Cold War Armageddon TV - Patrick Chappatte - Berlin Express 1948 - The Quiller Memorandum 1966 - Nazi Secrets TV - John Kennedy - Ronald Top TV - Dean Rusk - Walter Ulbricht - Erich Honicker - Nostradamus V:81 - Ronald Reagan - Mikhail Gorbachev - Brian Hanrahan & BBC News TV - Adam Curtis TV - Klaus Wowereit - Marlene Dietrich - Mark Twain - Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall TV - Niall Ferguson TV - Dick Deckert - Frederick Taylor - James Kronin - Peter Millar - John Kornblum - Days that Shook the World TV - Paul Keating - Spies Beneath Berlin TV - Masterminds TV - Hitler’s Circle of Evil TV - World War I: The Final Hours TV - Lilyhammer 1983 - History’s Most Hated TV - Berlin 1945 TV - The Fall of the Berlin Wall with John Simpson TV - Breakway 1955 - Secret History TV - Kennedy TV - Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War TV - Dogs of Berlin 2018 -
The Cold War in Berlin is a story of families forced apart. Cold War Armageddon s1e3, Discovery 2016
Donald Trump to Angela Merkel: You guys in Berlin had a terrific wall. Patrick Chappatte, The New York Times cartoon
Berlin ... is today a monument of ruins ... a colourless drab city. Berlin Express 1948 starring Robert Ryan & Merle Oberon & Lucien Ballard & Charles Korvin & Paul Lukas & Robert Coote & Reinhold Schunzel, director Jacques Tourneur, commentary
Get him to pop over to Berlin. Good. The Quiller Memorandum 1966 starring George Segal & Alec Guinness & Max von Sydow & Senta Berger & George Sanders & Robert Helpmann & Robert Flemyng et al, director Michael Anderson, spies over pleasant pheasant lunch
Albert Speer delivered the spectacle Hitler demanded. He became the dictator’s confidant. Few enjoyed such intimate access ... In 1937 Hitler entrusted his architect with the reconfiguration of Berlin. Nazi Secrets: Albert Speer Unmasked
Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us ... While the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see, we take no satisfaction in it, for it is, as your Mayor has said, an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together. John F Kennedy, June 1963 Berlin June 1963
You live in a defended island of freedom, but your life is part of the main. So let me ask you as I close, to lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today, to the hopes of tomorrow, beyond the freedom merely of this city of Berlin, or your country of Germany, to the advance of freedom everywhere, beyond the wall to the day of peace with justice, beyond yourselves and ourselves to all mankind. ibid.
Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades. All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. ibid.
Berlin decided to clean up its act, and made plans to replace this time-consuming tram journey with a modern rail link and a modern train. And the most modern of all these trains were powered not by steam but by 1898 onwards by electricity. Ronald Top, More Industrial Revelations s4e3: Europe – The City, Discovery 2006
But they may be thinking they can either bargain Berlin and Cuba against each other, or that they can provoke us into the kind of action in Cuba which would give an umbrella for them to take action with respect to Berlin. If they can provoke us into taking the first overt action then the world would be confused and they would have what they would consider justification for making a move somewhere else. For the first time I am beginning really to wonder whether Mr Khrushchev is entirely rational about Berlin because if they shoot those missiles we are in general nuclear war. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State
Nobody intends to put up a Wall. Walter Ulbricht, leader of GDR 15th June 1961
Everyone has his place in the German Democratic Republic, regardless of his political views or his religion. Erich Honecker
The wall of the East will fall, thunder and lightning. Nostradamus V:81
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, Come here to this gate! Mr Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall! Ronald Reagan
I learnt in the morning, quite early in the morning they reported it to me. My people were in a hurry to let me know. We had been expecting it to happen. It could have happened at any time. It was brought about by the Germans themselves. No-one was making them do it. No-one was pressuring Honecker. I took note of the report; it came from the East German ambassador, and it really moved us on to a new phase. Not that I was enthusiastic about it. But I accepted that it was something that had to happen. We understood that the time was coming for the German problem to be addressed. Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary Soviet Communist Party 1989, interview Brian Hanrahan
This is the middle of the checkpoint. The gates have been opened. The police are making no attempt to stop people as they go through and come back. I have never seen such elation. Brian Hanrahan, BBC News
In November 1989 the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Cold War was finally over. A new era of freedom had begun. The shape that freedom was going to take would be defined by the victors – the West, and as this programme has shown, the idea of freedom that had now become dominant in the West was deeply rooted in the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
Berlin is poor but sexy. Klaus Wowereit, mayor interview 2004
I still keep a suitcase in Berlin. Marlene Dietrich, 1957 song
Berlin is the newest city I have come across. Even Chicago would appear old and gray by comparison. Mark Twain
This is the story of a wall. It’s the story of a dictatorship. Of the construction and collapse of a system. Of the arms race between the builders of the Wall and their opponents the escapers. And it’s the story of a symbol. The Western gateway to the Cold War. Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall 1/2, 2013
Berlin will be under joint military administration. It’s a recipe for tension. Defeated Germany is now split between four victorious allies: in the west France, Britain and the USA; in the east Soviet Russia. And in the middle of the Soviet zone Berlin is divided again. ibid.
From 1949 there were two German states: east and west. ibid.
Seventy-seven east-west crossings are sealed inside the city. ibid.
And then a propaganda war begins. ibid.
By 1964 more than seventy tunnels had been dug from east to west and from west to east freeing more than two hundred and fifty people. ibid.
The Cold War is heating up. In the 1970s the Soviet Union staged missiles in East Germany. The Americans plan to do the same in West Germany. Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall 2/2
The watchtower, the rear wall, the bed of nails, the electrified barbed-wire fence, dogs, alarm wires, and there’s a trap for the guards too. ibid.
West Germany buys peoples’ freedom: for up to fifty thousand dollars each. Selling thousands of dissidents actually helps East Germany avert bankruptcy. And there are huge loans from the West. ibid.
Green bushes make the Wall look benign and bucolic. ibid.
Border guards are totally unprepared. ibid.
On October 3rd Germany was reunified. It signified the end of the Cold War. During the twenty-eight years the Wall existed at least 40,000 people escaped across the border to the West. 75,000 more were prosecuted for trying. Over 1,300 died. Including at least 136 in Berlin itself. But the East covered up many deaths so effectively the exact total is not known. ibid.
He set out to create a series of spectacular buildings. One of the first edifices in what Frederick [the Great of Austria] thought of as a kind of forum in the heart of Berlin was this wonderful theatre – the State Opera House. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: Is the West History? Channel 4 2011
If I’d known the Wall was going to fall in three years, the border was going to open, I wouldn’t have done it. I’d have waited out the three years. Dick Deckert
Khrushchev publicly declared it to be a public tumour. I mean these images of a kind of disease in the body politic of the eastern Block called East Berlin were used by Soviet leaders frequently. Frederick Taylor, author The Berlin Wall