Short History Of... - The Berlin Wall

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

On the border between the Western world and the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall was a symbol of the Cold War. Starting out as a simple barbed wire fence, it would grow in scale and complexity to become a 27-mile concrete edifice, incorporating watchtowers, trenches, electric fences, and landmines. But what was its purpose? How did it impact the people whose city it divided? And what did it take, in the end, to bring it down? This is a Short History of the Berlin Wall. Written by Duncan Barrett. With thanks to Iain MacGregor, author of Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and The Most Dangerous Place on Earth. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's early morning, on August the 22nd, 1961. A day before her 59th birthday, widowed nurse Ida Sieckmann is looking down from her window to the street below. It's a three-story drop, but she thinks she can make it. Over the past decade and a half, Ida has grown used to living in a divided city. Her apartment block on Berlin's Berner Straße literally straddles the border between East and West. The apartments themselves are located in the Soviet sector, while the front entrance opens into the French sector, where Ida's sister lives just a few blocks away. sector where Ida's sister lives just a few blocks away.

Ordinarily, crisscrossing the border would be no big deal, but a week and a half ago, everything changed. Overnight, a barbed wire barrier went up along the dividing line. Now the front entrance of Ida's building has been boarded up, with access provided via a rear courtyard opening onto East Berlin. Like many Berliners, Ida has found herself trapped in the Soviet sector, cut off from loved ones in the other half of the city. Ida is determined to celebrate her birthday in the free world, and there's only one way

to get there. Over the past few days, other residents have been leaping from their apartments to the street below. They're often caught by the West Berlin Fire Brigade, who've been patrolling for exactly this purpose. Right now, there's no sign of the men with the rescue nets, but Ida can't bear to wait a moment longer. She will just have to chance the fall on her own. She grabs some bedding and a few precious belongings and throws them out of her window to the street below. Then she clambers out onto the windowsill. She takes a deep breath and nudges herself over the edge. But luck is not on Ida's side. She lands badly, and is critically injured by the impact,

a blood seeping out onto the West Berlin pavement. Too late, the firemen arrive and bundle her into their engine for the short ride to Lazarus Hospital. But by the time they arrive, Ida is dead. She is the first casualty of the new barrier between East and West. The ever-watchful East German police diligently record the incident in their logs. At 6.50 am, they write, Ida Sieckmann, single, jumped out the window of her third-floor apartment. Sieckmann was carried away by the West Berlin Fire Department.

The bloodstain was covered up with sand. Eda may be the first person to die attempting to cross from east to west, but she will not be the last. Two days later, 24-year-old Taylor Gunther Litwin is shot dead by the East German transport police while attempting to swim across the river Spree. The border between East and West Berlin has just become one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

In March 1946, barely six months after the end of the Second World War, the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described an iron curtain dividing East and West. He was speaking metaphorically. But in Berlin, once the capital of Hitler's Reich, that nightmarish image was to become frighteningly real. Though it began as a simple barbed wire fence, the Berlin Wall would grow in cruel complexity

until it encompassed a deadly assault course. There were watchtowers, a dog room, anti-vehicle trenches, electric fences, and land mines. Not to mention the three and a half meter high concrete barrier itself. Its purpose? To prevent those living in the communist east of the city from defecting to the democratic west. Those stuck on the wrong side of the wall were effectively prisoners of war, and yet, over the course of almost three decades, around 5,000 of them managed to escape. But how did this 27-mile edifice become such an enduring symbol of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States? And what did it take, in the end, for the wall to start tumbling down?

I'm Paul McGann, and this is a short history of the Berlin Wall. It's not until 1961 that the first barbed wire barrier goes up in Berlin, but the origins of the wall will go back a lot further, to the end of the Second World War. The origins of the war will go back a lot further, to the end of the Second World War. Ian McGregor is the author of Checkpoint Charlie, The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and The Most Dangerous Place on Earth. Obviously, the Cold War didn't start straight after the Second World War. There was a long build-up to it, but you could see there was tensions between the Allies, primarily between the Western Allies in one camp and the Russians in the other. So by the time of May 1945, obviously Hitler's dead.

