Today marks 35 years since the Berlin Wall fell. Fragments of the famous border are still extant.

Communist East Germany closed its border in Berlin on August 13, 1961, when it erected a wall that eventually turned into an increasingly elaborate fortress that snaked through the city and around capitalist West Berlin.

The heavily fortified border —the Berlin Wall— The last gap between East and West was closed.

On November 9, 1989, the border was opened and the Berlin Wall ceremonially fell as the world watched. It marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the fall of the communist dictatorship in East Germany, paving the way for German reunification in 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Most of the wall was demolished soon after, but 35 years later there are still places where visitors can see its remains.

What was the Berlin Wall?

The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 and formed the front line of the Cold War between the Western world order, led by the US, and the Soviets for 28 years.

East Germany’s leadership had already closed the country’s main border with West Germany, which ran from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia, in 1952.

The 156 kilometer long wall was built by the communist regime to cut off East Germany from the perceived ideological contamination of the West and to stem the flow of people fleeing Germany. It cut through the middle of the city center and surrounded West Berlin.

But even barbed wire and the Wall couldn’t stop people from fleeing. Efforts to perfect the border fortifications in Berlin continued until 1989.

President John F. Kennedy’s promise for freedom

President John F. Kennedy toured West Germany on June 26, 1963. Speaking to a crowd of about 150,000 people in West Berlin, he pledged that the United States would defend the city’s freedom.

“Freedom is indivisible, and if one man is enslaved, not all are free,” he said. “When all are free, we can look forward to the day when this city will become one, and this country and this great continent of Europe into a peaceful and hopeful globe.”

“When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction from having been on the front lines for nearly two decades,” Kennedy added.

He then concluded with his now iconic sentence: ‘All free people, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore as a free man I am proud of the words: I am a Berliner.”

“Tear down this wall!”

President Ronald Reagan spoke to commemorate Berlin’s 750th anniversary on June 12, 1987 at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, near the Berlin Wall. Thanks to the amplification system used, Reagan’s words could be heard in East Berlin.

During his speech, the American president gave the now famous command: “Tear down this wall!”, addressed to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reagan’s speech on that day is considered by many to be the beginning of the end of the Cold War, which culminated in the fall of the Soviet Union.

When did the Berlin Wall fall?

In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union’s power began to waver, especially when Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. He abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine, a central political principle of Soviet foreign policy that demanded limited Warsaw Pact sovereignty. nations.

This allowed the Eastern Bloc of states to change their own foreign policies, and on May 2, 1989, Hungary dismantled its border fence – punching the first hole in the ‘Iron Curtain’.

In East Germany, a growing protest movement and a wave of migration to the West forced the end of the dictatorship there in 1989. A new travel law wrongly announced on November 9, 1989 led to a flood of people rushing to storm the Berlin Wall.

How did the Berlin Wall fall?

The Bornholmer Strasse intersection in Berlin was the first to open that evening. Border guards, who had not been ordered to let anyone through, buckled under pressure from a large crowd demanding to be let through after a clumsy announcement of new rules by Politburo spokesman Günter Schabowski.

New border crossings were created, leaving large gaps in the Wall. Border soldiers began dismantling fences and other obstacles.

In June 1990, the systematic dismantling of the Wall began, and pieces of concrete were sold around the world. Some parts were protected as historical monuments.

The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for the unification of Germany on October 3, 1990, less than a year after the border reopened. The demolition of the Wall ended in 1994.

Where can you see parts of the wall today?

Today, a section of wall plaques with photos and a series of plaques – including a warning sent by the Associated Press service in Germany – stand at the former intersection of Bornholmer Strasse in Berlin.

The longest section of the wall still in Berlin is in the so-called East Side Gallery, where the once gray concrete slabs are covered with murals painted by 118 artists after the opening of the border.

Otherwise, the Wall has now largely disappeared and much of the former ‘death strip’ – between the outer wall facing West Berlin and an inner wall facing East – has been rebuilt.

One of the exceptions is a strip of the former border at the Bernauer Strasse memorial site in central Berlin, and fragments can be found elsewhere in the city and on its edges.

In most cases, the main East-West German border outside Berlin consisted of heavily fortified fences rather than walls. However, there were a few exceptions: the most famous in the village of Moedlareuth, divided between Bavaria and the eastern region of Thuringia, which was nicknamed ‘Little Berlin’. Part of the border of Moedlareuth can still be seen.

What is Checkpoint Charlie?

One of the best known – and most visited intersections commemorating the Wall in Berlin – is Checkpoint Charlie.

The historic US-controlled border crossing between the East and West lasted three decades. There, Allied guards registered members of the American, British and French armed forces before they went to East Berlin, and foreign tourists could learn more about their stay there.

In October 1961 it famously became the scene of a tank confrontation between Americans and Soviet forces who took up positions and faced each other with armed weapons.

The checkpoint booth was removed on June 22, 1990, about six months after the wall opened. The original stand can now be seen in the Allied Museum in Berlin-Zehlendorf. A photo of former Tuba player Seargent Jeff Harper of the US Army is part of a series of photographs hanging near the original location to commemorate the last Allied soldiers in Berlin in 1994.