I am a French citizen and was on military duty in Berlin in 1980 at the Quartier Napoleon. I did my duty in Tegel and in Spandau. I find this video very well done and it gives me goodebumps thinking of the time I lived there. Many years later, I returned to Berlin in 1992 as a "tourist", lived in Potsdam and in Köpenick in the old east part of Berlin. Many many visions came back to my eyes and memory and despite being had times, I will never regret my time then. Then I visited the STASI HQ and the Oranienburg Sachsehausen KZ. I left Berlin loaded with deep emotions. Once in a while I return to Cologne where I have very good friends who live there. Living in Spain now and been seriously disabled, I have a hard time traveling long distance, but, as soon I could, I would return to Berlin in a New York minute. Thanks. X
Javi I was there same time as you, 1982 with US Army I remember so much and the evil and darkness I can never forget, yet I was a free man. God bless you I pray for your strength. And yes I would like to visit one more time
Andy, OUTSTANDING history lesson. I was a US Airman stationed at the Rhein Main Air Base in Frankfurt from '79 to '81. I was able to visit Berlin for five days in March of 1981. Thanks!
Fantastic video. I was living and working in West Germany as a British citizen in the mid-70s and again in the late 80s and decided to visit Berlin at the end of October 1989. I travelled to Berlin by train with a change in Hannover. I spent the weekend in the city, went through Checkpoint Charlie to explore East Berlin for the day. A few days after my return to Frankfurt, the Berlin Wall came down. I took many photos of East and West Berlin in October 1989 and 20 years later I took photos at the exact same spots. I love Berlin and have returned to the city on many occasions since, but the first visit in late-October 1989 was by far the most memorable.
Spent about 5 months in Berlin as a young soldier from Sept 1976 - Feb 1977. West Berlin was a real eye opener to life. But also had its sinister side. I had a brilliant time there and learnt a lot too. I think the Brit sector was the best part of Berlin at the time. I briefly revisited Berlin in 1982 to run the Marathon. It hadn't changed much. I went back in 1984 and 86. Again to run the Marathon. The finish point by that time had changed to the Olympic Stadium. What an uplifting experience. It was a lot better than finishing on the Ku Dam by the Blue Church. I also visited the East in December 1976. What a culture shock, and as stated in the video. In uniform and had to be back by 23:59 hrs. It was my first overseas posting. Great video brought back a number of good memories.
Interesting, especially your comment that the 1936 Olympic stadium was an "uplifting experience". I have never been there, but its use in the recent football championships demonstrates its quality and durability.
Dear Sir, I’m so very thankful for your video. I am a West German, born in 1956; I will never forget 1989 and the following years. I very often visited the DDR/GDR, because my mother was born nearby Erfurt. Again, thanks a lot for this video.
Andy thank you for the research you put in supporting your recording and editing of the video. I was stationed in Germany in the mid 1980s and drove the route from Helmstad to Berlin through the checkpoints and we walked through the Checkpoint Charlie in and out of East Berlin. The thing that was impressed on Allied drivers of privately owned vehicles was to pay attention to your speed when going from checkpoints A and B. If you got to Checkpoint B too fast you’d get a fine for speeding; if it took you too long to get to Checkpoint B, you had to defend yourself from accusations of spying. Had cruise control, set it 62 mph and arrived in the middle of the accepted timeframe.
I was the ammo sgt 2/6 Infantry Battalion Berlin and made that same drive many times. So evil worlds largest prison. I went in also to the east via checkpoint Charlie. None of the east germans believed me when I told them I was American. So sad the way they were forced to live
I worked for a construction company in the UK, the site manager was a former pilot and took part in the Berlin Airlift, he would tell me stories of how they flew in food, clothes and even bags of coal. Years later working in Denmark I'd visit the German Christmas markets a short ferry trip away at Lubec. The wall was starting to come down at that time and the next visit we sailed across to Rostock and drove on dual carriageway towards Berlin, enroute we came to a wide section of concrete road, this turned out to be an airstrip and there were buildings half hidden in the trees. The whole area was very aery and like the TV drama series of the 60s dark forests with a mist coming through the trees. The wall was being dismantled and people were collecting lumps of it, mine is somewhere?? My second visit most of the wall had gone, I took a boat tour and the guide described how East German guards would strafe the river if they though swimmers were trying to swim under the surface to escape. On my third visit it was funny to see that though the East and West police forces had joined, the West German police drove Mercedes cars, the East Germans drove Trabants.
I just finished watching your very informative video. I was in West and East Berlin in 1971. And I was at the Drewitz border crossing. I had forgotten after all those years. I just checked my old passport, and there it is! I have stamps for Drewitz on June 6 and June 12, 1971. We were American students studying in Munich and did a trip to Berlin. And, yes the border crossing was nerve-wracking. Thank for your work in presenting a vivid recollection of what that time was really like. I get choked up every time I think about it.
Fabulous video. As a Canadian exchange student in Winsen Luhe in 1980, one of 30 Canadian students across West Germany, we traveled to West Berlin for a week with a day in East Berlin. I was 18 and had no idea of the delicate planning behind this. Thank you for showing the check points we went through, landmarks and sites, the original footage was amazing. At the time I knew of East Germany and the Wall but only later appreciated its frightening reality.
I was stationed in West Berlin for six years during the seventies. This video brought back a lot of memories of familiar sights. It also showed me a lot of things I did not know, partly because I was not allowed in East Berlin. Checkpoint Bravo brought back a lot of memories, having gone through several times en route to Helmstedt and West Germany. Happy days.
In 1981 (I was 13) I went on a school trip for two weeks called ‘Behind the Iron Curtain’. I vividly remember crossing Checkpoint Charlie at midnight on a train on our way to Brest, Russia. The tour guides told us beforehand to have our passports ready, no laughing, giggling or anything. I was right by the door and I remember lots of shouting and banging doors and then this enormous jackboot kicking the door open! It was terrifying. We got to our hotel under darkness. In the morning we drove through East Berlin. I thought we’d gone through a time warp to 1950. I will never forget those memories. It is easy to forget the value of your freedom and how important it is to fight for it. These people thought they were being protected when they really they were captured and under constant surveillance. A poignant reminder of what can happen again under digital surveillance and ‘for your own safety’. Amazing videos. Thank you
Just watched this. Absolutely superb. I was born in West Germany in 1976 and spent alot of years living there. As a young child I had no idea of the threat. Only as I grew older and served in the British Army as an adult it's frightening to think of what could have happened. Absolutely loved watching this video and thank you for uploading it. Brings back happy memories 👍
The Glienicker Brücke is actually in a gorgeous area of Berlin/Potsdam. The scenery is pretty stunning and the bridge really fun to walk around on and see where the split was. Really loved visiting it.
It is as you say a lovely area. But..in 2005 when I was there with my husband, fluent German speaker, the locals were not particularly friendly. We crossed the Bridge, for old times sake, reminiscing about how it used to be, then visited a local cafe. On hearing us chatting in English a youngish man approached and questioned us about who we were, why were we there, etc. We politely refused to answer as he was extremely unfriendly. Along with his leatherclad friends he hurled abuse at us in German and they spat in our direction. Needless to say we made a hasty retreat, followed by jeers and lots of gestures! So even in 2005 not all East Germans were pleased to be 'liberated'. We did enjoy the rest of our walk down memory lane though.
I love how you can just discover amazing content like this on UA-cam! I remember visiting checkpoint Charlie and Berlin 88, and remember how bleak it looked to the east, and the scars of the battle of Berlin were still obvious there, incredibly evocative to see it again, and agree, gives you goosebumps seeing it again!
I am proud of my little part of bringing down the wall. We were in Berlin three days before the Checkpoint Charlie building was removed and put into the museum. I, too, have warm memories of my time in Germany and would go back in a heartbeat.
As a 17 year old US high school student "on holiday" in West Germany during the summer of 1989, I had the pleasure of spending 4 nights in West Berlin. My buddy and i (he was 16 - parents did not come with us) went to East Berlin for a day through the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. It was an interesting experience to say the least! Thanks for another great video!
I was 11 years old when the wall came down, I remember it happening, I have always been fascinated by the Cold War. This video is an absolute gem, thank you.
