Germany and Korea initially suffered a similar fate after the end of World War II.

In both countries, a border soon separated people who, of course, had previously been able to get from one part to the other.

While Germany remained peaceful despite all the hardships of the partition, the catastrophe of a great war broke out in Korea just five years after the liberation from Japanese colonial rule.

Peter Sturm

Editor in politics, responsible for "Political Books".

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The Soviet Union, which at the American request entered the war against Japan at the last minute, secured control of the northern part of the peninsula in 1945, the Americans the south.

The interim solution became permanent because the occupying powers could not agree on what was to be read as the last point in an American diplomatic document from 1945: a free and independent Korea.

The Americans reacted quickly

In the north, Stalin's Soviet Union installed a communist regime modeled on the Moscow model in the form of Kim Il-sung. This aggressively proclaimed the goal of a reunification of Korea under communist auspices. For the time being, however, American soldiers stood in the way in the south. These withdrew in 1948. In the unrest-shaken south the "Republic of Korea" was founded, the north called itself the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". Their leader Kim Il-sung took advantage of the seemingly favorable moment on June 25, 1950 - with the consent of Stalin - and had his army march into the south.

To this day, North Korea claims that its troops only reacted to an attack from the south. In military terms, the North Koreans initially hurried from success to success. However, the Americans, whose apparent disinterest in South Korea had facilitated the decision to attack the North, reacted quickly. They pushed through a resolution in the UN Security Council declaring that North Korea had broken the peace. In a second resolution, the panel approved the deployment of UN troops to Korea. The Soviet Union, which could have prevented these resolutions through its veto, boycotted the Security Council at this point, so that the Americans had a comparatively easy political game. The veto power China was still represented by the government of Taiwan,so that no resistance to the American proposal was to be expected from this side either.

Chinese “volunteers” in the theater of war

Soldiers from twelve countries fought in Korea under American command.

The UN troops first pushed the invaders from the north back over the pre-war border and then continued their advance all the way to the north of the peninsula.

When they got near the Chinese border and believed the war had been completely won, hundreds of thousands of Chinese "volunteers" appeared on the theater of war.

The UN units had to withdraw far to the south.

President Harry Truman opposed the request of their Commander-in-Chief, General Douglas MacArthur, to halt the Chinese advance through the use of nuclear weapons.

Finally the front froze on the line of demarcation at the 38th parallel to bloody positional warfare.

At the political level, talks about a ceasefire had been going on since 1951. However, a settlement was only reached on July 27, 1953, a good four months after the death of Josef Stalin. Korea has not made any legal progress to this day. There is “only” a ceasefire. And the peninsula is still divided by the world's most impenetrable border. It is true that there have been repeated attempts to relax the situation over the past two decades. But the acceleration of the North Korean nuclear weapons program and changing political cycles in both South Korea and the United States have prevented substantial progress.

And so, as a German, for a good 30 years, Koreans have been asking you again and again how it worked in central Europe with reunification.

While in Germany the alienation between the parts of the country formerly separated by walls and barbed wire is increasing again, in Korea many thoughts wander about the hermetically sealed border to the compatriots in the other part of Korea.

Reunification remains a political goal.

Nobody can be sure that they will still experience them - as they did in Germany.