In Berlin, shortly after midnight on 13 August 1961, soldiers of the National Volks Arms, the National People's Army of the German Democratic Republic, were frantically at work at the Brandenburg Gate: thousands of bales of barbed wire had to be unrolled. So began, at one o'clock in the morning on a quiet Sunday, Operation Pink, the codename of the most dastardly architectural project in history, conceived by the communist regime of Erich Honecker and Walter Ulbricht to stop the bleeding of men fleeing to the west, which was running out of technicians and skilled labour throughout East Germany; their crazy project was simple: a concrete furrow, built, Ulbricht said, to defend socialism. That night Berlin was shattered by the sound of thousands of jackhammers tearing the asphalt; uniformed workers kneaded the cement, while others passed bricks on bricks and frantically erected what the whole West would soon call the "Wall of Shame". Protected by tanks, about fifty thousand soldiers and border guards worked all night long and at dawn, Berlin woke up cut in two: a fence and brick cage isolated East Berlin and its inhabitants from the rest of the world, a 155 km long partition, about 4 meters high, which is a few hours had torn the city, the streets, the houses, the hearts from the daily life of the city, with its noises and voices, with its people moving from one point to another, abruptly stopped (193 streets ended up being dead ends, the underground lost twelve stops). On that summer night, East Berlin suddenly became an open-air prison, armoured by 300 control towers, Vopos patrols with orders to shoot fugitives, police dogs and spotlights. A small world "locked out", from which many prisoners tried to escape. It took 10,680 days to admit that the construction of the Wall on 13 August 1961 was an act of confession of the inferiority of the Rdt, the starting point of the capitulation of communism, which had its epilogue on 9 November 1989.
On 9 November 1989 the cry of "freedom, freedom!" fell, the "wall of shame" fell and tens of thousands of East Germans joined in a big hug with the brothers of the West, among rivers of beer offered free of charge by the locals. News of the fall of the wall bounced around the world on the news, in which images of a party that put an end to a silent revolution that had begun months earlier and that had led to the fall of the communist leader Erich Honecker, loyal to Moscow. The decision to open the border, said GDR Propaganda Minister Gunter Schabowski, came unexpectedly to the government offices of East Germany and just as it quickly leaked through radio and television, entering the homes of millions of Germans and giving the "green light" that after 28 years opened a different horizon for Berliners and the whole world: the wall had always been associated with the Cold War and the division of the two opposing blocks. The soldiers guarding the infamous checkpoints, scattered along the "Iron Curtain", had no choice but to let the human tide pass, which, without any possibility of identification, crossed the inviolable borders of the GDR up to a few hours.
In the new face of Berlin, a contemporary Arab phoenix reborn from its ashes, the Wall has radically disappeared, so much so that not even Berliners born after 2000 can indicate precisely where it once stood, and today only a few points, left as a monument of a historical era, like the murals in the Berlin of the "allied forces" where the Wall became a tourist attraction and for the artists a concrete canvas whose graffiti is now a habit for the Berliners, while there is a memorial to remember the 170 people who were killed by the military during the desperate attempt to cross the border raised for the will of the Soviet Union on 13 August 1961: The first to do so was Petty Officer Schumann. Two days after the construction of the Wall, young Conrad, on patrol on the border, helmet on his head, rifle on his shoulder, in a mad race against death, jumped over the barbed wire and took shelter in the free world. The snap of a photo consigned his escape to history.
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