I went back in '94 for the 25 anniversary. Our hotel was a former honeytrap in what had been the East. I visited the museum at CPCharlie. The hot air balloon that some enterprising escapee had built to get his family out fascinated me. As I studied it, a weird and dishevelled old man was shuffling about. Eager for first hand accounts of the bad days, I struck up a conversation with him. He was, it transpired, the man who had built and flown the balloon !
To be precise, there were two, a successful, and an unsuccessful attempt to leave the GDR in a balloon. The one Disney made a movie about flew 2 families, not one;, though the German version is more accurate. One of the men got severely injured and while he was unconscious, the other guy sold their story as him being the sole hero. The other attempt happened shortly before the fall of the Wall, and technically the husband arrived in West Berlin if you call falling out of your basket to your death as an arrival. He still managed to bring his wife to safety, who was detained by the Stasi. His body was returned. The real jarring thing missing from Andy's video is that the Stasi left no rest, even for the dead. Marienborn had a special mortuary garage to verify the person they transport to bury into West Germany is actually dead, and not a refugee taking their place. When the Stasi collected returned bodies or bodies killed in the death strip, especially after 1972, they sent them to a crematorium to cremate them asap with the money they had found on them.
This was excellent. I watched all night from the US as the wall came down. Then in January 1992 I visited Berlin to see the remnants of the divide before it was all but erased. We drove up from Munich, stopped in Liepzig (horrible grey city then) for a quick break and ended up in Berlin for 2 nights. Those images of the old east/west divide are still with me.
Wish I still had my mom's old pictures of Berlin. She would've loved seeing videos like this. Could only imagine the chills you had walking along the old wall even in present time. I had a small chill when I took my daughter to the old Patten museum at Fort Knox, KY where they had a small section of the wall compared only seeing the pictures my mom had
Hats of to you Andy!!! This is so informative and interesting. Remembering crying when the wall came down in 1989.Fist vist to Berlin in 1995 and just got back from Berlin (Sept 2023) Can not wait to return to go and check out all the places you pointed out in this video. Again thank you so much for sharing your experience with us!
I spent 2 years, 7 months, and 13 days as a US Army MP (Jun74 to Jan77) and I spent many hours on duty at Checkpoint Charlie. I also worked on a US Army Patrol Boat in 1976. We patrolled the US sector of the Wansee and we saw the Glienecke Bridge up close and personal many times while "sailing" along on duty. I did get to visit Checkpoint Bravo once while on duty and was shocked at how forward the female British MPs were. Oh Behave!! So many memories of my time in Berlin and I just wish I could have been there when The Wall came down!!!!
Adding a few bits. While being on the MP Patrol Boat on the Wansee, we would sometimes go into the British sector and visit the Canoe Club which was a recreation area for Brits. We became very good friends with the lads who worked there. They were Royal Green Jackets and we invited them to attend our Bicentennial 4th of July Celebration at Andrews Barracks where we were billeted. So much fun. We had more than a couple of impromptu beach parties at the Canoe Club that summer, too. Like I said...so many fond memories! I hope your memories were just as good.
Really amazing and insightful documentary mate. I am the same age as that poor lad shot and killed trying to cross in 1989. Thanks for sharing all this. Really puts perspective.
I just loved this video. It brought back memories of places and events I lived through. As a canadian I travelled the route from west Germany thru to West Berlin. We crossed at check point Charlie into east Berlin and thankfully back. I remember standing by the Brandenburg gate next to the wall and being warned by an uncle that I could be shot being that close. All of these memories were in 1989. Again thank you
I am good friends with the last American NCOIC of Checkpoint Charlie (Michael Rafferty). He was there on the day the border was opened and the day the checkpoint closed and took some amazing pictures. Really nice guy.
Very impressive presentation Andy. I was a US Army MP stationed in Berlin at the time of Reagan's 1982 visit. I wasn't working at Charlie the of Reagan's visit, but I spent plenty of time there, and I was working there the day the scenes for the movie Octopussy were filmed and I really do appear in the final cut. I remember the checkpoint area exactly as it appeared during Reagan's visit. It's changed so much that I wouldn't know where/what it was if you dropped me in the middle of it today. Bravo on the other hand, looked mostly like it did 40 years ago, except there's no place to pull over and park to clear the checkpoint. I can still remember looking at traffic coming into the city standing at the window in the gantry over the road. I'm glad that you mentioned some of the victims that were killed trying to escape East Germany. I'm afraid young people don't know, or don't believe just how common it was for people to be shot to death attempting to cross the border. I don't know the numbers but gun fire in the Deadman zone was very common, at least away from the downtown area, and I don't want that tragic fact forgotten. Thanks again for the great presentation and the walk down memory lane. :)
I was on my first tour as a young army spook in Bavaria when the Wall fell. It all happened with incredible speed and it was amazing to see history with my own eyes. Sadly enough, it appears that any lessons from the Cold War have been forgotten by the fools currently running the planet. God save us all.
The Wall falling was so much unplanned that an Unofficial Coworker as the Stasi like to call them requested an extraction for December just days before it fell. Unfortunately, the HV-A being way better in destroying their records, it wasn't found out who it was.
Sadly enough, it also appears that many people have forgotten that we cant allow a re-roll-out of a criminal russian sowjet union regime, because it means suffering, death and the end of freedom for millions of europeans born on the wrong side of putins new borders.
36:41 In the Grenzübergangsstellen / GüSt (border checkpoints), the people wearing the uniform of the border troops were - with the exception of the commander of the border checkpoint - _not_ members of the Grenztruppen (border troops), but of the Staatssicherheitsdienst (state security service) of the GDR.
I didn’t know this was the video I’d been looking for for years. An excellently produced and clear explanation of everything. For years I wondered about certain aspects of where the walls started and finished and how people got from East to West and Vice Versa. You explained so much. Congratulations on a wonderful film. Others should take note. Best 45 mins I’ve spent on the internet in months. Thanks.
Very nice video, thank you. One small correction: at 24:09 the Allied Museum is not at Tempelhof, but on Clayallee in Dahlem, at the site of the former US military cinema, the Outpost Theater (a landmarked building) and the former Nicholson Library building. There are plans to move the museum to one of the hangars of the old Tempelhof Airport, but the museum itself says that this is all in the planning stage and that it could take up to ten years before the move to Tempelhof actually happens.
Man you informed me better than when I was living through this time period. I’m an American Veteran and was Stationed at Kaiserslautern Germany with my Headquarters out of Ramstein Airbase 1979-1982 Army. This video is put together perfectly for me. Thank you 🙏 🎉.
Hey Andy, Thanks for making this superb video. As a civilian in the 1980s, I had a fascination with Eastern Europe and managed to visit most countries, East Germany and Belin being the most fascinating. I had run-ins with the Grenztruppen, the Stasi, and ended up being held on many occasions. In Drewitz, in Potsdam when I illegally to the S-Bahn from East Berlin on a day visa, and at Friedrichstrasse when I arrived from Alexanderplatz after midnight to cross Checkpoint Charlie. I've not really returned since those heady days, and your video is so interesting and brings back thos crazy memories. Thanks again from another ANDY 🙂
I'm flying out to Berlin for a short holiday tomorrow. This has given me a sobering account of the recent history. I was aware of the restrictions and one of my friends is a retired soldier, who talks with good humour of being stationed in Germany. I will bear in mind a lot of the information from the video when I'm walking in the city
Fascinating, thank you. I drive tour buses around Europe and frequently visited DDR during the 80’s …challenging at the time. For East Berlin, we would cross via the southern corridor near Eisenach and enter the city from the south. I still drive tour groups to Berlin and struggle to convey just how different it was just three decades ago, but your videos are extremely interesting and helpful to me. Well done… Bravo (…not forgetting Alpha and Charlie too 😂)
I was stationed at Tempelhof Central Airport (US Air Force) from summer 1984 to summer 1988. I clearly remember those checkpoints. Thank you for an awesome video especially with the historical views.
