Name: Why the Iron Curtain Still Keeps Germany Divided
Uploaded: 2026-01-22T17:14:13.000Z
Duration: 40 min 6 s
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Near the end Of February in 2025, Germany hosted what has perhaps become their most historically significant federal election since the reunification of the country in the early 1990s.

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The previously governing Center Left party, the SPD, suffered its worst electoral defeat in Germany's history since the time of Otto von Bismarck back in 1887.

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While a clear political divide emerged across the country, seen in electoral maps like this one, the eastern regions of Germany were colored in the bright blue of a relatively new political party called the Alternative for Germany, better known by its German langu initials, the AfD, a party that was only founded a little over a decade ago, in 2013 that is now most often associated with the far right that has also been linked to neo Nazis.

The AfD's blue in the east contrasted sharply with the black of the Christian Democratic Union's victory across the west, one of Germany's other more traditional parties, that is more center right on the political spectrum.

And almost immediately, it cannot help but be noticed that the border within Germany between where the AFD dominated in the east and where the CDU dominated in the west was followed almost precisely the exact border of the former Iron Curtain that divided the country during the Cold War era, back when West Germany and East Germany were separate countries ruled by competing ideologies for decades between 1949 and 1990.

The massive political differences that appeared between the former west and East Germanys in February's election, however, did not just end there.

The AFD didn't just win in all of the former states of East Germany, it completely dominated them nationwide.

The afd won nearly 21% of the total German vote in the election, its best all time record and the highest share of the vote that any far right party in Germany has ever achieved since the era of the Third Reich.

But in all of the states of the former East Germany, the AFD massively outperformed its nationwide averages.

They secured more than 38% of the vote in Thuringia, more than 37% in both Saxony and Saxony Anhalt, 35% in Mecklenburg Vorpommern and 32.5% in Brandenburg, while they only averaged about 18% of the vote in the states of the former West Germany.

And interestingly, the AFD wasn't the only non traditional populist party that performed exceptionally well in the former east of Germany either.

The bsw, a generally far left party that also maintained certain similar positions as the AFD on friendliness towards Russia and opposition towards migration, performed much better in the east than in the west as well.

And taken together, the AfD and the BSW achieved nearly half of all the votes in Thuringia, Saxony Saxony Anhalt and Mecklenburg Vorpimer.

Then there's also the other far left German party, Die Linke, the modern successor party to East Germany's former ruling Communist Party, which, just like the AfD and the BSW, performed significantly better in the former East Germany than it did in the West.

All things considered, the majority of Germans across the former East Germany voted for either far right or far left political parties during this most recent election, and

rejected Germany's more traditional center parties, which stood in stark contrast to the Germans in the former West Germany, whose majorities continued choosing to vote for the country's more centrist parties and rejected the extremes These clear political differences that you can see on a map between the former east and West Germany in today's Germany, however, are far from the only time that that ghostly BO border between them continues showing up again.

For example, here's a map showing the ratio of younger people in Germany today aged between 25 and 35, where you can clearly see the former border of the Iron Curtain between the east and the West.

Here's a map showing the current unemployment rate in Germany that still shows the same east west difference.

Or how about this map showing disposable income per capita in Germany?

Or this map showing population growth rates in Germany between 1987 and 2019.

Maybe this map that shows the proportion of Germans without a migrant background and related to that this map showing the distribution of Turkish migrants to Germany.

And this map showing incidents of anti refugee violence events between 2014 and 2015.

Then there's maps like this one that show where German women earn more than German men.

This map showing where childcare is more commonly practiced.

This map showing the amount of trash produced per citizen in Germany.

This map showing the differences in religion in modern day Germany.

This map showing where all of Germany's most major corporate headquarters are located today.

And this map showing the level of life satisfaction in modern day Germany.

Even if you look at Berlin tonight from far above, you'll still to this day see a clear divide through the city that precisely follows the path of the Berlin Wall that separated the city for decades between 1961 and 1989, with the former east and West Berlin still using noticeably different light colors.

In truth, no matter the data that you're trying to show on a map of Germany today, you'll pretty much always see the same pattern emerging between the former east and West Germany following the historical Iron Curtain.

And that then begs the question why, after 35 years now, following the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of Germany in 1990, are east and West Germany still so different and divided today in 2025?

