QOTD

Frederick Taylor, describing the night East Germany sealed the West Berlin border, in The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 at 167-68 (2007):

Robert H. Lochner was probably the first American to know. Born in New York in 1918, [he had lived in Berlin between 1923 and 1936 and] by March 1961 . . .was back in Berlin as newly appointed director of the US-sponsored German language station, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS). . .

At one minute past midnight on Sunday 13 August 1961, Lochner was waken by a call from his station's monitoring section. East Berlin had announced that traffic from East to West Berlin would be halted until further notice.

[Using his American diplomatic passport, he twice drove into East Berlin that night.] A third trip, after dawn, took him to the Friedrichstrasse station, normally the last stop on both the main railway and S-Bahn lines before they trundled over the river Spree into the West. A few hours earlier, the East German transport police had suddenly closed the ticket halls and barred all access to trains scheduled for the West.

In the tunnels and halls below the embarkation area, Lochner found hundreds of East Germans milling around in bewilderment and growing desperation. As yet unaware of the border closure, they still hoped to catch trains for the West. Most would-be refugees carried suitcases or, in a pathetic attempt to disguise their intentions, parcels and boxes tied up with string. Access to the trains was blocked by lines of black-clad transport police (Trapos), who stood shoulder-to-shoulder blocking the 'up' steps to the platform, semi-automatic weapons slung ready for use. Lochner found himself irresistibly reminded, by their uniforms and arrogance, of Hitler's SS, whose unattractive qualities he knew well from pre-war days.

As Lochner stood by, watching the miserable scene, he saw an elderly lady gather up her courage and slowly climb the steps until she reached the line of Trapos.

'When,' she asked nervously, 'is the next train to West Berlin?'

The sneer with which the young representative of the regime greeted her request would stay burned into Lochner's memory.

'None of that any more, grandma,' [the policeman] told her. 'You're all sat in a mousetrap now.'