The Cold War era has fascinated me for a very long time and I have watched many documentaries concerning this period in time. Your video is brilliant and informative showing me a number of facts I had not read about or viewed elsewhere. Thank You. Subscribed👍
I watched your ‘Across The Iron Curtain in the 1980s’ video last night, now here I am on my lunch break watching this. Absolutely great content! I learned a lot. Thanks for the first hand insight, Andy!
Fascinating to see areas I heard of as a child on TV. To see how they were then and today and to learn of some history is very interesting. Thank you for sharing this.
"The Germany I knew no longer exists" - same for me, and hence I truly appreciate your video, brings back memories and also refreshes my memory. For some reason I had a memory that the T-34 tank memorial was on the opposite side of the highway ...Thanks for the incredible work you've done
I am from the Netherlands and I grew up with a divided Europe and a divided Germany. Never visited East Europe our East Germany. But for the last two years I drove with my car to Poland and saw in the distance the tower of checkpoint Alpha. Did not knew there was a museum. Next year I will drive at the same autobahn and will visit the museum. Thanks for this video.
Fantastic video Andy. Clear, concise, informative narration. I learned a great deal from it, even though I had spent a weeks holiday in West Berlin back in the 80s. During that time, I visited the Eastern sector of the city once, to try to find locally made model Trabant and Wartburg cars to add to my collection, and find some I did. Being something of an ‘airliner nut’ at the time, I really wanted to visit Schonefeld Airport, which I did for a few hours one day during my visit. Sadly no pictures allowed! It was somewhat quieter than Tegel airport was at the time!
This was fascinating. Thanks much for preparing and posting it. I was stationed twice in Germany and made many trips to divided Berlin. This not only brought back memories but was a good reminder to never take freedom for granted. Very well done presentation.
I was on a 2-week vacation through central Europe in 1990, and in early December made to Berlin for the first time. The wall was all but gone and I had full access to all locations in the former east Berlin, including that giant radio/TV tower. The Brandenburg Gate was fenced off for major renovations but I was able to quickly walk through one of the arches at the end. The train I took still stopped at the former border of the now "gone" east Germany. The sniper tower was still there but unoccupied. It was a great experience and I hope to return someday.
I never got to see that part of Germany, and as an air force pilot during the 1960s, the Cold War was a big part of my life. I was long since out of the air force, working for an airline, and sitting in my hotel room on a layover, watching the people climbing on the wall and beginning to tear it down. It was a weird experience for me, because I was having a difficult time believing that what I was seeing was real. Thanks for the tour. I think you did a wonderful job.
I have just the documentary brilliant bought back a lot memories I'm 42 now but l was born in West Germany my Dad was in the British army. I enjoyed it so much l have watched a few times.
Dear Mr. McLoone, you have released a so important and pretty emotianal video for all of us. I hope the young generation will watch it! Against forgetting! Thank you for a honrorable performance. Best regards, C. M., Germany
Great video. Enjoyed it. I’m 58 years old and grew up in the Cold War era. I remember vividly when the wall came down and had visited East Berlin about 3 years prior.
I'm pleased you mentioned the shooting of Peter Fechter. He bled to death over a period of around an hour because neither the East Germans or the Americans dared to help him (he was at the base of the wall on the west side) due to the fear of sparking an international incident. The west did drop him some bandages, but what could he do, he was paralysed by a bullet through the pelvis and bleeding profusely. After he passed away, the Grenztruppen did recover his corpse, but it was never returned to his family.
Very informative. May I offer a couple of corrections: Glienicke is pronounced GLEENICKE, and the slogan beneath the Brezhnev/Honecker wall art translates as '.. deadly LOVE', not '.. deadly lovers ..'. Apart from that, I much appreciate your work and effort to post this video. Thank you.
This is excellent - I've always found it hard to find info about Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo, and this gave me exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you so much!
Andy, don’t know how this ended up on my feed but chuffed it did. I was a young soldier in 1986 and did a familiarisation tour of Berlin. We were lucky enough to go through Checkpoint Charlie into the East. We travelled to Berlin on the British Military Train and I remember stopping at all the train stations so we could be checked by the guards. The stations were empty less the East German guards with their Alsatians. I returned to Berlin as an older soldier in 1991 as I was stationed in Detmold. We got lost in Berlin and drove passed an East German camp in Potsdam, we laugh now, but the Lt Col I was driving at the time was not impressed. Loved the video.
Very enjoyable 45 minutes. My dad was RAF Regiment based at RAF Wildenrath in the late 1950s nowhere near Berlin but as a youngster I was privileged to see lots of Germany and make lifelong friends of many locals. Having read lots of Len Deighton's spy novels it was nice to put them in context Thanks
Great video! I wasn’t born until over 10 years after the wall fell and was always curious about it. This video gave me a great deal of information, thank you! Hopefully I’ll be able to visit Berlin myself in the future and see what remains in person. Cheers from the USA.
Добрый день! Это прекрасно что вы интересуетесь падением стены ,хотя родились через 10 лет! Я служил на мосту шпионов советским пограничником. В ноябре 1989 года ,На моих глазах со стороны Потсдама к мосту подошло много людей. Мы замерли, не знали что делать.. Я стоял на посту и сообщил об этом офицеру по селектору. Офицер позвонил вышестоящим офицерам. И мне был дан приказ сдать пистолет в сейф для оружия. Пограничники Восточной Германии открыли ворота и началось воссоединение восточных и западных немцев. Никогда не забуду этих слез радости и счастья !!! СТЕНА ПАЛА !!! А СКОРО ПАДУТ ВСЕ СТЕНЫ ,ПАДУТ ГРАНИЦЫ, ПОТОМУ ЧТО САМ БОГ НАВЕДЕТ ПОРЯДОК НА ВСЕЙ ЗЕМЛЕ !!!
The description you are giving of Marienborn border treatment of civilians applied to people going into the DDR. Transit to West Berlin (which I did about 100 times) was never like this, unless of course you arced up. It was very straightforward, no searches, no questions about who you were visiting etc. Just where you were going, and how many people were in your car, although at holiday times the queues could be very long. people would often turn off their enginges and push their cars. We used to look with envy at the "Military" lane vehicles sailing by.... Having a non-German passport meant I had to pay DM5 cash for a transit visa, and how that happened was always very arbitrary. Sometimes the border guard would take cash at the window, sometime you had to go to a little office, pay the DM5 for the transit visa, then bring the receipt back to the guard. If you were hitchhiking the German driver might get a bit annoyed and or freaked out about being stuck with the guard unable to move on till you came back. Occasionally on transit you would get weird things happening. For example a hitchhiker we picked up suddenly insisted that we take him to see his girlfriend in East Berlin, which of course we declined. He told us we had no balls and that he did this all the time... Then he tried to climb out of the car when we got to the Berliner Ring, luckily one of us was big enough to hold him in the car till we could speed up again If he had managed to get out of the car, we would not have been able to transit into West Berlin because there would be one fewer people in the car than the count on the way in to the DDR. Your videos are generally very accurate and really bring those times back, plus give me an appreciation of an Allied soldiers POV which was a bit different to ours....
It’s hard for me to imagine the Brandenburg Gate without a wall. I got to see it from both West and East Berlin in 1987, but wasn’t allowed to get close to it on the Eastern side of Berlin. It’s interesting to see how different Berlin is today.
Thanks for content like this! My grandfather was a WW2 veteran and I wonder how many stories he took to the grave. And now there are (almost?) none left. In terms of the human experiences, what we have is all we'll ever have. Not that you're gonna leave us any time soon, but one day you will, and it's important that experiences from this era are recorded.
I want to add my appreciation and enjoyment of this very educational video. I was a youngster in the 60's and new about the Berlin Wall and later learnt about the division of the city after WW2, I have never seen photos or footage of the checkpoints, whose names I remember from my childhood. Congratulations on producing an excellent video, I look forward to seeing the others you have on your channel.👏👏👏👏
In 2015 I sneaked close to the filming set on the Glienicker Brücke. I‘m a history teacher and as I saw it it was like you said Hollywood bollocks. As a retired Sergeant of the Bundeswehr I also asked myself if they had any military advisor on the film set. Slumpy uniforms, some unnecessary armored vehicles, a wooden tower on the bridge which was completely unnecessary since on the other side the Grenztruppen could watch deeply from Klein-Glienicke into Berlin West… Anyway: Thank you for your amazing videos and for your service in Germany! Kind regards once again from Potsdam. 😊
@@AndyMcloone No need to be sorry about that. I don’t expect non-native speakers to pronounce words like „Glienicke“ or „Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursachergebrauchsanweisungsheftchenheftklammer“ properly. 😉
So I bet you hated the 'Deutschland 89'' and ''Deutschland 83'' TV miniseries even more, they were full of glaring errors which even a non-German like me could spot.
