Checkpoint

Actors dressed as U.S. soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin have been banned from the iconic Cold War location because of their aggressive and abusive way with tourists, city officials said. Passersby were literally forced to pay for a picture with the a…

Actors dressing up as US soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin have been banned for abusing tourists who refused to pay donations for photographs. The fake border guards were said to be making up to £4,200 a day from visitors wanting a souvenir snapshot f…

Authorities in Berlin have banned a group of actors from wearing U.S. Army uniforms at Checkpoint Charlie, the famous Cold War-era crossing that divided the city and was heavily guarded by Soviet and American troops. Officials said the actors from the group …

Portion of the Berlin Wall in the city center on October 31, 2019, in Berlin, Germany. (Photo ... credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Getty Images On November 9, thirty years will have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Since its constructi…

And then, in the summer of 1989, things changed. Suddenly, I was no longer the only person on the train. In fact, I was surrounded by Hungarians and Poles because their governments had, for the first time, given them freedom to travel to the West. I got so ex…

Authorities in the German capital have barred re-enactors from posing for tourist photos at the iconic Checkpoint Charlie, the US control station that marked the crossing point between East and West Berlin. The Civil Enforcement Office withdrew public perfor…

By November 1989, rumors had long been flying that change was inevitable in communist East Germany. Citizens were turning their backs in droves on the politically and economically bankrupt state. Week after week in Leipzig, thousands demanded the right to tr…

Her little body curled tightly against her father, Peggy playfully lifted her finger to her lips in the inky darkness of the cramped car boot as if to say Hush. Hans-Peter Spitzner couldnt see the seven-year-olds gesture, or the smile he guessed went with it…

Thirty years ago on Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. A remark by East German government spokesman Guenter Schabowski at a news conference that evening sent first hundreds, then thousands of people to the Walls east-west border crossings. Schabowski had a…

Peter Keup can still remember how it felt to hold deutsche marks in his hand. “It was special to even touch this money,” he recalls. “It felt solid. The East German mark was thinner, flimsier.” As a boy growing up in East Germany, he was sometimes sent West …