The Russians have moved in. Berlin itself was destroyed. So the capital of Germany, of Hitler's Reich, was pretty much center of town anyway, in a five-mile radius, was completely gone. Seventy percent of housing destroyed, about two million survivors within the city. After the war, Germany is carved up into four sectors, each one governed by a different Allied power. What's left of Berlin falls inside Russian territory. But, as the nation's capital the

city itself is also divided into four, with British, American, French and Russian zones. And this effectively gives the Western Allies a foothold in the Soviet Union. Grudgingly the Russians allow the Allies into the city. But East and West turn out to have very different ideas about what a post-war Germany should look like. The Russians are pushing for the country to be completely demilitarized, to protect their western border. They don't want a repeat of what happened in 1941, when Hitler abruptly tore up their non-aggression pact and launched an invasion. There's more to the Russian drive for demilitarization than simply protecting their own border, however. With the Western Allies gone, they hope to install a government favorable to their own interests. The Americans, meanwhile, are determined to stick around and rebuild the country

On April 3, 1948, US President Harry S. Truman signs into law the Marshall Plan It's named for its forward-thinking Secretary of State, George C. Marshall whose vision of a future Europe free from war hinges on a massive international aid program Marshall's bold initiative soon begins to transform the Western economies. So they pumped in $12 billion worth of economic aid packages to countries of Western Europe and the Balkans, which equates roughly to about $130 billion in today's money. So it's a huge, huge investment of that. UK got 26%, France got 18%. And West Germany, which was created, the state of West Germany was created in 48.

That got 11%. So things were moving. And that's primarily by the time you get to 48, 49, both sides are entrenched. So you've got Eastern Bloc now is pretty much set up and it's under Russian control. The Western democracies are being built up with the Marshall Plan. You've got an East Germany, you've got a West Germany

that are now republics, and you've got a very soft border which will turn into a hard border. It doesn't take long for Berlin to become a symbolic battleground for the warring ideologies of East and West. In June 1948, just months after the first Marshall Plan payments are made, the Russian leader Joseph Stalin tries to force the Allies out of the city with a blockade. Road, rail and canal routes leading into Berlin from the west are all closed. But the Allies respond with a massive airlift,

involving over 200,000 planes and more than a million and a half tons of supplies. The message is clear. They aren't budging. As more and more money continues pouring into West Germany, the differences between the two sides of the city grow increasingly stark. West Berlin, to a degree, was rebuilt and it was renovated. And then you've got a lot of businesses coming in. And it's almost glib phrase, but it's true.

By the mid-50s, bright lights, big city. That's exactly what it was. It's very commercial, lots of shops, lots of bars. All the Allied soldiers and military police and intelligence agents that worked there at the time said it was the best posting they ever had because it was such an exciting place to be. It's an international city. But you go across into East Berlin, where the war split through the city eventually. In some places, it went right through the old heart of the government sector. In that area, that had all been semi-rebuilt, rubble cleared away, streets cleaned, some buildings maintained and rebuilt.

But you go a couple of streets out of there, and it's still rubble. It's just like you've just come out of your cellar in May 1945. Still lots of bullet holes, pockmarks, walls, still craters, still huge amounts of rubble that hadn't been cleared, lots of buildings that hadn't been repaired. By this point, East and West Germany are operating with two different currencies, and the spending power of the West German mark far outstrips the East German. For those living in East Berlin, this means a world of financial opportunity is literally on their doorstep.

Probably something like 600,000 East Berliners crossed into West Berlin every day to work because they earned West Berlin wages, which gave them brilliant spending power when they went home because the standard of living was so poor, it wasn't really a consumer society. The priority most of the time was on heavy industry. So if you're going into the shops, unless you're a senior member of the Communist Party or the Socialist Workers' Party in East Berlin, there's not much to buy. So yeah, there was a big, big discrepancy.

