Berlin Wall Memorial Posted on January 20th, 2015 by Evan Larson

Today we visited the memorial for the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse, this was an incredible experience to see whole sections of the entire wall still intact. Most people think that the Berlin wall was just a single wall made out of concrete, however the wall was actually two walls with a large area in between (see below).

This is a preserved section of the real wall and as you can see the area between the wall was quite large. This area, called the death strip. was filled with barbed wire, trip wire, spike strips and guards with weapons, all so that East Berliners and East Germans could not leave into the west. I also did not know that a “wall” of this size and severity was also all across the West and East German border. The wall went through many areas that were not ideal and had to be destroyed or moved, like churches, homes, or even, in the case of the wall here, cemeteries.

The cemetery above was built in the 1800’s far before the wall, but when the wall went up it lie directly in the path of the building plans. Instead of going around, they build the wall directly through cutting it in half and tearing up gravestones that were in the way. The two walls also surrounded the church, which had mainly western patrons, that was nearby to the  cemetery. Eventually the church was torn down because it was in such an unfortunate place and it has not been rebuilt since.