@@simonh6371 I never watched it but I read about the plot. This was absolute bollocks. Never ever was a GDR borderguard chosen by the stasi to infiltrate anything. The stasi got their spies from within and was looking for financially or psychologically unstable individuals. A GDR soldier would have uncovered himself simply by using military terminology. When I served in the Bundeswehr, I always could tell who served in the east simply by talking to them.
Many Many thanks. Livlng in West Berlin in the early 70s the borders never worried me, you knew they were there and you had to go and look. The view into East would show westerners how better life in West Berlin was.
I loved that you included the bit about the Military Liaison Missions crossing the Gleinicke Brücke. We had a neighbor a few doors down from us, Major Arthur Nicholson who was shit and killed by the Soviets while out on his MLM mission. It’s a fascinating part of history, the legal spying, that I think should not be forgotten. Excellent videos!
Where did you and for that matter, Nick Nicholson and his wife KAren and young daughter live? I went there and for the life of me cant remember where it was. I remember the USMLM Mission House well but the memory has a few fuzzy areas! Many thanks, Nigel (Brixmis mid 80s contemporary )
@@nigeldunkley2986Sorry to just get back to you. Good old YT did not notify me. Andy’s video came up in my feed though. We lived off the Dreipfuhl in the small housing area surrounding it, near Oskar Helene Heim station. We just called it the Duckpond.
I am of (West) German origin and, despite being born during the Cold War, I have just learned a lot I have never known by watching this. Great pictorial history lesson! Thank you!
This video was a trip down memory lane. I served in 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Wales in Berlin in 1976. I have just discovered your channel, and am looking forward to many more trips. Many thanks.
Very well documented and personal video, a real gem in historic knowledge. I was still very young when the wall came down, as I was born in 1978 in The Netherlands. But all of my youth I was well aware of the German separation, as It was just a fact of life back then. Thanks for this close look at indeed a not so distant past, reminding us what separation of people and lack of freedom really means. At this moment, 2023 in the Netherlands, I feel a new kind of lack of understanding and respect for differences are creating a separation again between cultures, welfare and knowledge. Let us be reminded dy videos like this that we are all just one kind and we need to cherish our differences instead of creating them.
Just subscribed.Thanks for all your amazing videos,Andy.I’m in my early sixties and the one big regret I have is that I didn’t visit Germany during the ‘Cold War’.Your videos answer a lot of my questions.Good luck and keep up the good work! 🇬🇧🇩🇪
This was a brilliant and educational video, I'm sincerely grateful that you took the time to make this. Your easy to listen to and clear, I knew somethings but now know a lot more. I look forward to browsing through your channel in the hope of more videos as enjoyable as was this.
This an absolutely phenomenal look back. I was kid the but vividly remember the wall coming down. I had always wondered where alpha and bravo were and why charlie was so popular. Thank you for taking the time to put this together.
Thank you for this video. Having grown up in western Poland in the 80s, I was always fascinated by the history of that part of the Cold War. I appreciate being able to learn from this video.
Greetings from the other side of the pond. Holy smokes, mate, what fantastic documentation and commentary. I was in grade school in the final days of the Cold War and looking back it becomes surreal to realize that this happened in my life time as a child. Then I juxtapose that with the world as I knew it in the ensuing years. At the time The Wall came down I was concerned with two things: 1) Mario 3 on NES 2)Tim Burton's Batman. 😄 Ultimately I wish I would have been just a little older or a little brighter back in those days to appreciate the tremendous goodwill and decades of diplomacy to avoid the worst of all outcomes and realize we all had a golden, once-in-history opportunity. I fear for the days ahead.
A wonderfully nostalgic video, thanks so much. As I commented under your British Military Train vid, I lived in Berlin in 1978, and drove there frequently over the next 30 yrs, and I vividly remember waiting for HOURS at the Marienborn and Drewitz checkpoints as my car was always full of test equipment and I had reams of carnet paperwork to be checked. All very officious and irritating.
Two (incl your first one on the access road) of the most evocative videos about that period in human history Andy. In 1987 I was also a Brirish Army reservist( RLC) and remember that whole period in time incl when the wall came down by which time I was a tuve driver in London as my full time position. Exceptionally well covered & articulated. Having lived & worked in Germay since then I would agree it is an amazing country with some of the most fair minded people I have ever met with a keen sense of history You have a new subscriber here and I look forward to seeing more of your content. Thanks 👍
As an East-Berliner, born in the late 70ies, it's interesting to see the view from this perspective. As a kid, the wall never felt like a threat to me (us kids), more somewhat mysterious (from knowing that all the cool stuff from the West is available behind it) ;)... i was 11 when the wall came down. It's crazy how Berlin has changed since then.
Excellent detailed information and enjoyable watch. I will always remember the Wall coming down as it all happened so quickly. I used to listen to Radio Berlin International on a SW radio but it was at an electrical dealers for repair when news of the Wall broke so I missed tuning in! I think the final broadcast of RBI is on UA-cam though. The last time I visited Berlin was 2018 and I stopped off at Helmstedt where I met a local lady in a bar who told me her lasting memory of reunification was the endless lines of Trabants which left a smog of fumes hanging in the air for days after! 😄
I was 10 months old when the Berlin Wall fell, but I do remember my parents telling me years later, that they didn't think they would see a unified Germany in their lifetime. Yet, from what they told me, less than a year after they said this to each other, the Berlin Wall fell and 11 months after that, Germany was one country again. This video (and the others about the Cold War period) is fascinating to watch, giving a voice to what memorials never can. The Neuewache (I Hope I spelled it right) is another landmark in Berlin that has fascinated me, how it went from Royal Guard House to a centre of German memorial for their War dead from the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Regime, surviving WW2 bombing, through East Germany and the current Federal Republic. The building has had different memorials within it over the years, though in my view, the current one, featuring a woman and child, dedicated to the victims of war and dictatorship, is a simple yet moving memorial. The really incredible thing is that although the uniforms changed over the years, and goose stepping has been deleted, the drill style when the building is guarded is otherwise unchanged since the Weimar Republic
I am a French citizen and was on military duty in Berlin in 1980 at the Quartier Napoleon. I did my duty in Tegel and in Spandau. I find this video very well done and it gives me goodebumps thinking of the time I lived there. Many years later, I returned to Berlin in 1992 as a "tourist", lived in Potsdam and in Köpenick in the old east part of Berlin. Many many visions came back to my eyes and memory and despite being had times, I will never regret my time then. Then I visited the STASI HQ and the Oranienburg Sachsehausen KZ. I left Berlin loaded with deep emotions. Once in a while I return to Cologne where I have very good friends who live there. Living in Spain now and been seriously disabled, I have a hard time traveling long distance, but, as soon I could, I would return to Berlin in a New York minute. Thanks. X
Thank you for sharing your memories!
Aujourd'hui tout le monde regrette la RDA ou la vie était bien facile et paisible qu'elle RFA.
Javi
I was there same time as you, 1982 with US Army I remember so much and the evil and darkness I can never forget, yet I was a free man. God bless you I pray for your strength. And yes I would like to visit one more time
Thank you 🙏 for sharing your memories. I salute 🫡 you sir !
I wanna go back too.
Andy, OUTSTANDING history lesson. I was a US Airman stationed at the Rhein Main Air Base in Frankfurt from '79 to '81. I was able to visit Berlin for five days in March of 1981. Thanks!
Man you're better than BBC.
That's not too hard these days.
Amen
That's an understatement
@@bubba842 perhaps but let it not detract from the point that these videos are outstanding.
The bbc has more 'propaganda' than the DDR ever had !