As the differences between the two sides of the city grow, Berliners continue to crisscross back and forth on a daily basis. Some might be visiting family, others attending medical appointments, yet more doing a cross-border school run. There are checkpoints dotted along the invisible line that divides the city down the middle. But the military policemen guarding them often don't even bother to look at people's papers. Unsurprisingly, many East Berliners find themselves drawn to the attractions of the West. And in a city with a distinctly porous border, defections are widespread. As long as they don't draw too much attention to themselves,

men, women, and even whole families can simply walk across the border and never come back. And it isn't just East Berliners. Anyone living under the Soviet yoke in East Germany can effectively take the same route to freedom. In time, the sheer scale of such one-way crossings becomes a major problem for the East German authorities. Something like 2.1 million East Germans packed their bags, said goodbye, and surreptitiously crossed this soft border. And they came across on a daily basis in their hundreds and thousands as about a sixth of the East German population.

And 50% of that 2.1 million were under 25 years of age. A great mass of them were from the professional class. So doctors, architects, engineers, teachers, even some of the police and bureaucrats. Unless you do something to stop these people leaving, that's literally just going to drain away the manpower and the economic power of the country. Clearly, something has got to be done to stop the brain drain.

East German leader Walter Ulbricht appeals to Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union since Stalin's death in 1953, to come up with a solution. But it's not until the early 1960s that Khrushchev sees an opportunity to act, with the election of a new US president, John F. Kennedy. Khrushchev's thinking, I've got this young president who's just taken over. I'm a survivor. I'm a veteran politician. Who is this kid?

They had a meeting in June 61, two months before the war went up. And after two days of fierce argument going back and forward, Khrushchev came away thinking, I had this guy nailed for two days. I can really push him around. My gut feeling is they are not going to go to war if we come up with some kind of solution to stop these Germans getting through the border. The following month, Khrushchev gives Ulbricht the green light for a plan

designed to end the defections once and for all. But it must be implemented in the strictest secrecy. If the operation is to succeed, the element of surprise will be crucial. It's Saturday the 12th of August, 1961. A balmy summer's evening. Ulbricht is hosting a garden party at his woodland retreat, 25 miles outside Berlin, formerly Hermann Göring's hunting lodge. His guests, government ministers and dignitaries are understandably perplexed.

There's no special occasion, and the party is distinctly out of character for the normally unsociable East German leader. Inside the house, a popular Soviet comedy film, Each Man for Himself, is playing, but most of the guests prefer to be outside. As they gather with drinks under the birch trees beside a perfectly tranquil lake, they speculate on why Ulbricht might have brought them here. After a few hours, Ulbricht summons them into a room, where he finally makes his big announcement. Earlier that day, he tells them,

he issued a series of top-secret orders to his most trusted military and police commanders in Berlin. Operation Rose, as the clandestine scheme is known, will finally stop the flood of defections from east to west. At 8pm that evening, barely four hours since Ulbricht's signature had dried on the paper, the sealed envelopes containing his instructions are opened at the People's Army headquarters in Berlin.

Inside are detailed orders, which must be carried out that very night. In charge of the operation is Ulbricht's security chief, Erich Honecker, a lifelong communist and one of his most loyal acolytes. It will be his job to ensure that the operation goes as smoothly as possible. At 1am, the streetlights are switched off across East Berlin. Tens of thousands of soldiers move into position. They unload the cement posts from their vehicles, along with over 150 tonnes of barbed wire, and set to work.

The men are meticulous with their placement of the new barrier, consulting maps to ensure that they never stray so much as an inch into West German territory. Then they begin quietly shutting down train stations, both above and below ground. By 6am, they've closed off nearly 200 streets, and a dozen stations have been boarded up as well. On Sunday morning, Berliners on both sides of the border awoke to a shocking new sight.

While they slept, the entire city has been divided in two by the snaking barbed wire fence. To those in the east, it's as if a prison wall has gone up around them. It was catastrophic for the city and it caused huge amounts of problems and emotional distress for everyone because it was a weekend, people had crisscrossed the city to see loved ones, go to an event, do something and you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and you're caught on the other side. Almost immediately, people begin attempting to cross the barrier.

