Fall Of The Berlin Wall

Iain MacGregor On Fall Of The Berlin Wall | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘In West Berlin you'd have had, there were British, American and French soldiers there, still as a legacy of the end of World War Two. What was it like for them now and essentially kind of cut off from the west in just a small part of the city?’

‘Obviously there was travel routes, there was the air corridors going through into West Berlin, there was the train corridors and then there was the autobahn route. The Russians after the Berlin Blockade failed, they weren't going to touch those routes any further. There might be the odd occasion, or it happened frequently where they would be intransigent at the border controls and hold people up, hold the train up, hold cars going through or, or buzz the aeroplane going through.

But generally, I talked to dozens of American, British troops that were stationed there throughout the life of the Berlin Wall. I talked to a few French gendarmes who were on duty at Checkpoint Charlie. To a man and woman all of them said no matter what year they served, all of them said it was the best tour of duty they ever had. And most of them were career soldiers, or career policemen. And they might have been in the army for 25, 30 years, but all of them just kind of gleamed over with nostalgic guys, and just loved the tour of duty that they had...

The difference on the western side was it was an international city. So it's probably the most international city in Western Europe because of the amount of military and civil personnel you had to have to service the the garrisons that were there... it was an exciting place to be. You could literally be, I don’t know, two, 300 yards away from a wall down the side street, you wouldn't even know the wall was there. And many of the veterans that I talked to said that, you know, if you weren't on duty at the wall, and you're living in West Berlin, you wouldn’t think you were 70 miles inside Soviet territory. It just wouldn't occur to you.

Whereas obviously on the eastern sector, yeah, I mean, you could see it all the way up until 1989 when the wall went, and people were finally crisscrossing and going into the eastern half of the city. It was still as if you'd gone back in time, you could be a Russian soldier about to plant your red flag on the Reichstag building. Lots of buildings bombed out, lots of buildings destroyed completely, some rubble in some side streets, bullet holes, marking the walls. It was very much the the main thoroughfares of East Berlin, were deliberately obviously, from a showcase point of view, reconstructed along very Soviet lines, very, you know, ugly buildings. Most of which got knocked down after reunification, but you go down the side streets, and you'd still be back in 1945’...

[On someone getting shot] What shocked the world was, it wasn't the fact that he'd been shot. It was the fact that he was allowed to just lie there bleeding to death in front of everybody. So the watching Americans, the military police witnessed it all. They weren't going to get involved because they couldn't go on to East German territory. It might cause some kind of diplomatic incident so they didn't know what to do. The East Germans were waiting for orders, they shot him and he was lying there. And now they decided, well, what should we do? They were waiting for their orders too. But meanwhile hundreds of West Berliners had seen what had happened and were coming out to find out what was going on, because for the first hour while this kid was lying on the ground, bleeding to death, he was screaming for help, screaming in pain, but no one would come to him. So gradually, obviously, he's he's losing his strength and it was like a horror show. By this time the media had turned up and they captured it all. So the famous photos you have are of his, his body lying on the ground before these Germans managed to get him.

By the time they decided they could go out and they waited for a doctor to turn up, few hours have gone by, he was obviously going to die. They managed to capture him, you see the look that was captured on the photographs of the faces of the East German border guards who shot him, is one of fear and tension, because by this time, there’s hundreds of Berliners screaming and shouting at them. They took them away but he died. He died a few hours later, that brought so much international attention to what was going on. And it really focused again, it focused Checkpoint Charlie, in the world's eyes, that this is somewhere that, you know, is very, very dangerous place, people are dying. Young kids are dying for no reason"