The 3rd World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS) was held from 5 to 19 August 1951 in Berlin, capital city of the then German Democratic Republic, and organised by World Federation of Democratic Youth. The motto of the festival was "Peace and Friendship against Nuclear Weapons"^[2][3]

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (August 2023) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 9,094 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Weltfestspiele_der_Jugend_und_Studenten#1951_Ost-Berlin]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|de|Weltfestspiele_der_Jugend_und_Studenten#1951_Ost-Berlin}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Turkish. (August 2023) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Turkish article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 492 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Turkish Wikipedia article at [[:tr:3. Dünya Gençlik ve Öğrenci Festivali]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|tr|3. Dünya Gençlik ve Öğrenci Festivali}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Quick Facts Host country, Dates ...

3rd World Festival of Youth and Students
Host country	German Democratic Republic
Dates	5–19 August 1951
Motto	Peace and Friendship Against Nuclear Weapons
Cities	Berlin
Participants	26,000 people from 104 countries[1]
Follows	4th World Festival of Youth and Students
Precedes	2nd World Festival of Youth and Students

Close

The third WFYS was held in a period of growing international tension between the Soviet Union and the western powers; it took place against the background of the Korean War and the spread of communism in Central Europe and China. The festival was meant to showcase the young German Democratic Republic, formed in the Soviet sector of postwar Germany.

West German police and the US military tried to prevent international delegates from crossing the western sector of Germany to attend the festival. In response, an operation was arranged to smuggle young people across the country in small groups.^[4] Jan Myrdal wrote about incidents where young people were shot at by West Berlin police when trying to cross the West German border.^[5]

The festival's sports programme featured an athletics competition.^[6]