Checkpoint Charlie

Assembled from 15 blocks · 1 evidence · 12 related

1. Story
2. The crossing point on Friedrichstrasse between the American and Soviet sectors of Berlin, named from the third letter of the NATO phonetic alphabet because it was the third such Allied checkpoint. Its significance is legal rather than military: because the western powers refused to concede that East Germany had authority over access to Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie was the place where Allied personnel and foreign nationals crossed under four-power arrangements rather than East German control. That refusal produced the confrontation of 27–28 October 1961, when a dispute over whether an American diplomat had to show his papers to East German rather than Soviet officials escalated until American and Soviet tanks stood facing each other across the line at a range of a hundred metres or so for something over a day, before being withdrawn in a co-ordinated sequence. It is the only occasion in the whole confrontation when the two powers' armoured forces confronted each other directly with live ammunition.
3. Knowledge
4. The Berlin Wall
5. Checkpoint Charlie
6. Connections
7. The Berlin Wall
8. American and Soviet tanks face each other on Friedrichstrasse
9. Berlin
10. Checkpoint Charlie
11. The Bornholmer Strasse crossing
12. The Berlin sector border is sealed
13. The Berlin Wall opens
14. Evidence
15. 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.