Exactly three decades ago today, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of what was referred to by communist East German officials as “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.” It had been constructed almost 30 years earlier in order to stop the flood of East Germans fleeing socialism into West Berlin.

While the economy was struggling under the East German socialist dictatorship, free West Germany had experienced an economic miracle. Capitalism had lifted the West German economy out of the ruins of World War II and back onto the stage of world players, bringing wealth to a nation that had been devastated by the horrors of the war it had started years before.