<P> The emigrants tended to be young and well - educated, leading to the "brain drain" feared by officials in East Germany . Yuri Andropov, then the CPSU Director on Relations with Communist and Workers' Parties of Socialist Countries, wrote an urgent letter on 28 August 1958, to the Central Committee about the significant 50% increase in the number of East German intelligentsia among the refugees . Andropov reported that, while the East German leadership stated that they were leaving for economic reasons, testimony from refugees indicated that the reasons were more political than material . He stated "the flight of the intelligentsia has reached a particularly critical phase ." </P> <P> An East German SED propaganda booklet published in 1955 dramatically described the serious nature of' flight from the republic': </P> <P> Both from the moral standpoint as well as in terms of the interests of the whole German nation, leaving the GDR is an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity . </P> <P> Those who let themselves be recruited objectively serve West German Reaction and militarism, whether they know it or not . Is it not despicable when for the sake of a few alluring job offers or other false promises about a "guaranteed future" one leaves a country in which the seed for a new and more beautiful life is sprouting, and is already showing the first fruits, for the place that favours a new war and destruction? </P>

Who decided to put up the berlin wall