The Berlin Wall
On August 13th 1961, Berliners awoke to find that, during the night, their city had been divided by a barbed wire and cinder block wall. Construction of the wall had started at midnight and the army and police worked throughout the night to ensure the border separating West Berlin from East Berlin and the rest of East Germany was shut by morning.

Border guards were given permission to shoot people trying to cross the wall, which was built to stop East Germans, who were increasingly disillusioned with communism, from escaping to the West. Once the wall was built, no-one could cross, not even the 60,000 people who had been commuting to work between one half of the city and the other. In 1965 a concrete wall was erected – by 1975, this had been widened and reinforced with mesh fencing, trenches, bunkers, barbed wire and over 300 watchtowers.