And what lessons might that hold for other divided societies that might want to reunify in the world today, like north and South Korea?

In order to understand this, it's necessary first to understand how Germany was initially divided between east and west at the conclusion of the Second World War, and

how that began, leading to modern Germany's internal division we still see today.

By 1945, at the end of the war, millions of tons of bombs had been dropped by the Allies across German cities.

But the damage done wasn't geographically equal.

The cities in what would soon become West Germany, on average, were significantly more damaged than the cities in what would become East Germany, owing to the fact that they were closer in range to British and American bombers for longer.

With the notable exceptions of some East German cities like Dresden, Magdeburg and Berlin that were significantly destroyed by the war, most of the other cities in what would become East Germany were spared from the level of destruction that was experienced in cities further to the West.

Thus, after Germany was divided between a Soviet occupation zone in the east and by a Western Allied occupation zone in the west, the Soviet side was actually the one that started with the greater theoretical advantage of being relatively more intact.

And it's perhaps because of that advantage that actually doomed the East.

You see, because the east of Germany was more intact after the war than the west was, it also meant that there were more spoils to loot and pillage.

And the Soviets that came to occupy the east were much more in the mood for revenge on the Germans than the Western Allies were.

Stalin immediately imposed enormous war reparations on the Soviet occupation zone in the east and pursued a much stricter policy of denazification than what would happen in the West.

The Soviets confiscated all of the military and state owned industries in the east and appropriated all of the territory's property that had been owned by members of the Nazi Party.

As a result, the majority of East Germany's heavy industry was directly pillaged by the Soviets as reparations after the war, and

was largely hauled back to the Soviet Union itself, which also represented a loss of 20% of East Germany's total production.

Another 40% of East Germany's industrial property was quickly nationalized by the Soviets as well, which left Only the remaining 40% of East Germany's industrial production behind in the hands of private enterprises.

In total, between 1946 and 1953, during Stalin's later rule in the Soviet Union, East Germany was made to pay the equivalent of $14 billion in reparations in 1938 constant prices, which is equivalent to an astonishing $313 billion worth of reparations paid to the Soviets in 2025 inflation adjusted dollars.

West Germany, meanwhile, was made to pay significantly fewer reparations by the Western Allies and was in fact Given more than 19 billion 2025 inflation adjusted dollars worth of direct aid through the United States Marshall Plan immediately after the war to help pay for reconstruction and to kickstart the economy back into gear, aid that the east never received.

Moreover, West Germany had several geographic advantages going for it over the east as well.

West Germany had direct geographic access to Western nations like the Netherlands, Belgium and France, and

thus the ability to trade directly with the Western world and by extension with the rest of the world too.

While East Germany had access to some navigable internal waterways like the Elbe and the Oder and Vistula rivers, they paled in comparison of scale to the navigable waterways that were found in West Germany, like the Rhine, the Main and the Danube, which all handle orders of magnitude more cargo than the Eastern rivers do.

Due to a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this video, East Germany, meanwhile, was effectively blocked from trade with most of the west, lacked anywhere near as capable waterways for trade, and

relied heavily on trade with the rest of the Eastern bloc instead.

By the late 1980s, 2/3 of East Germany's trade was still being conducted entirely with the communist world.

Western Germany also just had more natural resources than Eastern Germany did too, especially in hard coal.

East Germany is rich in lower quality lignite or soft coal, but

West Germany was richer in higher quality hard coal.

That's much better for heating and energy generation than soft coal is.

After the war, West Germany relied on its own massive hard coal reserves to power their factories and to expand their valuable steel, chemical and manufacturing services, which were vital to rebuilding the country's economy.

West Germany, through their hard coal reserves, simply possessed a domestic and cost effective energy source for large scale industrial production that wasn't present in the East.

West Germany's post war surviving domestic industrial production also wasn't gutted like it was in the east by the Soviets.

While the West Germans also received billions of dollars in aid to restart their production, that wasn't provided by the Soviets to the East.

Even though West Germany began transitioning away from their coal by the 1960s and the 1970s in favor of natural gas and oil, domestic West German coal was the primary power source that got West Germany quickly back on their feet through the 1950s and helped to kickstart the West German economic miracle.

