiest place to escape communism to being one of the most difficult.
The wall didn’t stop people from trying to defect to the West; some succeeded but at least 140 were killed trying to get over the wall, as guards were issued “shoot to kill” orders. At least 70 tunnels were dug, 19 of which were successfully used to escape; some 400 people escaped through tunnels over the years. One tunneling project that resulted in the escape of 29 students, in September, 1962, has been dramatized in at least two different movies.
The Berlin Wall became a dramatic symbol of the failure of the communist world as compared to the free world. Nothing quite so eloquently pointed out the superiority of free enterprise over communism as the fact that the communist countries had to build elaborate walls to keep their citizens within their prison state. American presidents were quick to see this. On June 26, 1963, John F. Kennedy delivered one of his finest speeches:
“There are many people in this world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world. Let them come to Berlin! There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin! . . . And there are even a few who say that its true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Let them come to Berlin!”
“Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us. . . . Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were on the front lines for almost two decades. All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ [I am a Berliner] All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!"
Likewise, in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan visited Berlin, he gave one of his finest speeches:
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev . . . Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
By then, it wouldn’t be long before the wall came down. Even then the Soviets were losing the will to kill large numbers of Eastern Europeans in the lost cause of imposing communism.
The dominoes began to fall in June, 1988, when the Polish labor union, Solidarity, forced the communist government to hold elections. Jaruzelski agreed to a deal allowing opposition candidates to fill 35 percent of the seats in the crucial lower house of a bicameral legislature (the Sejm), but allowing all 100 seats of a new Senate to be freely contested. Solidarity ended up sweeping both houses of the legislature, because a quirk in the law provided that no one could serve without receiving 50% of the vote, and voters simply crossed out the names of 33 of 35 Communist officials on the ballot, so that they did not receive 50% of the vote. Solidarity formed the new government, and a non-Communist prime minister took office in August.
Hungary went next, quietly opening its border with Austria, which allowed anyone from Eastern Europe to escape to the free world. Hundreds of thousands quickly escaped. This spelled doom to the communist system throughout Eastern Europe.
On November 4, 1989, a million people took to the streets of East Berlin. On November 9 the Politburo decided to lift all travel restrictions. At the end of a routine daily press briefing at 7 pm, a Politburo spokesman made a low-key announcement that “private trips abroad can be applied for, and permits will be granted promptly. . . Permanent emigration is henceforth allowed across all border crossing points between East Germany and West Germany and West Berlin.” Surprisingly, the East German government did not understand that opening its borders would essentially end its regime.
Within hours thousands of Germans from both sides of the Berlin divide descended on the Wall, where bewildered guards didn’t know what to do. Soon people with picks and hammers climbed atop the wall and started its destruction. The celebration was ebullient; decades of unwanted, Soviet-enforced socialism were finally at an end.
Otto Bamel, a West German diplomat living in East Germany when the wall came down reported, “Early in the morning [of the 10th] we saw a piece of paper on our kitchen table from our youngest boy, Jens, telling us, ‘I crossed the wall. I jumped over the wall at the Brandenburg Gate with my friends. I took my East Berlin friends with me.’
“I said to my wife, ‘Something is wrong.’ Without eating we took our bicycles and went to the border . . . There were people crossing the border on foot and in cars and on bicycles and motorbikes. It was just overwhelming. Nobody expected it … The joy about this event was just overwhelming all other thoughts. This was so joyful and so unbelievable.”
Berlin was reunited. Germany was reunited. The Second World War had finally ended.
These are the joyous scenes on the night the Berlin Wall began to tumble, on November 9, 1989.