Fantastic video. I was living and working in West Germany as a British citizen in the mid-70s and again in the late 80s and decided to visit Berlin at the end of October 1989. I travelled to Berlin by train with a change in Hannover. I spent the weekend in the city, went through Checkpoint Charlie to explore East Berlin for the day. A few days after my return to Frankfurt, the Berlin Wall came down. I took many photos of East and West Berlin in October 1989 and 20 years later I took photos at the exact same spots. I love Berlin and have returned to the city on many occasions since, but the first visit in late-October 1989 was by far the most memorable.
Spent about 5 months in Berlin as a young soldier from Sept 1976 - Feb 1977. West Berlin was a real eye opener to life. But also had its sinister side. I had a brilliant time there and learnt a lot too. I think the Brit sector was the best part of Berlin at the time. I briefly revisited Berlin in 1982 to run the Marathon. It hadn't changed much. I went back in 1984 and 86. Again to run the Marathon. The finish point by that time had changed to the Olympic Stadium. What an uplifting experience. It was a lot better than finishing on the Ku Dam by the Blue Church. I also visited the East in December 1976. What a culture shock, and as stated in the video. In uniform and had to be back by 23:59 hrs. It was my first overseas posting. Great video brought back a number of good memories.
Interesting, especially your comment that the 1936 Olympic stadium was an "uplifting experience". I have never been there, but its use in the recent football championships demonstrates its quality and durability.
Dear Sir, I’m so very thankful for your video. I am a West German, born in 1956; I will never forget 1989 and the following years. I very often visited the DDR/GDR, because my mother was born nearby Erfurt. Again, thanks a lot for this video.
Andy thank you for the research you put in supporting your recording and editing of the video. I was stationed in Germany in the mid 1980s and drove the route from Helmstad to Berlin through the checkpoints and we walked through the Checkpoint Charlie in and out of East Berlin. The thing that was impressed on Allied drivers of privately owned vehicles was to pay attention to your speed when going from checkpoints A and B. If you got to Checkpoint B too fast you’d get a fine for speeding; if it took you too long to get to Checkpoint B, you had to defend yourself from accusations of spying. Had cruise control, set it 62 mph and arrived in the middle of the accepted timeframe.
I was the ammo sgt 2/6 Infantry Battalion Berlin and made that same drive many times. So evil worlds largest prison. I went in also to the east via checkpoint Charlie. None of the east germans believed me when I told them I was American. So sad the way they were forced to live
I worked for a construction company in the UK, the site manager was a former pilot and took part in the Berlin Airlift, he would tell me stories of how they flew in food, clothes and even bags of coal. Years later working in Denmark I'd visit the German Christmas markets a short ferry trip away at Lubec. The wall was starting to come down at that time and the next visit we sailed across to Rostock and drove on dual carriageway towards Berlin, enroute we came to a wide section of concrete road, this turned out to be an airstrip and there were buildings half hidden in the trees. The whole area was very aery and like the TV drama series of the 60s dark forests with a mist coming through the trees. The wall was being dismantled and people were collecting lumps of it, mine is somewhere??
My second visit most of the wall had gone, I took a boat tour and the guide described how East German guards would strafe the river if they though swimmers were trying to swim under the surface to escape.
On my third visit it was funny to see that though the East and West police forces had joined, the West German police drove Mercedes cars, the East Germans drove Trabants.
I just finished watching your very informative video. I was in West and East Berlin in 1971. And I was at the Drewitz border crossing. I had forgotten after all those years. I just checked my old passport, and there it is! I have stamps for Drewitz on June 6 and June 12, 1971. We were American students studying in Munich and did a trip to Berlin. And, yes the border crossing was nerve-wracking. Thank for your work in presenting a vivid recollection of what that time was really like. I get choked up every time I think about it.
Fabulous video. As a Canadian exchange student in Winsen Luhe in 1980, one of 30 Canadian students across West Germany, we traveled to West Berlin for a week with a day in East Berlin. I was 18 and had no idea of the delicate planning behind this. Thank you for showing the check points we went through, landmarks and sites, the original footage was amazing. At the time I knew of East Germany and the Wall but only later appreciated its frightening reality.
I was stationed in West Berlin for six years during the seventies. This video brought back a lot of memories of familiar sights. It also showed me a lot of things I did not know, partly because I was not allowed in East Berlin. Checkpoint Bravo brought back a lot of memories, having gone through several times en route to Helmstedt and West Germany.
Happy days.
In 1981 (I was 13) I went on a school trip for two weeks called ‘Behind the Iron Curtain’.
I vividly remember crossing Checkpoint Charlie at midnight on a train on our way to Brest, Russia. The tour guides told us beforehand to have our passports ready, no laughing, giggling or anything.
I was right by the door and I remember lots of shouting and banging doors and then this enormous jackboot kicking the door open!
It was terrifying. We got to our hotel under darkness. In the morning we drove through East Berlin. I thought we’d gone through a time warp to 1950. I will never forget those memories. It is easy to forget the value of your freedom and how important it is to fight for it. These people thought they were being protected when they really they were captured and under constant surveillance. A poignant reminder of what can happen again under digital surveillance and ‘for your own safety’.
Amazing videos. Thank you
Just watched this. Absolutely superb. I was born in West Germany in 1976 and spent alot of years living there. As a young child I had no idea of the threat. Only as I grew older and served in the British Army as an adult it's frightening to think of what could have happened. Absolutely loved watching this video and thank you for uploading it. Brings back happy memories 👍
I've lived in the former east for almost ten years now and find Cold War era history fascinating. I'm really enjoying your videos.
The Glienicker Brücke is actually in a gorgeous area of Berlin/Potsdam. The scenery is pretty stunning and the bridge really fun to walk around on and see where the split was. Really loved visiting it.
It is as you say a lovely area. But..in 2005 when I was there with my husband, fluent German speaker, the locals were not particularly friendly.
We crossed the Bridge, for old times sake, reminiscing about how it used to be, then visited a local cafe. On hearing us chatting in English a youngish man approached and questioned us about who we were, why were we there, etc. We politely refused to answer as he was extremely unfriendly. Along with his leatherclad friends he hurled abuse at us in German and they spat in our direction. Needless to say we made a hasty retreat, followed by jeers and lots of gestures!
So even in 2005 not all East Germans were pleased to be 'liberated'.
We did enjoy the rest of our walk down memory lane though.
I love how you can just discover amazing content like this on UA-cam! I remember visiting checkpoint Charlie and Berlin 88, and remember how bleak it looked to the east, and the scars of the battle of Berlin were still obvious there, incredibly evocative to see it again, and agree, gives you goosebumps seeing it again!
I am proud of my little part of bringing down the wall. We were in Berlin three days before the Checkpoint Charlie building was removed and put into the museum. I, too, have warm memories of my time in Germany and would go back in a heartbeat.
As a 17 year old US high school student "on holiday" in West Germany during the summer of 1989, I had the pleasure of spending 4 nights in West Berlin. My buddy and i (he was 16 - parents did not come with us) went to East Berlin for a day through the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. It was an interesting experience to say the least! Thanks for another great video!
FANTASTIC video and tour. Thank you!
I was 11 years old when the wall came down, I remember it happening, I have always been fascinated by the Cold War. This video is an absolute gem, thank you.
I went back in '94 for the 25 anniversary. Our hotel was a former honeytrap in what had been the East. I visited the museum at CPCharlie. The hot air balloon that some enterprising escapee had built to get his family out fascinated me. As I studied it, a weird and dishevelled old man was shuffling about. Eager for first hand accounts of the bad days, I struck up a conversation with him. He was, it transpired, the man who had built and flown the balloon !
What 25 anniversary was in '94?
To be precise, there were two, a successful, and an unsuccessful attempt to leave the GDR in a balloon. The one Disney made a movie about flew 2 families, not one;, though the German version is more accurate. One of the men got severely injured and while he was unconscious, the other guy sold their story as him being the sole hero. The other attempt happened shortly before the fall of the Wall, and technically the husband arrived in West Berlin if you call falling out of your basket to your death as an arrival. He still managed to bring his wife to safety, who was detained by the Stasi. His body was returned.
