Today, the Berlin Crisis of 1961, in which the Soviet Union demanded that Western powers cut their ties with Berlin, may be the most forgotten crisis in the annals of the Cold War. Even most Berliners who lived through the event remember little about it. Yet this crisis over Berlin brought America and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers of the post-World War II period, close to war. In fact, since the very end of World War II, Berlin had been the centrepiece of a struggle between these two superpowers. It was here that World War II ended in 1945 when, following the occupation and defeat of Nazi Germany by the allied armies of the United States, Britain, and France from the west, and the Soviet Union from the east, the city had been captured and divided into the separate zones of East and West Berlin. Soon afterwards Germany had itself split into East and West, and the border between the two had become the dividing line (the so-called “iron curtain”) between Sovietcontrolled Eastern Europe and free, capitalist Western Europe. Thus, situated behind this iron curtain and stuck a hundred miles inside Eastern territory, West Berlin was claimed, protected and supplied by the Western powers. In 1948, Stalin imposed a blockade, cutting West Berlin off from its Western suppliers. The United States responded with an airlift, keeping the zone alive for more than 300 days before Allied access was restored.