“The East Germans with little cranes were moving huge cement flower pots and positioning them across the roadways that go under the Brandenburg Gate. And so it looked like a joke at first — they’re sealing it off with flowers.”
NewsHour co-founder Robert MacNeil was a junior correspondent for NBC News and covering for a colleague in Berlin at the time of the wall’s construction. He recounts the events of that day in this interview.
Saturday, August 13, marked the 50th anniversary of the day Berlin residents awoke to find barbed-wire barricades and roadblocks where an open border once stood between East and West Berlin. For 28 years the wall segregating family and friends was patrolled by soldiers tasked with apprehending anyone trying to cross it without appropriate documentation. Here, photos of the construction, eventual demolition, and haunting legacy of the Wall.
