The Berlin Wall

On the morning of August 13, 1961, Berliners woke up to find police and soldiers in the city’s Soviet sector blocking streets and barricading alleyways with trucks, tanks, bricks, and wire. Bemused citizens could only watch helplessly as the city was cut in two. For three decades, the Berlin Wall became synonymous with spies and treachery, Checkpoint Charlie, and desperate, often fatal, attempts to get over, through or under the wall to freedom. It came to symbolize the Cold War and a continent divided. This is the exciting, personal, and often moving story of the Wall’s rise and, ultimately, fall.