A powerful, fascinating, and groundbreaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary and most important military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States and her allies confronted the USSR during the Cold War.
As tensions between east and west rose during the Cold War, East Germany committed $millions to the creation of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s, an 11-foot-high barrier that would evolve through the years to consist of 79 miles of fencing, 300 watchtowers, 250 guard dog runs and 20 bunkers and was operated around the clock by guards who shot to kill. Over the next 28 years, at least 10 thousand people attempted to smash through it, swim across it, tunnel under it, or fly over it, desperate to escape the repressive totalitarian East German regime for the freedom of the West.