19611776 Club
Before dawn, East German troops string barbed wire across Berlin
Sunday shoppers wake to find their city cut in two, with soldiers standing where the streetcars used to cross.
By the summer of 1961, about a thousand East Germans a day were slipping into West Berlin and vanishing into the free world. Before dawn on Sunday, August 13, East German troops and police rolled out barbed wire along the entire boundary between the eastern and western sectors, closing streets and subway lines and splitting families mid-block. Within days, work crews began replacing the wire with concrete. Berliners called it Barbed Wire Sunday…
