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Blood, Tanks, and the Death Strip: Engineering a Divided City
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On August 13, 1961, East Germany sealed a city overnight with barbed wire and built a killing field in the heart of Europe — and the world watched. From Peter Fechter's death in no-man's-land to the tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie, this is the Wall as a system of total control.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's just past midnight. August thirteenth, nineteen sixty-one.
The Wall didn't begin as concrete. That came later.
The death strip is what most people don't picture when they imagine the Wall. The Wall itself, the thing you see in photographs, was just the outer edge.
Less than two months after the Wall went up, Checkpoint Charlie nearly triggered a war. An American diplomat named Allan Lightner was attempting to cross into East Berlin.
August seventeenth, nineteen sixty-two. Almost exactly a year after the Wall went up.
June twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-three. President Kennedy came to West Berlin.
The Wall was nineteen sixty-one to nineteen eighty-nine. Twenty-eight years.
November ninth, nineteen eighty-nine. East German Politburo member Günter Schabowski held a press conference.
A replica guardhouse stands at Friedrichstraße today. The "You are leaving the American sector" sign is still there, reproduced.
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