The real jarring thing missing from Andy's video is that the Stasi left no rest, even for the dead. Marienborn had a special mortuary garage to verify the person they transport to bury into West Germany is actually dead, and not a refugee taking their place. When the Stasi collected returned bodies or bodies killed in the death strip, especially after 1972, they sent them to a crematorium to cremate them asap with the money they had found on them.
I met him in 1983 in west Berlin while serving with US Army. I have a photo with him and the fabric from his freedom balloon. Let us never forget
I saw the balloon in March 1981 in the museum called "The House at Check Point Charlie." @@berlinbear11b18
@@fritzfrostick6910 I think he meant 2014.
Thank you for bringing the past alive.
This was excellent. I watched all night from the US as the wall came down. Then in January 1992 I visited Berlin to see the remnants of the divide before it was all but erased. We drove up from Munich, stopped in Liepzig (horrible grey city then) for a quick break and ended up in Berlin for 2 nights. Those images of the old east/west divide are still with me.
This was the finest historical documentary I have seen on you tube. Poignant and thoughtful yet entertaining and informative.
Wish I still had my mom's old pictures of Berlin. She would've loved seeing videos like this. Could only imagine the chills you had walking along the old wall even in present time. I had a small chill when I took my daughter to the old Patten museum at Fort Knox, KY where they had a small section of the wall compared only seeing the pictures my mom had
Berlin is such a fascinating city. Living there in the cold war must have been something else.
As a former West German who just stumbled upon this channel, I just wanted to say
Thank you for your service :3
Thank you too!
Hats of to you Andy!!! This is so informative and interesting. Remembering crying when the wall came down in 1989.Fist vist to Berlin in 1995 and just got back from Berlin (Sept 2023)
Can not wait to return to go and check out all the places you pointed out in this video.
Again thank you so much for sharing your experience with us!
I spent 2 years, 7 months, and 13 days as a US Army MP (Jun74 to Jan77) and I spent many hours on duty at Checkpoint Charlie. I also worked on a US Army Patrol Boat in 1976. We patrolled the US sector of the Wansee and we saw the Glienecke Bridge up close and personal many times while "sailing" along on duty. I did get to visit Checkpoint Bravo once while on duty and was shocked at how forward the female British MPs were. Oh Behave!! So many memories of my time in Berlin and I just wish I could have been there when The Wall came down!!!!
Adding a few bits. While being on the MP Patrol Boat on the Wansee, we would sometimes go into the British sector and visit the Canoe Club which was a recreation area for Brits. We became very good friends with the lads who worked there. They were Royal Green Jackets and we invited them to attend our Bicentennial 4th of July Celebration at Andrews Barracks where we were billeted. So much fun. We had more than a couple of impromptu beach parties at the Canoe Club that summer, too. Like I said...so many fond memories! I hope your memories were just as good.
Man it sucks that you’re content is hidden by UA-cam, you need way more views
Really amazing and insightful documentary mate. I am the same age as that poor lad shot and killed trying to cross in 1989. Thanks for sharing all this. Really puts perspective.
I just loved this video. It brought back memories of places and events I lived through. As a canadian I travelled the route from west Germany thru to West Berlin. We crossed at check point Charlie into east Berlin and thankfully back. I remember standing by the Brandenburg gate next to the wall and being warned by an uncle that I could be shot being that close. All of these memories were in 1989. Again thank you
I love the old footage, thanks for making this
I am good friends with the last American NCOIC of Checkpoint Charlie (Michael Rafferty). He was there on the day the border was opened and the day the checkpoint closed and took some amazing pictures. Really nice guy.
Wish I could hear his stories. I was stationed there 1982 McNair Barracks Zehlendorf
Very impressive presentation Andy. I was a US Army MP stationed in Berlin at the time of Reagan's 1982 visit. I wasn't working at Charlie the of Reagan's visit, but I spent plenty of time there, and I was working there the day the scenes for the movie Octopussy were filmed and I really do appear in the final cut. I remember the checkpoint area exactly as it appeared during Reagan's visit. It's changed so much that I wouldn't know where/what it was if you dropped me in the middle of it today. Bravo on the other hand, looked mostly like it did 40 years ago, except there's no place to pull over and park to clear the checkpoint. I can still remember looking at traffic coming into the city standing at the window in the gantry over the road. I'm glad that you mentioned some of the victims that were killed trying to escape East Germany. I'm afraid young people don't know, or don't believe just how common it was for people to be shot to death attempting to cross the border. I don't know the numbers but gun fire in the Deadman zone was very common, at least away from the downtown area, and I don't want that tragic fact forgotten.
Thanks again for the great presentation and the walk down memory lane. :)
I was there that day as well, probably standing close to you watching. Craig Allison 287mp co 1981-83
Wish I could sit down and have a coffee with you. Were you in Andrew's? McNair 82/83
I was on my first tour as a young army spook in Bavaria when the Wall fell. It all happened with incredible speed and it was amazing to see history with my own eyes. Sadly enough, it appears that any lessons from the Cold War have been forgotten by the fools currently running the planet. God save us all.
The Wall falling was so much unplanned that an Unofficial Coworker as the Stasi like to call them requested an extraction for December just days before it fell. Unfortunately, the HV-A being way better in destroying their records, it wasn't found out who it was.
I agree with you
Sadly enough, it also appears that many people have forgotten that we cant allow a re-roll-out of a criminal russian sowjet union regime, because it means suffering, death and the end of freedom for millions of europeans born on the wrong side of putins new borders.
Yes very well said. Our so called public servants are taking orders from banker elites !
Brilliant stuff….thank you for sharing and keeping the memories alive.
Well done, thanks for sharing your experience!
36:41 In the Grenzübergangsstellen / GüSt (border checkpoints), the people wearing the uniform of the border troops were - with the exception of the commander of the border checkpoint - _not_ members of the Grenztruppen (border troops), but of the Staatssicherheitsdienst (state security service) of the GDR.
I didn’t know this was the video I’d been looking for for years. An excellently produced and clear explanation of everything. For years I wondered about certain aspects of where the walls started and finished and how people got from East to West and Vice Versa. You explained so much. Congratulations on a wonderful film. Others should take note. Best 45 mins I’ve spent on the internet in months. Thanks.
Very nice video, thank you. One small correction: at 24:09 the Allied Museum is not at Tempelhof, but on Clayallee in Dahlem, at the site of the former US military cinema, the Outpost Theater (a landmarked building) and the former Nicholson Library building. There are plans to move the museum to one of the hangars of the old Tempelhof Airport, but the museum itself says that this is all in the planning stage and that it could take up to ten years before the move to Tempelhof actually happens.
Some Allied Museum stuff has been already at Tempelhof for years (the British VIP Range Rover, the Ferret FSC, the AMX 30, the 432, etc)
Man you informed me better than when I was living through this time period. I’m an American Veteran and was Stationed at Kaiserslautern Germany with my Headquarters out of Ramstein Airbase 1979-1982 Army. This video is put together perfectly for me. Thank you 🙏 🎉.
Hey Andy, Thanks for making this superb video. As a civilian in the 1980s, I had a fascination with Eastern Europe and managed to visit most countries, East Germany and Belin being the most fascinating. I had run-ins with the Grenztruppen, the Stasi, and ended up being held on many occasions. In Drewitz, in Potsdam when I illegally to the S-Bahn from East Berlin on a day visa, and at Friedrichstrasse when I arrived from Alexanderplatz after midnight to cross Checkpoint Charlie. I've not really returned since those heady days, and your video is so interesting and brings back thos crazy memories. Thanks again from another ANDY 🙂
I'm flying out to Berlin for a short holiday tomorrow. This has given me a sobering account of the recent history. I was aware of the restrictions and one of my friends is a retired soldier, who talks with good humour of being stationed in Germany. I will bear in mind a lot of the information from the video when I'm walking in the city
I went there this year. So beautiful. You’ll love it.
Great Video, there is so much history now in Germany and Berlin. It’s amazing.
