November 9th marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

At the end of World War II, the Allied powers divided Germany into four zones, controlled by either the United States, Great Britain, France, or the Soviet Union. The same was done with Germany’s capital city,Berlin. Since the city of Berlin had been situated entirely within the Soviet zone of occupation, West Berlin became an island of democracy within Communist East Germany.

By the late 1950s living conditions in West Germany and East Germany had become distinctly different and many people living in East Germany wanted to move to the more affluent west.
Having already lost 2.5 million people by 1961, East Germany needed to stop the exodus. The obvious way being to close down the easy access East Germans had to West Berlin.
On the night of August 12-13, 1961, soldiers and construction workers began tearing up streets that entered into West Berlin, dug holes to put up concrete posts, and strung barbed wire all across the border between East and West Berlin.

The Berlin Wall stretched over a hundred miles. It ran not only through the centre of Berlin, but also wrapped around West Berlin, entirely cutting West Berlin off from the rest of East Germany.
By 1989 it had been transformed into an 80 meter wide no-man’s-land, with an additional inner wall, soldiers patrolling with dogs, a raked ground that showed footprints, anti-vehicle trenches, electric fences, light systems, watchtowers, bunkers, and minefields.

There had been signs in 1988 and 1989 that the Communist bloc was weakening, as Communism began to falter in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. On the evening of November 9, 1989, an announcement made by East German government official Günter Schabowski who stated, "Permanent relocations can be done through all border checkpoints between the GDR (East Germany) into the FRG (West Germany) or West Berlin."
Very quickly, the Berlin Wall was inundated with people from both sides. Some chipping at the Berlin Wall with hammers and chisels as an impromptu celebration took place.

After the Berlin Wall came down, East and West Germany reunified into a single German state on October 3, 1990.

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