Checkpoint Charlie

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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stood facing each other across the line at a range of a hundred metres or so for something over a day, before being withdrawn in a co-ordinated sequence.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.