The Berlin Wall

Assembled from 23 blocks · 1 evidence · 14 related

1. Story
2. The barrier erected by the German Democratic Republic from the night of 12–13 August 1961, enclosing the whole of West Berlin rather than dividing Germany — a distinction that is constantly lost and that explains its geometry: the wall ran around an island, of which only a part, some tens of kilometres, cut through the built-up city, the remainder running through countryside on the boundary with Brandenburg. It was not one wall but a fortified strip that developed over three decades into a system: an outer wall, a signal fence, a patrol road, floodlights, watchtowers, dog runs, anti-vehicle obstacles and a raked sand death strip designed so that footprints showed. Its purpose was to stop emigration. Between the founding of the two German states and 1961 a very large number of people had left the east through the open border in Berlin, disproportionately the young and the qualified, and the state was losing the population it needed. The number of people killed at the Wall between 1961 and 1989 is contested: research associated with the Berlin Wall Memorial and the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam arrives at a figure of at least around one hundred and forty, while other counts using broader criteria are substantially higher, and the discrepancy is a question of definition — who counts as a victim of the border regime — rather than of arithmetic.
3. Knowledge
4. The Berlin Wall
5. Berlin
6. Connections
7. Berlin
8. Checkpoint Charlie
9. The Bornholmer Strasse crossing
10. The Berlin sector border is sealed
11. The Berlin Wall opens
12. The Berlin Wall
13. Tempelhof Airport
14. The Berlin blockade and airlift
15. The Berlin sector border is sealed
16. American and Soviet tanks face each other on Friedrichstrasse
17. The Berlin Wall opens
18. Berlin Marathon
19. The first Berlin Marathon, in the Grunewald
20. Berlin moves its marathon into the city
21. The Berlin Marathon runs through the Brandenburg Gate
22. Evidence
23. Named as the standard research documentation for the Berlin Wall, the events of 9 November 1989 and the contested count of deaths at the Wall. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted. This pack therefore states the death toll as a disputed range attributed to differing counting criteria rather than as a figure, and treats the timing of the Bornholmer Strasse opening as unchecked.