The simple barbed wire construction is far from impregnable and large numbers of East Berliners find they're able to get past it. Among them are a number of East German border guards and policemen who are welcomed with open arms by their counterparts on the other side. Thousands got through but it was within weeks that the Berliners and the Allies knew that they were playing for higher stakes. And by that, what I mean is there was now an informal or unspoken shoot-to-kill policy on the border. Within weeks, the first death-by-shooting of an East Berliner going across into West Berlin occurs.

A dress tailor called Günter Litwin. He was one of those guys that was earning his living in West Berlin. So he was earning a lot of money, had the spending power of a king back in East Berlin. But he was in the process that summer of moving into West Berlin. He bought a flat, he was moving furniture. of moving into West Berlin. He bought a flat, he was moving furniture. He just happened to go back hours before the war went up to go and start moving some other stuff

and got caught on the wrong side. Then for the next two weeks, he was going up and down the new border, figuring out, well, how can I get across? He was just frantic. In the end, Litvin decides to attempt a water crossing, identifying a canal that branches off the river Spree, where the distance between east and west banks

is only 40 meters. But the escape attempt doesn't go as planned. As he's about to jump into the water, he's discovered by transport police. Officers fire warning shots and order him to stand down, but Litvin decides to swim for it. So he tried to swim across and he was shot and he was hit fatally three times and he died.

And that was the first death by shooting. And that's when everyone knew, right, okay, they really do mean business. They really want to keep their own population in. Although attempting to cross the border now carries a potential death sentence, desperate East Berliners continue to try their luck. Meanwhile, the authorities get to work reinforcing the barrier.

In a matter of weeks, the barbed wire fence is replaced with a very basic wall built out of breeze blocks and cement. As time goes on, it's repeatedly rebuilt and strengthened. And each new version is not only harder to cross, but more deadly for those who attempt it. To get through the first iteration of the wall, people were ramming it with cars or trucks. They were trying to scale it, which was easy to do.

If you didn't get shot, it was easy to do. It was just a six, seven foot wall. So what they then did was they created the famous, what would become the killing zone. So they demolished houses to make sure that there was a big area that you would have to get across before you got to the wall. By the time you get to the seventies, you get to the final fourth generation wall. It was L-shaped because if you tried to ram it, it just doesn't fall down instantly because it's got a protective base that's its platform, makes it very hard to get down. And that, again, is 3.6 meters high. So it's incredibly hard to get across. And then it's got that cylindrical

topping on it as well, which was specially designed. By this time, attempting to cross the border means running a horrific assault course. You've basically got to get across the old wall, which had been improved, and that's topped with barbed wire. You've got to get through an electrified fence. You've got to get across the dog runs. You've got guard towers placed roughly 300, 400 yards separating each other, but they've got 360 degrees viewing. Very powerful searchlights.

You've got what they called Stalin's grass, which were metal spikes buried under the sand, just under the sand. You've got an asphalt road that goes all the way around in between these two walls. So motorised police, border guards could get there instantly if you were caught. And then, like I said, you've got to get across this L-shaped wall. It's a dystopian nightmare. As the wall itself becomes increasingly unassailable, desperate East Germans start looking for alternative ways to cross into the West. Some successfully escape underground, reaching the surface on the other side before their tunnels flood with water. Others get their hands on light aircraft and manage to fly themselves to freedom.

A less risky strategy is to approach one of the many professional smuggling gangs that have begun operating in East Berlin. If you're discovered in the back of a lorry, you might end up with a lengthy prison term, but at least you won't be shot by a border guard. shot by a border guard. Some East Berliners, like 32-year-old engineer Winfried Freudenberg, are even more ingenious in their escape attempts. In their apartment, Winfried and his wife Sabina have been stitching together cheap polythene sheets into a makeshift balloon. They've just finished the design, wrapped their construction inside a net of packing string. There's no basket suspended underneath, just a bar of wood to sit on. After making sure the coast is clear, they sneak it out to their car, along with the keys from Vinfeed's work. Recently he's taken a job at a local gas supply utility, with exactly this moment in mind.

taken a job at a local gas supply utility, with exactly this moment in mind. It's a clear night, with a wind blowing towards the west. According to his calculations, they should soon be across the border. Keeping an eye out for police, they head to a pressure regulating station, where they know they can get hold of natural gas. They unpack the balloon and get started. But it's a slow process and before the balloon is completely full they hear the sound of a patrol car approaching. A suspicious passerby has called the Volkspolizei. Unsure if the vessel has enough lift to support two people they make a hasty decision that Sabina will stay behind. As his wife races back to their apartment, Winfried takes off on his own.