Fascinating, thank you. I drive tour buses around Europe and frequently visited DDR during the 80’s …challenging at the time. For East Berlin, we would cross via the southern corridor near Eisenach and enter the city from the south. I still drive tour groups to Berlin and struggle to convey just how different it was just three decades ago, but your videos are extremely interesting and helpful to me. Well done… Bravo (…not forgetting Alpha and Charlie too 😂)
I was stationed at Tempelhof Central Airport (US Air Force) from summer 1984 to summer 1988. I clearly remember those checkpoints. Thank you for an awesome video especially with the historical views.
The Cold War era has fascinated me for a very long time and I have watched many documentaries concerning this period in time. Your video is brilliant and informative showing me a number of facts I had not read about or viewed elsewhere. Thank You.
Subscribed👍
I watched your ‘Across The Iron Curtain in the 1980s’ video last night, now here I am on my lunch break watching this. Absolutely great content! I learned a lot. Thanks for the first hand insight, Andy!
Well done! I was stationed at Tempelhof from 84 to 86. Thank you!
Fascinating to see areas I heard of as a child on TV. To see how they were then and today and to learn of some history is very interesting. Thank you for sharing this.
"The Germany I knew no longer exists" - same for me, and hence I truly appreciate your video, brings back memories and also refreshes my memory. For some reason I had a memory that the T-34 tank memorial was on the opposite side of the highway ...Thanks for the incredible work you've done
My pleasure!
I am from the Netherlands and I grew up with a divided Europe and a divided Germany.
Never visited East Europe our East Germany.
But for the last two years I drove with my car to Poland and saw in the distance the tower of checkpoint Alpha. Did not knew there was a museum.
Next year I will drive at the same autobahn and will visit the museum. Thanks for this video.
Fantastic video Andy. Clear, concise, informative narration. I learned a great deal from it, even though I had spent a weeks holiday in West Berlin back in the 80s. During that time, I visited the Eastern sector of the city once, to try to find locally made model Trabant and Wartburg cars to add to my collection, and find some I did. Being something of an ‘airliner nut’ at the time, I really wanted to visit Schonefeld Airport, which I did for a few hours one day during my visit. Sadly no pictures allowed! It was somewhat quieter than Tegel airport was at the time!
Thank you for your video and thank you for your service.
This was fascinating. Thanks much for preparing and posting it. I was stationed twice in Germany and made many trips to divided Berlin. This not only brought back memories but was a good reminder to never take freedom for granted. Very well done presentation.
I was on a 2-week vacation through central Europe in 1990, and in early December made to Berlin for the first time. The wall was all but gone and I had full access to all locations in the former east Berlin, including that giant radio/TV tower. The Brandenburg Gate was fenced off for major renovations but I was able to quickly walk through one of the arches at the end. The train I took still stopped at the former border of the now "gone" east Germany. The sniper tower was still there but unoccupied. It was a great experience and I hope to return someday.
Was für eine großartige Zeitreise!
I never got to see that part of Germany, and as an air force pilot during the 1960s, the Cold War was a big part of my life. I was long since out of the air force, working for an airline, and sitting in my hotel room on a layover, watching the people climbing on the wall and beginning to tear it down. It was a weird experience for me, because I was having a difficult time believing that what I was seeing was real.
Thanks for the tour. I think you did a wonderful job.
This is a great video. This is a standard to which all UA-camrs should aspire.
Great informative video, thanks for posting.
An amazing tour of the fascinating past. Thanks
Very, very watchable video. Well done and thank you from Cape Town, RSA.
Great video! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for a very interesting and comprehensive video tour and reminder of those historic times.
I have just the documentary brilliant bought back a lot memories I'm 42 now but l was born in West Germany my Dad was in the British army. I enjoyed it so much l have watched a few times.
Dear Mr. McLoone, you have released a so important and pretty emotianal video for all of us. I hope the young generation will watch it! Against forgetting! Thank you for a honrorable performance. Best regards, C. M., Germany
Wow, thank you
Great video. Enjoyed it. I’m 58 years old and grew up in the Cold War era. I remember vividly when the wall came down and had visited East Berlin about 3 years prior.
I'm pleased you mentioned the shooting of Peter Fechter. He bled to death over a period of around an hour because neither the East Germans or the Americans dared to help him (he was at the base of the wall on the west side) due to the fear of sparking an international incident. The west did drop him some bandages, but what could he do, he was paralysed by a bullet through the pelvis and bleeding profusely. After he passed away, the Grenztruppen did recover his corpse, but it was never returned to his family.
Very informative. May I offer a couple of corrections: Glienicke is pronounced GLEENICKE, and the slogan beneath the Brezhnev/Honecker wall art translates as '.. deadly LOVE', not '.. deadly lovers ..'. Apart from that, I much appreciate your work and effort to post this video. Thank you.
Found you scrolling through UA-cam. Some extremely well documented content. Very enjoyable and knowledgeable videos you are producing.
This is excellent - I've always found it hard to find info about Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo, and this gave me exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you so much!
Andy, don’t know how this ended up on my feed but chuffed it did. I was a young soldier in 1986 and did a familiarisation tour of Berlin. We were lucky enough to go through Checkpoint Charlie into the East. We travelled to Berlin on the British Military Train and I remember stopping at all the train stations so we could be checked by the guards. The stations were empty less the East German guards with their Alsatians. I returned to Berlin as an older soldier in 1991 as I was stationed in Detmold. We got lost in Berlin and drove passed an East German camp in Potsdam, we laugh now, but the Lt Col I was driving at the time was not impressed. Loved the video.
An excellent watch. Thanks!
Very enjoyable 45 minutes.
My dad was RAF Regiment based at RAF Wildenrath in the late 1950s nowhere near Berlin but as a youngster I was privileged to see lots of Germany and make lifelong friends of many locals.
Having read lots of Len Deighton's spy novels it was nice to put them in context
Thanks
Great video! I wasn’t born until over 10 years after the wall fell and was always curious about it. This video gave me a great deal of information, thank you! Hopefully I’ll be able to visit Berlin myself in the future and see what remains in person. Cheers from the USA.
Добрый день!
Это прекрасно что вы интересуетесь падением стены ,хотя родились через 10 лет!
Я служил на мосту шпионов советским пограничником. В ноябре 1989 года ,На моих глазах со стороны Потсдама к мосту подошло много людей. Мы замерли, не знали что делать..
Я стоял на посту и сообщил об этом офицеру по селектору. Офицер позвонил вышестоящим офицерам. И мне был дан приказ сдать пистолет в сейф для оружия. Пограничники Восточной Германии открыли ворота и началось воссоединение восточных и западных немцев.
Никогда не забуду этих слез радости и счастья !!!
СТЕНА ПАЛА !!! А СКОРО ПАДУТ ВСЕ СТЕНЫ ,ПАДУТ ГРАНИЦЫ, ПОТОМУ ЧТО САМ БОГ НАВЕДЕТ ПОРЯДОК НА ВСЕЙ ЗЕМЛЕ !!!
The description you are giving of Marienborn border treatment of civilians applied to people going into the DDR.
Transit to West Berlin (which I did about 100 times) was never like this, unless of course you arced up. It was very straightforward, no searches, no questions about who you were visiting etc. Just where you were going, and how many people were in your car, although at holiday times the queues could be very long. people would often turn off their enginges and push their cars. We used to look with envy at the "Military" lane vehicles sailing by....
Having a non-German passport meant I had to pay DM5 cash for a transit visa, and how that happened was always very arbitrary. Sometimes the border guard would take cash at the window, sometime you had to go to a little office, pay the DM5 for the transit visa, then bring the receipt back to the guard. If you were hitchhiking the German driver might get a bit annoyed and or freaked out about being stuck with the guard unable to move on till you came back.
Occasionally on transit you would get weird things happening. For example a hitchhiker we picked up suddenly insisted that we take him to see his girlfriend in East Berlin, which of course we declined. He told us we had no balls and that he did this all the time... Then he tried to climb out of the car when we got to the Berliner Ring, luckily one of us was big enough to hold him in the car till we could speed up again
If he had managed to get out of the car, we would not have been able to transit into West Berlin because there would be one fewer people in the car than the count on the way in to the DDR.
Your videos are generally very accurate and really bring those times back, plus give me an appreciation of an Allied soldiers POV which was a bit different to ours....
