Now Playing
Ich bin ein Berliner: Kennedy, Reagan, and the Wall's Moral War
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
From Peter Fechter bleeding in the death strip to Kennedy's defiant words at Rathaus Schöneberg, the Berlin Wall became the Cold War's defining moral battleground. This chapter traces how a killing machine forced the world to confront what it was willing to do — and what it wasn't.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people, when they picture the Berlin Wall, picture the end. The hammers.
Let's go back to where this series has already been grounded. August thirteenth, nineteen sixty-one.
Peter Fechter was eighteen years old. He worked as a bricklayer, which is its own grim irony.
This is the detail that made Peter Fechter's death different from the others. There were cameras.
The footage and photographs from that day moved around the world within hours. Not because the world didn't know the wall was deadly.
To understand why Fechter couldn't be saved, you have to understand what the death strip actually was. It wasn't just open ground.
Fechter became the most famous person to die at the Berlin Wall. But he was not the first, and he was far from the last.
Despite all of it, people kept trying. The methods shifted as the wall hardened.
Checkpoint Charlie, established in October nineteen sixty-one, sat at the intersection of Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße. It was the designated crossing point for Allied military personnel and foreign nationals.
There's a dimension of the wall's history that's harder to look at directly, but it matters. The shoot-to-kill order didn't operate by itself.
Between August thirteenth, nineteen sixty-one, and November ninth, nineteen eighty-nine, over five thousand people successfully escaped from East to West Germany through various routes. That number sounds large until you set it against the other number: approximately seventeen million people lived in East Germany at the wall's peak.
The wall fell twenty-seven years after Peter Fechter died in the death strip. Günter Schabowski, an East German official who hadn't even been briefed properly on the details of a new travel regulation, said at a press conference on November ninth, nineteen eighty-nine, that East Germans could cross the border.
The death strip is gone. Checkpoint Charlie is a tourist site now, with a replica guardhouse and a warning sign that's been photographed millions of times by visitors who weren't alive when the crossing mattered.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.