Bernauer Straße
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009) |
Bernauer Straße is a street of Berlin situated between the localities of Gesundbrunnen and Mitte, today both belonging to the Mitte borough. It runs from the Mauerpark at the corner of Prenzlauer Berg to the Nordbahnhof. The street's name refers to the town of Bernau bei Berlin, situated in Brandenburg.
When Berlin was a divided city, the Berlin Wall erected in 1961 ran along this street. Bernauer Straße became famous for escapes from windows of apartment blocks in the eastern part of the city, down to the street which was in the West.
[edit] History
As the street itself belonged to the French sector of West Berlin the entrances and windows of the houses on the southern side were successively bricked up by the East German border guards and access to the roof was blocked. On 22 August 1961 Ida Siekmann was the first casualty at the Berlin Wall, she died after she jumped out of her third floor apartement at No 48.[1] By autumn 1961, the last of these houses had been compulsorily emptied and the buildings themselves were then demolished from 1963. For the ten people known to have died trying to escape in the area of the Bernauer Straße, there is a memorial tablet at the entrance to Swinemünder Straße.
Escape tunnels were also dug under the wall in the Bernauer Straße. In 1962, one came out in number 7 Schönholzer Straße. 29 East Berliners of all ages crept along the tunnel to freedom in West Berlin, unnoticed by the border guards. The NBC News documentary film The Tunnel was a visual account of that operation. Another tunnel ended in number 55 Strelitzer Straße (in the East) and, over two nights in October 1964, 57 East Germans managed to escape. However the action was detected and ended with shots exchanged between the border guards and the tunnel diggers. Egon Schultz, a border guard, was killed and thereafter stylised by East German authorities as a martyr murdered on duty by western smugglers. The access to the files after the 1989 Wende revealed that he was killed in a fire exchange hit by bullets from friend and foe.
The dismantling of this stretch of wall in 1989 was the first time that British soldiers (62 Transport and Movement Squadron, Royal Corps of Transport and Royal Engineers) based in the British Sector had worked directly with the former East German army. Heavy Goods Vehicles belonging to the transport squadron were provided to carry sections of the concrete wall away to an area near to Potsdam. This journey involved travelling through areas occupied by the crumbled Soviet armed forces.
After the Wall came down, Bernauer Straße was the location of one of its longest preserved sections, which was turned into a memorial in 1999. The street was also the first location of Rainer Hildebrandt's mauermuseum, before moving to Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. Meanwhile the street has been rebuilt as a main road including a tramway line. However few of the cleared plots at the southside have again been built-up.
[edit] References
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bernauer Straße (Berlin) |