It’s hard for me to imagine the Brandenburg Gate without a wall. I got to see it from both West and East Berlin in 1987, but wasn’t allowed to get close to it on the Eastern side of Berlin. It’s interesting to see how different Berlin is today.
Thanks for content like this! My grandfather was a WW2 veteran and I wonder how many stories he took to the grave. And now there are (almost?) none left. In terms of the human experiences, what we have is all we'll ever have. Not that you're gonna leave us any time soon, but one day you will, and it's important that experiences from this era are recorded.
I want to add my appreciation and enjoyment of this very educational video.
I was a youngster in the 60's and new about the Berlin Wall and later learnt about the division of the city after WW2, I have never seen photos or footage of the checkpoints, whose names I remember from my childhood.
Congratulations on producing an excellent video, I look forward to seeing the others you have on your channel.👏👏👏👏
In 2015 I sneaked close to the filming set on the Glienicker Brücke. I‘m a history teacher and as I saw it it was like you said Hollywood bollocks. As a retired Sergeant of the Bundeswehr I also asked myself if they had any military advisor on the film set. Slumpy uniforms, some unnecessary armored vehicles, a wooden tower on the bridge which was completely unnecessary since on the other side the Grenztruppen could watch deeply from Klein-Glienicke into Berlin West…
Anyway: Thank you for your amazing videos and for your service in Germany!
Kind regards once again from Potsdam. 😊
Thanks, and sorry for my mispronunciation of Gleinicke 🫢
@@AndyMcloone No need to be sorry about that. I don’t expect non-native speakers to pronounce words like „Glienicke“ or „Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursachergebrauchsanweisungsheftchenheftklammer“ properly. 😉
So I bet you hated the 'Deutschland 89'' and ''Deutschland 83'' TV miniseries even more, they were full of glaring errors which even a non-German like me could spot.
@@simonh6371 I never watched it but I read about the plot. This was absolute bollocks. Never ever was a GDR borderguard chosen by the stasi to infiltrate anything. The stasi got their spies from within and was looking for financially or psychologically unstable individuals. A GDR soldier would have uncovered himself simply by using military terminology. When I served in the Bundeswehr, I always could tell who served in the east simply by talking to them.
Many Many thanks. Livlng in West Berlin in the early 70s the borders never worried me, you knew they were there and you had to go and look. The view into East would show westerners how better life in West Berlin was.
I loved that you included the bit about the Military Liaison Missions crossing the Gleinicke Brücke. We had a neighbor a few doors down from us, Major Arthur Nicholson who was shit and killed by the Soviets while out on his MLM mission. It’s a fascinating part of history, the legal spying, that I think should not be forgotten. Excellent videos!
Oops, “shot”, not what made it to YT. 😅
Where did you and for that matter, Nick Nicholson and his wife KAren and young daughter live? I went there and for the life of me cant remember where it was. I remember the USMLM Mission House well but the memory has a few fuzzy areas! Many thanks, Nigel (Brixmis mid 80s contemporary )
@@nigeldunkley2986Sorry to just get back to you. Good old YT did not notify me. Andy’s video came up in my feed though.
We lived off the Dreipfuhl in the small housing area surrounding it, near Oskar Helene Heim station. We just called it the Duckpond.
Thanks!
I am of (West) German origin and, despite being born during the Cold War, I have just learned a lot I have never known by watching this. Great pictorial history lesson! Thank you!
This video was a trip down memory lane. I served in 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Wales in Berlin in 1976. I have just discovered your channel, and am looking forward to many more trips. Many thanks.
Very well documented and personal video, a real gem in historic knowledge. I was still very young when the wall came down, as I was born in 1978 in The Netherlands. But all of my youth I was well aware of the German separation, as It was just a fact of life back then. Thanks for this close look at indeed a not so distant past, reminding us what separation of people and lack of freedom really means. At this moment, 2023 in the Netherlands, I feel a new kind of lack of understanding and respect for differences are creating a separation again between cultures, welfare and knowledge. Let us be reminded dy videos like this that we are all just one kind and we need to cherish our differences instead of creating them.
Excellent documentary. Thank you for making and posting it!
Just subscribed.Thanks for all your amazing videos,Andy.I’m in my early sixties and the one big regret I have is that I didn’t visit Germany during the ‘Cold War’.Your videos answer a lot of my questions.Good luck and keep up the good work! 🇬🇧🇩🇪
This was a brilliant and educational video, I'm sincerely grateful that you took the time to make this. Your easy to listen to and clear, I knew somethings but now know a lot more.
I look forward to browsing through your channel in the hope of more videos as enjoyable as was this.
This an absolutely phenomenal look back. I was kid the but vividly remember the wall coming down. I had always wondered where alpha and bravo were and why charlie was so popular. Thank you for taking the time to put this together.
These videos are terrific. Many thanks, sir!
Thank you for this video. Having grown up in western Poland in the 80s, I was always fascinated by the history of that part of the Cold War. I appreciate being able to learn from this video.
What an excellent presentation. Thanks for sharing this. Liked and Subscribed.
Greetings from the other side of the pond. Holy smokes, mate, what fantastic documentation and commentary. I was in grade school in the final days of the Cold War and looking back it becomes surreal to realize that this happened in my life time as a child. Then I juxtapose that with the world as I knew it in the ensuing years. At the time The Wall came down I was concerned with two things: 1) Mario 3 on NES 2)Tim Burton's Batman. 😄
Ultimately I wish I would have been just a little older or a little brighter back in those days to appreciate the tremendous goodwill and decades of diplomacy to avoid the worst of all outcomes and realize we all had a golden, once-in-history opportunity.
I fear for the days ahead.
A wonderfully nostalgic video, thanks so much. As I commented under your British Military Train vid, I lived in Berlin in 1978, and drove there frequently over the next 30 yrs, and I vividly remember waiting for HOURS at the Marienborn and Drewitz checkpoints as my car was always full of test equipment and I had reams of carnet paperwork to be checked. All very officious and irritating.
Two (incl your first one on the access road) of the most evocative videos about that period in human history Andy.
In 1987 I was also a Brirish Army reservist( RLC) and remember that whole period in time incl when the wall came down by which time I was a tuve driver in London as my full time position.
Exceptionally well covered & articulated.
Having lived & worked in Germay since then I would agree it is an amazing country with some of the most fair minded people I have ever met with a keen sense of history
You have a new subscriber here and I look forward to seeing more of your content.
Thanks 👍
Thanks for your kind remarks
As an East-Berliner, born in the late 70ies, it's interesting to see the view from this perspective. As a kid, the wall never felt like a threat to me (us kids), more somewhat mysterious (from knowing that all the cool stuff from the West is available behind it) ;)... i was 11 when the wall came down. It's crazy how Berlin has changed since then.
Excellent detailed information and enjoyable watch. I will always remember the Wall coming down as it all happened so quickly. I used to listen to Radio Berlin International on a SW radio but it was at an electrical dealers for repair when news of the Wall broke so I missed tuning in! I think the final broadcast of RBI is on UA-cam though. The last time I visited Berlin was 2018 and I stopped off at Helmstedt where I met a local lady in a bar who told me her lasting memory of reunification was the endless lines of Trabants which left a smog of fumes hanging in the air for days after! 😄
I was 10 months old when the Berlin Wall fell, but I do remember my parents telling me years later, that they didn't think they would see a unified Germany in their lifetime. Yet, from what they told me, less than a year after they said this to each other, the Berlin Wall fell and 11 months after that, Germany was one country again.
This video (and the others about the Cold War period) is fascinating to watch, giving a voice to what memorials never can. The Neuewache (I Hope I spelled it right) is another landmark in Berlin that has fascinated me, how it went from Royal Guard House to a centre of German memorial for their War dead from the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Regime, surviving WW2 bombing, through East Germany and the current Federal Republic. The building has had different memorials within it over the years, though in my view, the current one, featuring a woman and child, dedicated to the victims of war and dictatorship, is a simple yet moving memorial. The really incredible thing is that although the uniforms changed over the years, and goose stepping has been deleted, the drill style when the building is guarded is otherwise unchanged since the Weimar Republic