What division in Europe did the Iron Curtain refer to?
The ‘Iron Curtain’ was the division between NATO and Warsaw Pact nations, dividing Communist Central & Eastern Europe from Capitalist Western Europe and the USA. The division was formed by partition agreed between the USSR and the West following the collapse of the Third Reich at the end of WW2; France, Italy, Spain, the UK, the USA, Denmark and the Benelux nations were in the West (though France opted out of the NATO command structure until this year). All nations to the East were part of the Warsaw Pact, and had Communist governments. Germany itself was divided into East and West; within East Germany, the former capital of Berlin was itself partitioned into four ‘sectors’, one each for the USA, Britain, France and the USSR. A corridor existed from East to West Germany, to allow Westerners access to their parts of Berlin. Although loosely a part of the Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia enjoyed a special status as a semi-seperate Communist federation, and the type of Communism practiced there wa
