The fall of the Berlin Wall

It was 25 years ago today that the Berlin Wall fell and that historic occasion is being celebrated world wide. Here is a photo of a photo I took of the Berlin Wall 39 years ago, in September 1975.

Taken from the viewing platform, it is the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz looking southeastwards into Stresemannstrasse and East Berlin. On the right is the derelict building "Haus Vaterland". Lower right by the wall is the abandoned entrance to the Potsdamer Platz subway-station. See my PS below.

Beyond the wall is the heavily fortified no-man's land that was patrolled by tanks and soldiers. The watchtowers were manned 24 hours a day by armed guards.

Guards patrolled and military vehicles drove up and down a concrete road in the "death strip," which allowed them to respond quickly to any escape attempts. To improve visibility for the guards, sand or gravel was kept neatly raked to show footprints and the wall was painted a pale colour.

On the free side, the western side, West Germans could walk right up to the wall which they decorated with graffiti and various rude slogans. You can't see very much of the slogans in my photo, but at this URL you can see a similar photo taken from the same spot, 2 months after mine when snow had fallen. Being a wider angle shot you can see the main slogan is calling for ONE GERMANY.

The wall appeared in 1961 and was constantly modified and beefed up in the following years. In 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy made his famous speech in West Berlin, declaring that "all free men" were residents of Berlin, including himself. He then spoke the German phrase, "Ich Bin Ein Berliner!"

Although the 9th of November, 1989 officially marks the fall of the Berlin Wall, the official demolition did not start till the June 13th, 1990.

I visited the wall and the locations where it originally stood - on a number of occasions between 1970 and 2009, thanks to the frequent times I covered contests in Germany. Having a friend to stay with in Berlin also greatly helped. (He was involved in a famous escape tunnel group from the west side, but that is another story.)

The reason for being up on this platform in 1975, overlooking the wall with the rather bizarre background was for a film and photo shoot with Jr. Mr. Germany, Wilfried Dubbels. I was looking for somewhere different that typified Berlin, and I can assure you it was a very short shoot. I could sense the unease in his eyes and the discomfort as we shot the film. We could see the guards in the watch tower behind us and it was quite scary.

After a short time, we moved to a much calmer, safer location, to the lawn in front of the old Reichstag building, which is now home to the German Parliament.

PS.
After the war, Potsdamer Platz was the centre from which the four Allied occupation zones were demarcated. The ruined Haus Vaterland (House of the Fatherland) was in the Russian sector, but had doors to both the British and the American sectors.

This is probably one of the last photos taken of the derelict House of the Fatherland on the right. The building was completely burnt out on 17th June 1953, during the East German strike and protest. It was then left in ruins, being adjacent to the Berlin wall after the wall's construction in 1961.

In 1972, the Senate of West Berlin bought the building as part of 8.5 hectares of land to build a new road, and then had it demolished in 1976. The 600 tonnes of iron and steel were sold as scrap.

See more detail in LARGE.