Iron Curtain

The Berlin Wall in 1966, symbol of the Iron Curtain policy of isolation established after World War II by the Soviet bloc countries, against the western democracies. Built in 1961, it was fortified and heavily guarded at the border between East and West Berlin to stop East German citizens escaping to the West. After the collapse of the Communist regime in East Germany, the wall was breached in November 1989 and subsequently torn down by Germans anxious to reunite their country.

In Europe after World War II, the symbolic boundary between capitalist West and communist East during the Cold War. The term was popularized by the UK prime minister Winston Churchill from 1946.

An English traveller to Bolshevik Russia, Ethel Snowden (1881-1951), used the term with reference to the Soviet border in 1920. The Nazi minister Goebbels used it a few months before Churchill in 1945 to describe the divide between Soviet-dominated and other nations that would follow German capitulation.