Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain was the name given to the giant border which descended across Central Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, one which divided the western-aligned states of the continent like France, West Germany and Italy from others within the Soviet bloc such as East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Iron Curtain was a hard border, one through which the communist regimes in countries like East Germany and Hungary sought to prevent their citizens passing through to escape to the more liberal states of Western Europe. However, it was also porous at certain times during the Cold War. For instance, the second half of the 1940s, when Europe was still in a period of immense flux after the Second World War, saw millions of people crossing the new borders of the continent’s nation states. Various revolts and developments over the next half century made the Iron Curtain passable at different times leading to considerable migration within Europe and further afield during the Cold War.

Iron Curtain chronology of events

The Iron Curtain across Europe

The Iron Curtain is typically believed to have been first described by the former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, during a famous speech he gave at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946. Here he famously proclaimed that “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain had descended across the continent.” Churchill was, of course, referring to the fact that all of the nation states east of this line had adopted communism and authoritarianism in the aftermath of the Second World War. These included East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union itself including Ukraine, the Baltic States and Belarus. Churchill was not the first individual to describe this line of Soviet power as an iron curtain descending across the continent, but his declaration concerning it is the most well-known. Over the next fifteen years this iron curtain would become more and more impenetrable as the Soviets and their allies sought to prevent millions of their subjects fleeing to the more liberal states of western Europe such as West Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy or Austria.

The Prague Spring of 1968

The Iron Curtain was more permeable at certain times than at others during the four and a half decade long period that the Cold War lasted. For instance, Europe’s borders were extremely fluid in 1945, 1946 and 1947 as millions of people traversed the continent to return to their home countries after spending years abroad fighting or even being used as forced laborers in countries like Germany. In some cases borders were simply being redrawn and nobody knew where they stood in 1945. Thereafter the Soviets began to tighten the borders, but in areas they remained fluid, notably in Germany where until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 it was easy for people to move from East Germany to West Germany through the capital, and many millions did so between 1945 and 1961. Other countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia only tightened their borders after insurrections against the communist regimes there. This was the case in Hungary in 1956 and following the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. The borders in these countries were only loosened once again as the Cold War began to come to an end in 1989 and 1990.

Migration surrounding the Iron Curtain

Despite the best efforts of the Soviets and their allies in Berlin, Prague, Budapest and other Eastern European capitals, millions of individuals fled through the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. It is estimated that as many as 15 million people alone headed for Western Europe between the end of the Second World War in the summer of 1945 and the end of 1949. Indeed this mass migration had already started in 1944 as the Red Army advanced into Nazi-controlled territories in Poland and the Baltic States and people there began to flee from reprisals, murders, mass rapes and the possibility of living under Soviet rule for decades to come. By the end of the war approximately 300,000 people had fled from the Baltic States region around what are now Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Elsewhere millions of Poles were displaced as the war came to an end and many of these headed westwards.

It continued like this into the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. By this time the borders were tightened in parts of western Czechoslovakia, western Hungary and along the long border between West Germany and East Germany in the center of the modern-day nation of Germany. However, a hole in his iron curtain remained in Berlin, a city which had been divided in two, with West Berlin remaining an isolated part of West Germany throughout the Cold War. Prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall around West Berlin in 1961, it was almost impossible for the government of East Germany to prevent people from escaping to West Germany by crossing into West Berlin. As a consequence, over three and a half million people, many of them younger, better-educated Germans, escaped to West Germany though Berlin in the 1950s.

Further episodes brought mass migrations that required the communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe to tighten their border defenses. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, approximately 170,000 Hungarians fled over the border into Austria in the space of just a few months. Others made their way southwards from countries like Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland into Yugoslavia, a fellow communist state, though one with a more liberal approach to migration. When all of this is taken together, despite the supposed impermeability of the Iron Curtain, there were tens of millions of people who escaped from the Soviet Eastern bloc into Western Europe in the course of the Cold War.

Demographic impact of the Iron Curtain

The demographic impact of all of this migration was very considerable, but also complex. It was not limited to movement between one or two countries on either side, but rather involved dozens of countries. A clear example is that the population of West Germany increased very considerably in the years between 1945 and 1961 as millions of East Germans fled to the west. But in other instances things were much more complex. For instance, of the 170,000 Hungarians who fled their country in late 1956 and early 1957, some 30,000 were settled in the United States under Operation Safe Haven launched by the government of President Dwight Eisenhower, but a great many others of these ended up dispersed widely throughout countries like Austria, West Germany, Italy and France. Similarly, the millions of Poles who were displaced in the 1940s ended up variously resettling in Germany, France, the Low Countries and other regions, with Sweden also acting as a popular destination across the Baltic Sea for many Poles. Similarly, 150,000 Poles had settled in Britain by the end of the 1940s. Thus, the entire picture of migration across the Iron Curtain was very complicated.

Explore more about Eastern Europe

• Soviet Union, Award Records, 1939-1991 record collection on MyHeritage
• Russian historical records on MyHeritage
• Best Internet Resources for East European Genealogy, webinar by Lisa A. Alzo, M.F.A. on Legacy Family Tree Webinars

References

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