In 1949, Germany was formally partitioned between two different states as the Soviet and Western occupation zones coalesced into their own nominally independent countries.

The Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, was established out of the Allied occupation zone in the west as a capitalist market economy that was aligned with the West, While the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was established out of the Soviet occupation zone as a communist one party state with a centrally planned economy that was aligned with the Soviet bloc.

While the city of Berlin itself, despite being surrounded within the Soviet zone, was further divided between a capitalist West Berlin that was ruled directly by the Western allies and an East Berlin that was a part of East Germany for the next 41 years of history until 1990.

This would be the way that Germany would be politically divided.

East Germany's more inefficient, centrally planned command economy further exacerbated its other inherent economic disadvantages relative to the Western.

For decades, the allocation of capital, natural resources and labor in the east were all determined by the country's political bureaucracy rather than by the logic of the market, while its harsh system of political repression and its lack of opportunities encouraged mass migration to the west as well.

While East Germany never became a hardcore totalitarian state like North Korea did, it was nonetheless still a deeply paranoid authoritarian police state that attempted to crush any and all opposition towards communist rule.

East Germany maintained an official policy of state atheism throughout most of its existence.

Secularism was heavily promoted by the state.

Overtly religious citizens stood to lose out on employment and education opportunities, while young people were pressured into joining the secular Free German Youth Organization for their social activities rather than the Church.

This is all what culminated in the significantly higher degree of irreligious people in East Germany than in the west that can still be seen today, where a significant majority of people in every East German state continue identifying as non religious, compared to only smaller minorities of people who do so in the West.

East Germany's communist secret police force, best known as the Stasi, also maintained a fascinating and nearly all encompassing surveillance state over the country's population.

Before modern 21st century technologies, the Stasi operated a vast network of informants and all throughout East Germany to the point where at its peak, it was estimated that roughly one in every six people in the country worked for them as an informant, meaning that virtually everybody in the country was under suspicion by the state.

Nearly every East German citizen had a file on them that was compiled by the Stasi.

The organization amassed more than 1 billion pages of files on East Germany's citizens by the late 1980s, many of which contained personal details about the private lives of East German citizens, tracking people's relationships, hobbies and personal conversations.

Nearly every aspect of citizens lives was documented and monitored by the Stasi, aided by their secretive planning of surveillance recording bugs into people's private homes, offices, cars and even public spaces.

Due to these factors, migration to the west was a constant problem for East Germany to try and deal with.

The land border between the east and the west itself was almost immediately sealed sealed by the time of Germany's formal division in 1949.

For decades until 1990, the border here across Germany between East and west was among the most heavily militarized and fortified frontiers anywhere in the world.

On a comparable scale to the DMZ that still divides the Korean peninsula between north and South.

The German frontier was defined by a continuous line of high metal fences and walls, barbed wire, guard towers, anti vehicle ditches, alarms and minefields, and

booby traps that was constantly patrolled by around 50 East German border guards with active shoot to kill orders in place for anyone attempting to cross it.

Nonetheless, following 1949, hundreds of thousands of people continued fleeing or migrating to the west every single year anyway, primarily by taking advantage of the political loophole in Berlin.

If an East German visited the western political enclave of West Berlin that was surrounded deep inside of East Germany, they could secure their free travel to West Germany and avoid trying to escape over the fortified frontier.

This early migration out of East Germany to the west included a serious brain drain of highly skilled and trained professionals as well.

And the problem got so severe for the east and its economy that by 1961 they decided to do something extremely drastic to stop it.

Already by that point, more than 2.7 million East Germans had successfully escaped to the west since 1949.

And as a consequence, East Germany's population had rapidly declined by about 1 century 6th in only 12 short years.

Further hammering East Germany's struggling economy and further boosting the west with millions of additional workers and taxpayers.

So in order to stop this bleeding out, the communist East German authorities decided in 1961 to build another wall around the entire perimeter of West Berlin too.

This of course became the infamous Berlin Wall.

A complex series of very visible fortifications, guard towers and death strips constantly patrolled by East German soldier who like the soldiers guarding the frontier with the west, hundreds of miles away, maintained strict shoot to kill orders on anyone attempting to cross it.

The Wall would very publicly divide the city of Berlin for a total of 28 painful years, firmly separating families and friends on either side of it for decades.