The location of the border between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is not the random outcome of where American, British, and Soviet tanks stopped at the end of WWII in 1945. Instead, in anticipation of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the three allied forces had agreed in 1944 on a division of post-WWII Germany into Soviet and Western occupation zones that followed the pre-WWII borders of the German Empire states and the provinces of the largest state, Prussia (with a few very minor exceptions for geographic connectedness). As a result, the East–West border separated the populations of pre-existing regions with distinct histories and cultures.
Since the border follows pre-existing regions, we can explore pre-WWII county-level data to investigate whether West and East differed in relevant dimensions. A first dimension is the size of the working class, strongly emphasised by communist countries. Inspecting pre-WWII data, we see that the East Germany already had a substantially higher working-class share in 1925 (Figure 1), well before the area became communist. The difference between East and West in working-class share amounts to 12 percentage points. In fact, the working-class share jumps quite abruptly in several regions around the later inner-German border: it is significantly detectable when focusing on counties within 100 kilometres of the later border or on the counties that have a direct contact with the later border. [...]
East and West were differentially affected by WWII and the occupying forces. Using data from the German Census jointly administered in all four occupation zones in October 1946, we show that the ratio of men to women was substantially lower in the Soviet zone. No such differences had existed in the last pre-WWII census, in 1939. [...]
What is sometimes overlooked is that also about half a million people migrated from the West to the East before 1961. GDR propaganda describes them as “not in agreement with the capitalist system”. We show that six of the 19 Politburo members in the early GDR (1949–1961) had been born in what became West Germany, including long-time GDR leader Erich Honecker. Taken together, the evidence suggests that there was selective migration and sorting by political preferences.
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