Word: wall
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Berlin will long remember a young East German named Peter Fechter who last summer tried to escape across the Wall and was shot down by the Red border cops. Wounded, he was left to bleed to death by the Communists, while U.S. soldiers, under strict instructions to avoid "incidents," were not allowed to cross a few feet into East Berlin and help the dying man. When a wave of disgust swept Germany, the Allies responded by a feeble gesture: they stationed an ambulance at Checkpoint Charlie in the U.S. sector to pick up any future wounded fugitive and take...
...Heidelbergerstrasse, practically in the shadow of the Wall, East Berlin security cops swooped down on a building where a fresh tunnel had just been completed. Eight men and women scurried through the passage to a West Berlin beer parlor at the other end, but one young man was sprayed at point-blank range by machine pistols. Three miles to the northwest, the Allies learned of the shooting and sped their ambulance to the border. But East German guards refused to raise the barrier, and the British army drivers did not force the issue; after an hour they turned back...
Others fleeing from East Berlin had better luck last week. A young electrical engineer clung to a homemade bucket seat attached to a crane while friends on the Western side wafted him 90 ft. across the Wall. Three teenage boys cut their way through barbed wire, and a coal miner, his courage kindled by schnapps, leaped 35 ft. from a bridge into a barge canal, then swam to the Western shore...
Meanwhile, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht, desperately attempting to justify the Wall's existence, hopes for a visit from Polish Party Chief Wladyslaw Gomulka and Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz. According to one story current in West Berlin. Gomulka summoned the East German ambassador when he heard that he was expected to whitewash the Wall and told him angrily: "The only thing we know like it in history is the one you Germans built around the Warsaw ghetto...
...cash a check. It was 12 107. With a reverberating, mind-stopping roar, one of the three steel boilers, 15 ft. long and 5 ft. across, exploded at one end. The escaping steam roared out through the aperture with the thrust of a rocket, drove the boiler through the wall into the cafeteria, on through the ceiling into the first-floor accounting office, then hurtled down into the cafeteria again and through the far wall into a file room. Stumbling through the choking, smoking chaos of shattered walls and furniture and bodies, survivors thought the city must have been...