But thanks to a faulty valve, and a lighter weight than he'd planned, the balloon rises too high too fast. After more than five hours in the air, at an altitude of 6,000 feet, Winfried can no longer hold on. He falls to the ground like a stone. When his body is discovered hours later in a West Berlin garden, nearly every bone has been broken. His homemade contraption got him across the border, but Winfried is dead on arrival.

Those who attempt to cross the Berlin Wall know they are taking their lives in their hands. But it's not just their own fates that hang in the balance where the wall is concerned. As a powerful symbol of the clash between East and West, the wall itself soon becomes a flashpoint in the developing Cold War. Only a few months after the first barbed wire barrier goes up, Checkpoint Charlie, one of the main crossing points, is the site of a terrifying standoff.

As tensions rise, the two superpowers, America and Russia, inch a little closer to World War III. How it happened was an American diplomat was taking his wife across Checkpoint Charlie to the theatre because the theatre district was in the East Berlin side. And again, because of the disparity in what your money could buy, you could have a great night out in East Berlin, in the heart of town, and it would cost a fraction of what it would in West Berlin. The agreement was, if you're showing military or diplomatic plates on your car, you do not get stopped at the East German, the Soviet side and asked for your papers. You're just waved through. And we were doing the same to the Soviets. They were waved through ours. But he was that night. And that created a standoff because

the guy wasn't going to move. He said, well, I'm staying in my car and I'm not giving you my papers. With their diplomat illegally detained at the border, the Americans see an opportunity for a bit of saber rattling. President Kennedy's man on the ground in Berlin is retired General Lucius Clay. He's already a Cold War veteran, having supervised the successful Berlin airlift three years earlier, and he's in no mood to be messed around by the Soviets. Clay orders his men to retrieve the diplomat and his wife at once, and to brook no nonsense from their counterparts on the other side.

The diplomat is rescued by a full platoon of military police, with bayonets fixed to their rifles. But rather than heading straight back to West Berlin, the American convoy first takes a tour around the east of the city. It's a provocative gesture, thumbing their noses at the Soviets. The stunt appears to have little impact on the East German guards, though. Over the ensuing days, they continue to illegally stop cars at the border. The third time it happened, Clay had had enough. He said, OK, we're sending the tanks to the checkpoint. Once Clay had sent down the tanks and armoured cars to the checkpoint,

the Russians did the same. In the end, you probably had 10 or 12 American tanks and APCs on the border. But the trouble was the Russians then matched them tank for tank, armored car for armored car, but they had dozens more in the side streets as they would do because Berlin surrounded by armies of Soviet troops. There's over 3,000 tanks and armored cars in East Germany. So that's where we had it. And these guys were locked and loaded, barely a couple of hundred metres apart from one another. Battles have happened for less than this. It only takes one person to fire a shot and then it goes off, so to speak.

With air forces and navies on alert around the world, it's left to President Kennedy's younger brother, Bobby, the US Attorney General, to attempt to calm the situation. He uses back channels to get in touch with the Soviet leadership, persuading Khrushchev that both sides need to find a way to back down and save face. After a day and a half, the first American tank pulls back, followed by one of the Russians. One by one, the tanks retreat from the border, and the tense standoff comes to an end. For the world leaders in Washington and Moscow, the Berlin Wall has become another front in the

increasingly complex and dangerous Cold War. But it represents more than just a physical boundary between East and West. Perhaps more significantly, it's an emblem of the two sides opposing values. Freedom on the one side and repression on the other. When 18-year-old Peter Fechter is shot attempting to cross the wall in August 1962, his death becomes a PR disaster for East Germany and the Soviet Union. He was a kid, at the end of the day, he was an 18-year-old bricklaying apprentice from East Berlin. And like any teenager, they just want an exciting life. They want to have Western music, wear jeans, that kind of thing. They were all into Elvis, they all had quiffed haircuts, and they tried to dress accordingly. And they just galvanised themselves, him and his friends, to think, we want a better life, let's try and get across the border.

