The Iron Curtain term was popularised by the former British Prime Minister Winston Curchhill, who used it in his "Sinews of Peace" address March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri: From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an "iron curtain" has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. After its fall, a section of the Berlin Wall was transported to and erected at Westminster College, Missouri.
There are various earlier usages of the term "iron curtain " pre-dating Churchill. The first recorded use of the term iron curtain was derived from the safety curtain used in theatres and first applied to the border of communist Russia as "an impenetrable barrier" in 1920 by Ethel Snowden in her book Through Bolshevik Russia. Some suggest the term may have first been coined by Quenn Elisabeth of the Belgians after World War I to describe the political situation between Belgium and Germany, in 1914. An iron curtain, or eisener Vorhang, was an obligatory precaution in all German theaters to prevent the possibility of fire from spreading from the stage to the rest of the theater. Such fires were rather common as the decor often was very flammable. In case of fire, a metal wall would separate the stage from the theater, secluding the flames to be extinguished by firefighters. Dougals Reed used this metaphor in his book Disgrace Abounding : The bitter strife (in Yugoslavia between Serb unionists and Croat federalists) had only been hidden by the iron safety-curtain of the King's dictatorship.
Joseph Goebbels wrote of an "iron curtain" in his weekly newspaper Das Reich: If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain (ein eiserner Vorhang) would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered. The Jewish press in London and New York would probably still be applauding.
The first oral mention of an Iron Curtain was in a broadcast by Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk to the German people on May 2, 1945: In the East the iron curtain behind which, unseen by the eyes of the world, the work of destruction goes on, is moving steadily forward.
The first recorded occasion on which Churchill used the term "iron curtain" was in a May 12, 1945 telegram he sent to US President Harry S. Truman: I am profoundly concerned about the European situation. … 3. An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of Lübeck-Trieste-Corfu will soon be completely in their hands. To this must be added the further enormous area conquered by the American armies between Eisenach and the Elbe, which will, I suppose, in a few weeks be occupied, when the Americans retreat, by the Russian power. All kinds of arrangements will have to be made by General Eisenhower to prevent another immense flight of the German population westward as this enormous Muscovite advance towards the centre of Europe takes place. And then the curtain will descend again to a very large extent, if not entirely. Thus a broad land of many hundreds of miles of Russian-occupied territory will isolate us from Poland. …
Churchill repeated the words in a further telegram to Truman on June 4, 1945 in which he protested against such a US retreat to what was earlier designated as, and ultimately became, the US occupation zone, saying the military withdrawal would bring: Soviet power into the heart of Western Europe and the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward.
At the Potsdam Conference, Churchill complained to Stalin about an "iron fence" coming down upon the British Mission in Bucharest. Allan Dulles used the term in a speech on December 3, 1945, referring to only Germany: It is difficult to say what is going on, but in general the Russians are acting little better than thugs. They have wiped out all the liquid assets. No food cards are issued to Germans, who are forced to travel on foot into the Russian zone, often more dead than alive. An iron curtain has descended over the fate of these people and very likely conditions are truly terrible. The promises at Yalta to the contrary, probably 8 to 10 million people are being enslaved.
