Firstly, although a number of commentators at the time believed that the main impetus for the Wall came from the Soviets, internal archival documents from the GDR and the former USSR have shown a lot of the impetus for its construction came from the ruling SED party of East Germany. The waves of Republikflucht (flight to West Germany) had created a demographics crisis within the GDR in which some of its best-trained and valuable workers were electing to leave to the FRG. The GDR had already instituted various passport controls at the inner-German border, but the peculiar status of West Berlin made it a natural exit point for East Germans throughout the GDR, not just East Berliners. The SED was able to use the threat of the GDR further sinking behind the FRG or even collapsing to throw their weight behind supporting the erection of the Wall.

The flight of so many citizens of the GDR to the FRG was one that was an embarrassment to the SED leadership of East Germany. The ruling SED party prided itself on not only having the "correct" socioeconomic model, but also having encouraged the "good" Germany to reject fascism and embrace Germany's humanistic tradition. That so many GDR citizens would flee to the West undercut both these claims and underscored not only the repressive nature of the state, but also that the planned economy had manifestly failed in its promises to deliver the goods. The result of this situation was that the SED was at great pains to come up with alternative explanations to the problem of Republikflucht.

One of the more prominent excuses for the large number of flights was that Western intelligence or other agencies had lured unsuspecting East Germans into the West with false promises of prosperity. This was a form of propaganda juijitsu in which one of the main reasons for Republikflucht was economic hardship and the sense that the FRG's economy held out better prospects than in the GDR. SED-controlled media often emphasized that Western businesses and NATO intelligence agents were conducting an ongoing propaganda offensive that promised GDR citizens a life of riches. It certainly helped this propaganda line that both Bonn and the US certainly did have a public relations campaign that extolled the virtues of the Wirtschaftswunder and that the comforts of daily life in the FRG far exceeded that of the GDR. But although these Western propaganda efforts gilded the lily, they were also fundamentally accurate. The indices for consumption and other material well-being in the FRG had exceeded 1930s levels by the mid-1950s while the GDR would only do so a decade later. There were certain costs to the FRG economy and not all East Germans adjusted accordingly and returned back to the GDR. While the state harassed and restricted these returnees' daily lives, its state media seldom failed to popularize their stories upon their return that the grass was not greener on the other side of the German border. There were also show trials of alleged human traffickers within the GDR that confessed to luring young, unsuspecting Germans to the West where they got involved in crime or other unsavory activities like prostitution.

Other state responses to the Republikflucht was to emphasize that this was a national security dilemma created by the West to undermine the GDR. DEFA spy films in the 1950s and 60s all emphasized that open borders exposed up the GDR to infiltration. State media also asserted the Berlin Brigades of the Western Allies were a vanguard force behind the inner-German border that NATO would use offensively. Republikflucht was also used as a convenient excuse for the shortfalls of the planned economy as flight drained trained workers. Again, there were kernels of truth to these accusations in that a number of FRG firms did look to the GDR as a form of cheap labor and before the Wall and the tightening of the inner-German border, many East Germans did find employment as seasonal workers migrating back and forth between the border. But these labor patterns were more of a response to the wider failures of the SED's planned economy, not a cause of it.

GDR cinema provides an interesting window in which to view how it portrayed the obvious problem of so many of its citizens leaving. The 1957 film Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser was an example of youth delinquency films that portrayed good, upstanding GDR youth being corrupted by a decadent and permissive West Berlin. The main characters wear blue jeans and ape Western fashions while swooning over American actors like Brando. One of the more famous GDR spy films, 1963's For Eyes Only- Steng Geheim includes a NATO planning scene in which a CIA agent reports that its plan to undermine the GDR by encouraging refugees was working well and that West Berlin would be a pretext to conquer the whole of the GDR. The short documentary Das Ganze halt justified the construction of the Wall while the much longer agitprop film Schaut auf diese Stadt presented a more long-form portrayal of West Berlin as a den of vice and neo-fascist militarism. One of the more notable features of all these justifications of the Wall was that the films often juxtaposes the alluring aspects of the West, especially music, with its darker aspects. For example, Schaut auf diese Stadt opens with a Hitler monologue followed by American 50s jazz and rock set to a montage of tanks and armed force. This dangerous superficiality of the West is later juxtaposed with the more elevated an humanistic GDR. In the meantime, the 1967 film cycle Geschichten jener Nacht portrayed the East Germans who sided with the construction of the Wall as torn between obvious duty the a higher Germany and personal self-interests. Although the cycle does present a degree of sympathy for those who engaged in Republikflucht, it ultimately justifies the Wall as a necessity.

Ultimately, neither the GDR public nor even the ruling SED circles bought much of this official line on the Wall's necessity. Yet, counter-intuitively, the Wall did stabilize the demographics of the GDR and did see a period o economic growth and stability within the GDR. The end of an open exit point forced the state and its citizenry to form a sort of modus vivendi in which they had to deal with each other. Such a truce though only lasted to the 1970s and by the 1980s, travel rights became one of the key issues used by a wide array of protest groups against the SED dictatorship. The Wall might have resolved the demographic dilemma created by Republikflucht, but it was such a PR nightmare that it was a constant albatross around the SED's neck while it existed.