When it comes to it, only two of the lads, Peter and his friend Helmut Kuhlbeck, are foolhardy enough to actually attempt the escape. Remarkably, they make it past the various obstacles in the death strip and have begun scaling the 3.6 metre wall itself before they're spotted. The records show something like the guards fired 35 times at them, which is incredible. His friends scaled the wall. He was first there. He got over the wall and you got, you know, bullets pinging around the wall where they were and at their feet.

He got across and as he was lifting his hand down to try and get Peter up, Peter was hit three or four times, fatally, as it turned out. He collapsed back. This all happened 100 yards away from Checkpoint Charlie, but the American guards there couldn't do anything because it's inside East German territory. They're powerless. They could just watch. So he fell back, and he's lying there, and he's mortally wounded, and he's bleeding out. And for the first hour or so, he's screaming.

You could hear it a good distance away. And it woke a lot of West Berliners who lived right by the barrier, woke them up. And they're looking out of their apartment blocks down onto where this kid is lying, screaming in pain. And the thing was, the Americans couldn't go into no man's land, the death strip, because it's not their territory. They couldn't give him any first aid. They wanted to, but they couldn't because they didn't have permission. And they knew what kind of trouble that would cause. The East German guards who'd shot him wouldn't go to his aid because they hadn't been given the command to do so. So it took three or four hours before these Germans did go over there.

And by that time, big crowd on the West Berlin side had built up. There was hundreds looking on. The Western media was by now was there as well, which is why you've got the famous shots of him lying there, dying. And you've got the shots of him then being carried away by East German border guards. And the thing is, it's obviously before we've got the internet or 24-hour news, but this was the story of the summer of 1962. Because again, it's a PR disaster for these Germans and the Soviet government. It showed to the world exactly what this wall meant for Berlin and Germany. This is what they're doing to their own people.

Germany, this is what they're doing to their own people. For President Kennedy, as much as the wall is anathema to American ideals of individual freedom, its very existence provides a valuable opportunity for propaganda. In June 1963, the young president visits West Berlin, where he's received by rapturous crowds. Addressing more than 100,000 people from the steps of the city hall, he gives a speech which will go down in history. Two thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was, was Kiwis Romanus Sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ish bin ein bilina.

Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect. But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in to prevent them from leaving us. As the years go by, the differences in both living conditions and culture between the two halves of Berlin become increasingly pronounced. Although West Germany still has a policy of national service, those living in Berlin are exempt.

As West German youths flee to the city to avoid military conscription, the demographic skews younger and more alternative. West Berlin becomes a thriving centre of art and music. The stark culture clash between East and West is even played out on the wall itself. While its eastern side looks like something from a prison camp, the colourful western face is a testament to the spirit of bohemian West Berlin. On the East German side, it's pristine because you're never going to get near it because you'll get shot or arrested. But on the West German side, you can goistine because you're never going to get near it because you'll get shot or arrested.

But on the West German side, you can go right up to it with a can of spray paint and just do some amazing graffiti. And that's what was done for miles and miles and miles. There's lots of separate sections of the wall that are in galleries all around the world. I mean, there's one in South East London where I live. It's my shopping centre. For the West Berliners, the graffiti is a defiant gesture, a statement of unrestricted artistic expression. But since the wall technically stands just inside the East German border, the artists responsible for such acts of vandalism are putting themselves at risk. Doors that have been built into the wall are sometimes used by guards who aren't above using them to kidnap West Berlin as they get too close. Of course, no one in East Berlin can see the graffiti on the other side of

the wall, but when it comes to live music performances, it's a different story. Throughout the 1980s, major stars are lining up to perform in West Berlin, as its status as an international city of culture grows. Acts like the Rolling Stones, Prince and Bryan Adams all insist on dates here, and the recording scene becomes world famous. David Bowie performs several times and records a trilogy of albums in Berlin. The song Heroes is inspired by a couple kissing by the wall and imagines a love affair that spans the divide. With sets performed deliberately close to the wall, some bands hope to reach audiences in the east side of the city as well. Hundreds if not thousands of the youths of East Berlin risk clashes with riot police at the border to listen to the intoxicating sound of the West.

