10 Things You May Not Know About the Berlin Wall

At a press conference on the evening of November 9, 1989, East German Politburo member Günter Schabowski prematurely announced that restrictions on travel visas would be lifted. Asked when the new policy would begin, he said, “As far as I know ... effective immediately, without delay.”

But in actuality, the policy was to be announced the following day and would still have required East Germans to go through a lengthy visa application process. Schabowski’s confused answers, and erroneous media reports that border crossings had opened, spurred thousands of East Berliners to the Berlin Wall.

At the Bornholmer Street checkpoint, Harald Jäger, the chief officer on duty, faced a mob growing in size and frustration. Receiving insults, rather than instructions, from his superiors - and nervously expecting results of his cancer diagnostic tests the next day - the overwhelmed Jäger opened the border crossing on his own, and the other gates soon followed.

More than 2 million East Germans, most of them skilled professionals, fled to the West between 1949 and 1961. The Soviet Union had rejected East Germany’s original request to build the wall in 1953, but with defections through West Berlin reaching 1,000 people a day by the summer of 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev finally relented.

The residents of Berlin awoke on the morning of August 13, 1961, to find barbed wire fencing had been installed on the border between the city’s east and west sections. Days later, East Germany began to fortify the barrier with concrete.

The 27-mile portion of the barrier separating Berlin into east and west consisted of two concrete walls between which was a “death strip” up to 160 yards wide that contained hundreds of watchtowers, miles of anti-vehicle trenches, guard dog runs, floodlights and trip-wire machine guns.

Experts report that at least 140 people were shot dead, suffered fatal accidents or committed suicide after failed escape attempts across the Berlin Wall. Other researchers place the death toll even higher. The first victim was Ida Siekmann, who died on August 22, 1961, after attempting to leap to a West Berlin street below her fourth-floor East Berlin apartment window. The last fatality occurred in March 1989 when a young East German attempting to fly over the wall in a hot air balloon crashed into power lines. Many other would-be escapees were shot and killed by border guards.

The first defector to escape across the Berlin Wall was 19-year-old East German border guard Corporal Conrad Schumann, who was immortalized on film as he leapt over a 3-foot-high roll of barbed wire just two days after East Germany sealed the border.

As the Berlin Wall grew more elaborate, so did escape plans. Fugitives hid in secret compartments of cars driven by visiting West Berliners, quietly dug underground tunnels and crawled through dark sewers.

The three Bethke brothers pulled off the most spectacular escapes. Eldest brother Ingo escaped by floating on an inflatable mattress across the Elbe River in 1975, and eight years later brother Holger soared over the wall on a steel cable he fired with a bow and arrow to a rooftop in West Berlin. In 1989 the pair flew an ultra-light plane over the wall and back to pick up youngest brother Egbert.

In June 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned President John F. Kennedy that he would blockade West Berlin if Western forces were not removed, a belligerent act that could lead to war.

When Kennedy heard news that the communists had walled off East Berlin instead of cutting off West Berlin, he confided to an aide, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war. This is the end of the Berlin crisis. The other side panicked—not we. We’re going to do nothing now because there is no alternative except war.”

On June 26, 1963, Kennedy famously told a crowd at the Berlin Wall, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” intending to express solidarity with the citizens of Berlin by saying he was one of them. Some critics, however, claimed that by adding the indefinite article “ein,” he actually said, "I am a jelly doughnut," referring to a jam-filled pastry known in parts of Germany as a “Berliner.”

Linguists counter that the president did not commit a grammatical faux pas because “ein” is required when the speaker is speaking figuratively, not literally, about being of a certain nationality, as was obviously the case with Kennedy. In addition, the pastry known as a “Berliner” in the rest of Germany is called a “pfannkuchen” in Berlin, so there would have been no confusion among the listeners.

Rather than keeping its citizens in, the East German government claimed it erected the Berlin Wall to keep out Western fascists, spies and ideas. Two weeks after ordering the construction of the “Antifaschistischer Schutzwall,” East German leader Walter Ulbricht claimed, “We have sealed the cracks in the fabric of our house and closed the holes through which the worst enemies of the German people could creep.”

Prussian King Frederick William II commissioned the iconic triumphal arch straddling East and West Berlin that served as the iconic backdrop for famous presidential speeches by Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. When completed in 1791, the Brandenburg Gate was incorporated into the city’s original Customs Wall, which ringed the city beginning in the 1730s.

Official demolition of the Berlin Wall began in the summer of 1990. More than 40,000 wall sections were recycled into building materials used for German reconstruction projects, but a few hundred segments were auctioned off and are now scattered around the globe, from the Vatican gardens to the men’s room of the Main Street Station Casino in Las Vegas, where urinals are mounted on a graffiti-covered wall segment protected behind glass.