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A further 2,087 prisoners were released to the West under an amnesty in 1972. Another 215,000 people, including 2,000 children cut off from their parents, were allowed to leave East Germany to rejoin their families. In exchange, West Germany paid over 3.4 billion DM – nearly $2.3 billion at 1990 prices – in goods and hard currency. [123]
Crossing points on the inner German border, 1982 [1]. Crossing the inner German border between East and West Germany remained possible throughout the Cold War; it was never entirely sealed in the fashion of the border between the two Koreas, though there were severe restrictions on the movement of East German citizens. [2]
The development of the inner German border took place in a number of stages between 1945 and the mid-1980s. After its establishment in 1945 as the dividing line between the Western and Soviet occupation zones of Germany, in 1949 the inner German border became the frontier between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany).
In 1976 West Germany became one of the founding nations of the Group of Six (G6). In 1973, West Germany—home to roughly 1.26% of the world's population—featured the world's fourth largest GDP of 944 billion (5.9% of the world total). In 1987 the FRG held a 7.4% share of total world production.
No such restriction applied to Western civilians, who were free to go up to the border line. There were no physical obstacles to stop them actually crossing it, and there were incidents of West Germans crossing the border to steal East German border markers as souvenirs (at considerable risk, since the East German border guards sought to ...
On September 16, Berlin ordered the “temporary reintroduction of border control” at Germany’s borders with Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, France and Denmark.
The then official West German government position on the status of the former territories of Germany east of the Oder and Neisse rivers was that the areas were "temporarily under Polish [or Soviet] administration", because the border regulation at the Potsdam Conference had been taken as preliminary provisions to be revisited at a final peace ...
Berlin still needs to discuss its plans to detain asylum seekers at the borders with Germany's 16 regional governments whose authorities would need to implement them.