Perhaps in response to such altercations, in 1988, the East German authorities take the unprecedented step of inviting a Western musician to come and play for them officially. The man they select for the gig is Bruce Springsteen. There was a new, younger generation coming in who were in their 40s, and they were the ones that were saying we have to change. Can't still stick rigidly to the old ways of governing our population. We need to give them a bit of what they want. We've seen this guy, Bruce Springsteen. He seems like a real blue- blue collar working man who sings

songs about workers' rights. What could be more perfect than if we're going to have a Western star come over to our country, to East Berlin? We should ask him. So he was invited. It was on his tour. It was the Tunnel of Love tour, which I went to. It's fantastic, by the way. And a gig of, say, 70,000 to 80,000 to 90,000 attendees that the local authorities, German local authorities could control and could manipulate in a PR way to say, he's come, what a great country we are, turned into a PR disaster because everyone wanted to go to the gig. And it was in an open-air stadium, very easy to illegally get into. So, you know, some eyewitnesses

and some reporters who covered the gig itself said that nearly 300,000 were there. Moved by the sight of so many fans coming out to see him, Springsteen gives an epic four-hour performance. At the end of it, he makes a brief speech in German, reading from a phonetic translation.

I am not for or against a government, he tells the crowd. I've come to play rock and roll for you, in the hope that one day all barriers will be torn down. He didn't say, break down the wall, let's destroy East Germany. He never said that. He was just talking about, in a roundabout way, the youth that he was playing to had a decision to make of what lives they wanted to live. And he played Chimes of Freedom, a Bob Dylan song, and again, went down a storm. And to me personally, knowing the history of what happened afterwards, that was another brick in the wall that was taken out, basically,

before the whole thing fell apart. By the late 1980s, Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika, openness and restructuring, have started to change the face of the Soviet Union. In June 1987, Berlin plays host to another American president, Ronald Reagan. In a powerful speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan throws down a gauntlet to his Russian counterpart. We welcome change and openness,

for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The Russian leader isn't willing to go that far.

But the following year, he does announce that the Soviet Union will relax its control over its satellite states. And privately, he begins communicating to the leaders of those countries, including East Germany, that they too will need to either change or perish. He was bringing in his own liberal policies to try and lift the Soviet Union out of the economic mire it was in. He knew that they couldn't fight the Cold War economically like they had before. It was going to bankrupt the country. So by 89, he was already telling these Germans, as he had told the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Romanians, everybody, we can't

underpin and supply you the finances you need to keep your country going the way it is. You've got to do the same as me and change and give them some more freedoms and free up your economy, otherwise you will collapse. East German leader Erich Honecker, the man who spearheaded the operation to build the Berlin Wall almost three decades earlier, is unimpressed by Gorbachev's approach. But after he speaks out against the Russian premier in a closed meeting, Arnake finds himself ousted by his party comrades. His successor, Egon Krentz, comes to power promising reform.

But the pace of change turns out to be much faster than he has in mind. Just three weeks later, on the 9th of November 1989, Krenz's press officer, Gunter Schewowski, is delivering his daily briefing. A 60-year-old veteran of the party's official newspaper, Neues Deutschland, he is still adjusting to the idea of answering questions from journalists rather than simply telling them what to write. Exhausted after a long day of meetings, Schabowski is far from the top of his game. At 6.53pm, as the briefing is about to wrap up, he announces that he has one more piece of news for the assembled journalists. From the papers on the desk in front of him, he finds something Krentz handed him earlier, about an easing of restrictions for East Germans who want

to travel abroad. Announce this, Krentz told him. It'll be a bombshell. During his limousine ride over to the press conference, Schabowski barely glanced at what was in his hands. It's supposed to outline a very gradual change of policy. But now, he's staring at the typed document covered in scrawled annotations, and can barely make it out. He entirely misses the mention of a press embargo until the following day. Worse still, when pressed by a journalist as to when the changes will come into effect, he inadvertently brings the entire process forward. Worse still, when pressed by a journalist as to when the changes will come into effect, he inadvertently brings the entire process forward.

