On 11 December 1957, East Germany introduced a new passport law that reduced the overall number of refugees leaving Eastern Germany.
On 15 June 1961, First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party and GDR State Council chairman Walter Ulbricht stated in an international press conference, "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!" (No one has the intention of erecting a wall!). It was the first time the colloquial term Mauer (wall) had been used in this context.
The transcript of a telephone call between Nikita Khrushchev (the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964) and Ulbricht, on 1 August in the same year, suggests that the initiative for the construction of the Wall came from Khrushchev.
On 9 August 1961, the NSA (the American National Security Agency) intercepted an advance warning information of the Socialist Unity Party's plan to close the intra-Berlin border between East and West Berlin completely for foot traffic.
On Saturday, 12 August 1961, the leaders of the GDR attended a garden party at a government guesthouse in Döllnsee, in a wooded area to the north of East Berlin. There, Ulbricht signed the order to close the border and erect a wall.
At midnight, the police and units of the East German army began to close the border and, by Sunday morning, 13 August, the border with West Berlin was closed. East German troops and workers had begun to tear up streets running alongside the border to make them impassable to most vehicles and to install barbed wire entanglements and fences along the 156 kilometres (97 mi) around the three western sectors, and the 43 kilometres (27 mi) that divided West and East Berlin. The date of 13 August became commonly referred to as Barbed Wire Sunday in Germany.
Later, the initial barrier was built up into the Wall proper, the first concrete elements and large blocks being put in place on 17 August.
On 22 August 1961, Ida Siekmann was the first casualty at the Berlin Wall: she died after she jumped out of her third floor apartment at 48 Bernauer Strasse.
West Berliners initially could not visit East Berlin or East Germany at all – all crossing points were closed to them between 26 August 1961 and 17 December 1963.
On 26 June 1963, 22 months after the erection of the Berlin Wall, U.S. President John F. Kennedy visited West Berlin. Speaking from a platform erected on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg for an audience of 450,000 he declared in his Ich bin ein Berliner speech the support of the United States for West Germany and the people of West Berlin.
On 6 June 1987, David Bowie (English Singer), who earlier for several years lived and recorded in West Berlin, played a concert close to the Wall.
On 19 July 1988, 16 months before the Wall came down, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, played Rocking the Wall, a live concert in East Berlin, which was attended by 300,000 in person and broadcast delayed on television.
On 9 October 1989, the police and army units were given permission to use force against those assembled, but this did not deter the church service and march from taking place, which gathered 70,000 people. Many of those people started to cross into East Berlin, without a shot being fired.
The longtime leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, resigned on 18 October 1989 and was replaced by Egon Krenz that day.
The fall of the Berlin Wall began the evening of 9 November 1989 and continued over the following days and weeks, with people nicknamed Mauerspechte (wall woodpeckers) using various tools to chip off souvenirs, demolishing lengthy parts in the process, and creating several unofficial border crossings.
On 13 June 1990, the East German military officially began dismantling the Wall, beginning in Bernauer Straße and around the Mitte district.
On 1 July, the day East Germany adopted the West German currency, all de jure border controls ceased, although the inter-German border had become meaningless for some time before that.