Word: checkpoints
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hated Wall. Two East Germans astonishingly made it into West Berlin riding on a motorcycle; one young West Berliner last week explained how he had smuggled his fiancée out of East Berlin by strapping her to the bottom of his car and driving five miles to the checkpoint. But the Wall has also spawned entrepreneurs who manage to get people out, at the same time lining their own pockets in a fast-growing escape business...
Fortnight ago, when the U.S. told the Russians that they could no longer use Checkpoint Charlie as the crossing point for their daily convoy to the Soviet war memorial in West Berlin, the Reds meekly shifted the procession to the shorter route across Sandkrug Bridge in the British sector. Same day, at a meeting of Allied commanders, U.S. Major General Albert Watson proposed that the Russians be instructed to return to using buses instead of the formidable, six-wheeled armored cars that had been brought in to protect Red soldiers from rock-hurling West Berliners last month...
...foot-high barrier and leap over the barbed wire on top. But Fechter paused for a few fatal seconds, long enough for the Grenzpolizei (border police) to raise their weapons and fire. Shot in the back by crossfire. Fechter fell back onto the death strip only 300 yds. from Checkpoint Charlie, the U.S. command post at the busy Friedrichstrasse border crossing...
...Escort Question. The rioting finally petered out after heavily reinforced police had put a moat of barbed wire around Checkpoint Charlie and arrested 128 troublemakers. The Soviet guard faced trouble of a different sort when its commander announced that it was going to drive to the war memorial in three armored personnel carriers, which by tacit agreement between U.S. and Soviet commandants enter each other's sector only if they do not display arms. When the Soviet guard showed up with submachine-gun-toting soldiers standing on the sides of the vehicles, General Watson insisted that they climb inside...
...Travel Bureau collected photographs of colleagues they knew wanted to escape. They then hunted down West Berliners who resembled their fellow students, bluntly asked to borrow the lookalikes' identity papers (which had the owners' photographs attached) so that their classmates could "legitimately" cross at the border checkpoint while posing as West Berliners. The ruse was highly successful until the Vopos became suspicious of so many West Berliners in the East, barred residents of the free sector from crossing the border. West Germans, however, at the time still had access to East Berlin and the use of phony identity...