It was supposed to be a very slow, snail's pace, step-by-step process these German citizens would have to go through. It could take them weeks, might even take them months, before they were allowed to go through the border. But he was just caught on the hop. And he gave this briefing about visa restrictions. He didn't really understand what he was saying to a degree because he hadn't read it properly. And so when a question came back to him as in, well, when do these visa restrictions end? He said, oh, well, they come into effect immediately. Schabowski's words, spread around the world by the international press, are enough to open the floodgates in

Berlin. That evening, tens of thousands of East Germans flocked to the checkpoints, demanding to be let through into the West. The guards on duty, who have not been briefed on the new official policy, are unsure what to say to them. It's a tense situation, and one that could easily turn bloody. It's only five months since the massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where thousands of demonstrators were murdered by the authorities. The East German government are keen to avoid what's become known as a Chinese solution. But does that mean simply capitulating to the crowd's desires and throwing open the

gates after nearly three decades? The mass of people aren't technically a political protest, but nor do they seem likely to go back home willingly. While the East German authorities ponder their next move, Gorbachev makes his position clear. He orders his own troops to remain in their barracks, whatever happens. If the East German forces make a move against their citizens gathering at the border, they will have to do so without Moscow's support. At 11.30 pm, the East German border guards have still not received any new orders, and

the crowds are getting increasingly impatient. Finally, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Yeager, who is in charge of the passport control unit at the Bornholm-Estrasser border crossing, takes the decision to raise the barrier there. In the hour that follows, more than 20,000 people cross over into the neighbouring French sector, where they receive a warm welcome from the gendarme. The other checkpoints soon follow suit,

and all over the city East Berliners begin flooding into the West. After 28 years, residents from both sides of the border begin to mingle again. Crowds of youths from both East and West clamber up onto the top of the wall to celebrate together. The street party to end all street parties has begun. TV crews gather to film the triumphant scenes, with reporters clambering into cherry pickers to get the best vantage point. It doesn't take long for the wall itself to start coming down. Almost immediately, civilians begin chipping away at it with hammers and chisels,

earning themselves the nickname Mauer-Spechte, or wall-peckers. Soon, bulldozers are smashing giant holes through it as well. It will be another seven months before the official demolition process begins, as the once impregnable barrier is reduced to 1.7 million tons of rubble. But even before that happens, the great symbol of the gulf between East and West has lost all its power. Just as rapidly as the first barbed wire fences went up nearly three decades earlier, the

Berlin Wall has come tumbling down. It's too late, though, for the hundreds of East Berliners who died attempting to reach a new life in the West. People like Ida Siegmann, Peter Fechter, and Winfried Freudenberg. Probably 5,000 people escaped altogether once the wall had gone up through to when it came down in 89. Thousands obviously didn't. Official records say it's about 201, 208 people, civilians died getting across through one way or the other.

They either shot or badly injured and they died of their wounds. At least 10 East German guards died in crossfire because obviously some escapees were armed and there were shootouts. But there could literally be hundreds more because for every one person that got away, there was another person who didn't and they could have been badly injured, but they were never heard of again. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of the suffragettes. Mrs Pankhurst, whose sister had been assaulted by the police on that day,

said, this is too dangerous, somebody will die. We can't go in these mass demonstrations to Parliament because it's too dangerous. The police have physically and sexually assaulted our women. It's unsafe. So what she says was, we'll go underground and we will wage a guerrilla war against this government. And that's what happens. It spreads all over the country like wildfire.

And it changes tactics. It's vandalism.'s winter smashing it's arson that's next time on short history of