In purely numerical terms there was a tie: ten Soviet and American battle tanks each had each other on the 27th/28th. October 1961 on Friedrichstrasse, exactly where Kreuzberg (belonging to the US sector) met Mitte (Soviet sector of the divided city). There were also armored personnel carriers and other military vehicles.
Films and photos of the threatening showdown went around the world and ensured that the foreign crossing from West to East Berlin, now known as Checkpoint Charlie, became a worldwide symbol of the murderous GDR border regime. Apparently these images disturbed those in power in the SED dictatorship. How else could one explain the fact that only a short time later, drafts for a redesign of the “Friedrichstrasse checkpoint” were drawn up? Several sketches are dated November 3, 1961, just six days after the end of the tank confrontation.
Apparently the authors of the drawings, probably pioneers of the GDR border troops, had been given a double task: Firstly, after the reconstruction, the crossing should be so massive that tanks from the West could no longer bulldoze the barriers. Secondly, the crossing point should appear less martial when viewed from West Berlin (no one cared about the view from the East). Based on the competition “Our village should become more beautiful” that was launched in the Federal Republic of Germany at the beginning of 1961, the motto could have been: “Our wall should be more beautiful.”
In the fall of 1961, less than three months after the inner-city border was closed, barrier walls made of concrete slabs and sleepers and cast stone, topped with barbed wire, stood in most places at risk of breach. On the East Berlin side, at least two fences in a row and in some places one or two rows of “Czech hedgehogs”, obstacles welded together from three steel girders or old railway tracks, reinforced the “front pioneering technical system”.
However, there wasn't such a dense array of obstacles, especially at the crossings. Cars and buses and (smaller) trucks should be able to get through here, albeit past barriers and in serpentine lines created by concrete thresholds on the road - i.e. slowly. But nothing stopped a tank from doing so, especially if it was equipped with a plow blade.
Since the confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie, those responsible have apparently been worried about this. In any case, concrete plans emerged for a more stable “securing of the KPP”. Accordingly, Friedrichstrasse and Mauerstrasse, which enters here from the northwest at an angle of around 40 degrees (whose name had nothing to do with an actual wall, but with a city fortification planned around 1720 but never built), were to be blocked off by a “2.20 meter wide and 1.60 meter high wall”.
A 2.75 meter wide gap was planned on Friedrichstrasse for traffic to the “KPP” - with a maximum net width of 2.55 meters, it was passable for cars, buses and normal trucks at walking speed, but still very narrow. On East Berlin, geographically the northern side, two “special reinforcements” were planned, each of which was to be 2.50 meters long and turned the passage into a 2.75 meter narrow, almost five meter long bottleneck.
“All cavities are filled with concrete B 225”
The structure of this wall was clearly described: Prefabricated concrete perforated sleepers three meters long, one meter wide and 20 centimeters high were to be piled up, each in a 2.5 centimeter thick bed of mortar. In the space between the two long stacks, there should be old railway tracks every one and a half meters, anchored in a 50 centimeter deep foundation. But that's not all: "All cavities are filled with concrete B 225, including the cavities in the panels." The top layer of slabs on the wall should protrude eight centimeters to a height of 1.40 meters; the resulting wider gap should be closed by another layer of concrete sleepers. In front of the barrier wall, additional railway tracks should be embedded in the ground at an angle “with a 60 percent inclination”.
As soon as the mortar and concrete had set to some extent, such a construction was insurmountable, even for an M48 with a dozer blade: the combination of sheer mass (each cubic meter of the wall weighed around 3,000 kilograms, a four-meter-wide piece more than a 40-ton tank) with the sloping rails in front of it and the vertical ones in the construction, even the most powerful tracked vehicle in the US Army could not break through.
On the GDR side, an obstacle made of concrete sleepers, one meter wide and 60 centimeters high, running diagonally across Friedrichstrasse was to replace the previous staggered barriers. Due to the 2.75 meter narrow gap between this barrier and the sidewalk just before Schützenstrasse, the speed of passing in both directions should be limited to walking pace without forcing vehicles to drive in zigzags.
This oblique obstacle was already part of the second part of the order that unknown members of the GDR border troops fulfilled with their drawings in the week after the tank confrontation: a less ugly appearance of the crossing from West Berlin. Since no one in the eastern part of the city could be fooled about the murderous nature of the wall, people immediately focused on the view of their opponents in the Cold War.
Three suggestions for the structure of the plaster
The 2.20 meter wide and 1.60 meter high wall made of stacked sleepers was to be completely plastered with “MG II mortar”, i.e. an easy-to-use external mortar such as for facades. The pioneers even thought about the design of the plastered surfaces: “The project includes three suggestions for the structure of the plaster, which can be chosen depending on the location.”
The decoration seemed even more important for the barrier: 22 flagpoles were to rise across the entire width between the fire walls of the houses at Zimmerstrasse 79/80 and Mauerstrasse 93. GDR flags in black, red and gold, with the national coat of arms consisting of a hammer, compass and wreath of wheat (the official flag introduced in 1959) and apparently red flags should flutter alternately on them; At least that's what it looks like on the surviving perspective drawings. The red cloth always stood for the SED and its membership in the global communist movement. In addition, there should be 19 plant bowls on the top layer of concrete sleepers. Unfortunately, it is unknown exactly which flowers the illustrator imagined; Maybe he thought his barrier wall would be colorful.
The aesthetic part of the planning was less convincing to those responsible at the border troops than the technical side: the proposed obstacle across Friedrichstrasse was created within a few weeks at the end of 1961, almost as suggested. But those responsible apparently considered the “pretty-up” to be unnecessary.
In the first week of January 1962, the slightly modified basic construction, including the slanted railway tracks, was finished - the concrete sleepers used were thicker than planned and the result was therefore around 20 centimeters higher despite one less layer. In addition, the entire barrier was built three meters further south than originally planned. This is shown in a snapshot that shows several buses with sailors from the aircraft carrier USS “Essex”, which was currently stopping in Hamburg, before entering East Berlin on January 10, 1962. Further photos from the same time demonstrate the almost exact implementation of the designed barrier wall.
However, the border pioneers did not use any decorations: only a state coat of arms of the GDR measuring around 3.50 meters square on a white background was erected. This wall was not properly plastered or even decorated with flagpoles and plant pots. A slightly less repulsive external appearance was not that important to SED leaders Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, as Central Committee Secretary for Security responsible for the inner-German border.
The new barrier created secluded areas at the GDR “border crossing point” (GÜSt, as the KPP was now called). Two East German customs officers independently took advantage of this on August 30 and September 1, 1964 to escape. Within a few days, border troop pioneers built a watchtower from which blind spots could be checked. In this context, the stacked concrete sleepers were covered with white paint.
The new watchtower proved to be too low, so in 1968 it was raised by almost four meters. A little later, the barrier wall was clad for the first time in fluted sheet metal, a standard material in the GDR construction industry. But dissatisfaction with the shape of the most prominent “entrance” to the SED state remained. At the beginning of the 1970s, planning began for a fundamental reorganization, the coordination of which was taken over by the Stasi in 1973, in the wake of the GDR's international recognition. Again the unspoken principle was: “Our wall should be more beautiful.”
But that took time in the GDR, a state with shortages. During the filming of the James Bond film “Octopussy” in August 1982, the transition was still largely in its old form. Only then did the construction of a powerful, covered control point begin - whose essential function was to screen all passing vehicles with radioactive gamma rays. It wasn't until November 9, 1989, around 10 p.m., according to contemporary witnesses, that this practice ended.
