Former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was known not to mince his words when it came to the Soviets and their allies. He labelled the communist superpower the "deadly enemy," called Kremlin Chief Nikita Khrushchev "a brutal fighter" and referred to East Germany as a "concentration camp."
So Andrei Smirnov, Moscow's ambassador to Bonn, probably had an inkling of what might be in store for him when he walked into Adenauer's Chancellery on August 16, 1961.
Three days before, members of the East German police and of the communist party militia had begun sealing off the border between East and West Berlin with barbed wire. Concrete blocks lay ready nearby to build the Berlin Wall. Millions of East Germans found themselves locked in the self-proclaimed "workers' and farmers' state."
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