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The Wire, the Death Strip, and the Night a City Was Sealed
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On August 13, 1961, East German troops sealed a city overnight with barbed wire that became concrete, watchtowers, and shoot-to-kill orders. From Peter Fechter bleeding to death in the death strip to the tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie, this is the full story of how the Berlin Wall worked — and what it cost.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Twenty-eight years. That's how long a single city stayed cut in half.
To understand August thirteen, nineteen sixty-one, you have to understand what East Germany was losing. Between nineteen forty-nine and nineteen sixty-one, two point six million people fled west.
What began as barbed wire became something far more engineered over the following years. The final version of the wall wasn't one barrier.
August seventeen, nineteen sixty-two. Peter Fechter was eighteen years old.
Checkpoint Charlie was established in October nineteen sixty-one, at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse. It became the primary crossing point between sectors for Allied personnel and foreigners.
John F. Kennedy arrived in West Berlin on June twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-three.
Alongside the official standoffs and the speeches, a quieter and more desperate story was playing out. People were still trying to cross.
By the mid nineteen eighties, the wall had been standing for a quarter century. Most people on both sides had accepted it as a permanent feature of the European landscape.
November nine, nineteen eighty-nine. East Germany was in political freefall.
Within six weeks, the Cold War's political structure across Eastern Europe had essentially collapsed. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania: the dominoes fell fast.
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