The Berlin Wall had stood for 28 years, a stark and ugly reminder of the Cold War's Iron Curtain - that divided the communist East and the capitalist West. But Germany had actually been divided for years before the wall - and initially not just in half, but in quadrants. Why?  A temporary solution to organize Germany into four occupation zones led to a divided nation under the Cold War.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              The situation in Germany after World War II was dire. Millions of Germans were homeless from allied bombings campaigns that razed entire cities. And millions more Germans living in Poland and East Prussia became refugees when the Soviet Union expelled them. With the German economy and government in shambles, the Allies concluded that Germany needed to be occupied after the war to assure a peaceful transition to a post-Nazi state.  With the war officially over, it was time to initiate a "nuts and bolts" action plan for an Allied occupation of Germany.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Instead of administering and policing Germany side by side, as the Allies did in postwar Austria, the decision was made at Potsdam to divide Germany into four distinct occupation zones, one for each Allied nation (including France). The British were assigned the northwest quadrant, the French the wouthwest, and the Americans the southeast. Since the Soviet army already occupied much of eastern Germany, the Soviet Union was put in charge of northeast quadrant, which included the capital Berlin.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Berlin itself was also subdivided into four quadrants, with the British, French, Soviets and Americans each policing a different zone of the capital, which was fully surrounded by Soviet-occupied territory. From the start, the Soviets ran their occupation zone very differently than the British, French and Americans. "The Soviet army and Russian civilians had suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis during the war," says Boghardt. "So when it came to carrying out the joint directive of denazification, for example, they not only arrested Nazi officials, but they considered all major German landowners to be Nazis. So they confiscated their land."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       The Soviet Union agreed to trade food grown in its occupation zone for cash reparations and finished goods from German factories in the western occupation zones. But when the Soviets failed to keep up with their agricultural shipments, the Western Allies cut off reparation payments.  By 1946, tensions escalated further as soviet military forces helped to establish Communist regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania. In 1947, Great Britain and the United States decided to merge their two occupation zones to foster more economic cooperation between the regions. They named it "Bizonia".                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Then the western Allies took things a step further by stepping up economic aid to Bizonia and the French occupied territory with cash from the Marshall Plan. They also replaced Germany's badly inflated currency, the Reichsmark, with a new and more stable Deutche mark. All these action were taken without Soviet approval.  Tensions came to a head when the western Allies tried to circulate the new Deutsche mark in Berlin. The Soviets boycotted the Allied Control Council, and when the West didn't bow to their demands, Joseph Stalin ordered a total blockade of Berlin, located 100 miles inside Soviet-occupied territory. He cut off all access to West Berlin by road, train and ship, but not by air.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             The Americans, British and French responded with the Berlin Airlift, a months-long air campaign to drop food and fuel into West Berlin that ultimately broke the Soviet blockade in 1949. Later that same year, France officially merged its occupied territory with Bizonia, creating the Fewderal Republic of Germany, or what became known as West Germany. In October of 1949, the Soviet Union responded with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic, a Communist state known as East Germany."For eight years, there was that loophole," says Boghardt, "when it was very easy for anybody who wanted to flee East Germany to do so. All you had to do was hop on a subway in East Berlin and exit in West Berlin."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     On the night of August 12 to August 13, 1961, East German soldiers in Berlin laid out miles of barbed wire that would become the Berlin Wall, sealing the border with West Germany for the next 28 years.