Busting the Berlin Wall

13th August 1961: The first barb-wire and breeze-block barrier is built by East German communists to save their socialist state from collapse, to stop thousands of their citizens voting with their feet across the open border in Berlin - from East to West. From the very first day of the Wall, any escaper risks betrayal, prison, or death. More than 136 people will die at the Berlin Wall before it is torn down. But right from the start, there are families who refuse to be separated. Klaus Koeppen tries to smuggle out his fiancée Roswitha under the hood of a VW beetle. Rudolph and Horst Müller hijack a subway train to bring their families to the West. Wolfgang Engels borrows an army tank and drives it straight through the Wall. And when East German guards get wise to these tricks, the escapers start building tunnels... A desperate ‘arms race’ begins, between the builders of the Wall and ever bolder and more ingenious escapers. The Wall grows taller, broader, more deadly - with watchtowers, electrified fences, alarm wires, dogs, and armed guards ready to shoot at anyone who touches the ‘death strip’ of brushed sand. And that’s just around West Berlin. On the border between East and West Germany there are booby-trapped guns that spit shrapnel at escapers, and hundreds of kilometres of minefields.

By the 1970s not even a tank can get through the Wall; and the Stasi secret police have long infiltrated the tunnel-building teams. For the eastern regime, the Wall has worked. East Germans start getting washing machines, TVs, even some cars. East and West come to an agreement: East Germany promises human rights and in exchange its borders are recognized by the West. Neither side means it. the East keeps on building up the Wall. Soon they are planning an electronic ‘hi-tech’ Wall, so advanced and impenetrable it won’t even need guns! But some people still can’t take the lack of freedom - freedom of thought, and freedom of movement. And they prove it in spectacular ways. The Strelzyk and Wetzel families fly across the border in a home-made hot air balloon, and Holger Bethke swings over the Wall in the centre of Berlin, hanging from a makeshift pulley! Later he will fly across the Wall in a microlight aircraft to rescue his brother Egbert. The Wall works but Communism is crumbling behind it. If the Soviet Union refuses to prop up its East German satellite, the East German state cannot survive. Then, with a slip of the tongue at a press conference, the borders are open. The date is 9th November, 1989