Fall of the Berlin Wall

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall was opened and Germany was reunited about a year later. I remember reading about it on 9th of November 1989, maybe a bit too young to fully understand the impact of this monumental event.

Construction of the wall started in 1961 and a decade later it had grown to 43 kilometers, completely surrounding West Berlin. During the wall years, roughly 5000 people managed to escape, a tenth of them being police officers. Over 200 people were killed during escape attempts.

I visited Checkpoint Charlie many years ago where there is a museum demonstrating ingenious methods of escape conceived by desperate citizens. There are many books on the subject and I can recommend “It happened at the wall” by Rainer Hildebrandt which has a lot of photographs.

Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

• More photos from Berlin