Almost a half-century later, when the Berlin Wall was torn down, the results of this remarkable experiment vividly and unqualifiedly attested to the superiority of the West German free market system based on individual rights, a system where people lived with minimum fear of the state’s intrusion into their daily lives.
In East Germany, in contrast, to assure that society was appropriately collectivized, it was necessary to probe into the private lives of all individuals and suppress individual freedoms. Human beings had to be molded by force to achieve the East German leaders’ distorted view of societal organization. Privacy was scarcely the goal or purpose of the East German state.