Word: checkpoint
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...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...
There was a faint touch of detente in the Berlin air. The U.S. removed its M48 tanks from the threatening spot at West Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie, the Friedrichstrasse passageway to the Communist half of the city; next day the Russians pulled back their own tracked T-54 tanks from the sector boundary...
Delgado lost five more days dickering unsuccessfully for horses to cross the border, finally risked driving into Portugal by bus through a guarded checkpoint. Limping, stooping and squinting "like somebody out of a horror movie," Delgado was admitted without question, and headed straight for a grubby pension in Lisbon. "I was used to living in palaces," says he disgustedly...