Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his third blog.
For today's young travelers who zip around Europe, where borders of countries sometimes seem irrelevant, Germany in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s may be difficult to comprehend.
Germany was two countries. Down the middle of what we now know as Germany, for 865 miles, was a highly militarized border with fences and walls, dogs and soldiers, cameras and machine guns. The border -- marked by what nations of Western Europe called an Iron Curtain and the Eastern Soviets called anti-fascist protection -- was the result of the end of bloody World War II.
On both sides of this border, armies with tanks and missiles prepared for World War III.
Today, the border is gone, and Germany is unified as one country. Travelers can gain a sense of the past along the old border, in an area about 100 miles west of Berlin. These Cold War sites are an easy day trip from Berlin, Germany's capital, and most can be reached by train.
The Zonengrenz Museum in Helmstedt exhibits how the fortified border grew from a fence with barbed wire -- the early Iron Curtain of the mid-1940s -- to a series of walls with motion activated machine guns and other armaments.
Nearby Hoetensleben has preserved the old border fortifications -- a system of fences and no-mans lands. The Soviets built and patrolled the border. Most of the weapons were pointed east, at their own citizens.
Above, in winter, residents of Hoetensleben use the old militarized border as a hill for sledding, beside a preserved guard tower. East Germany was to the right of the wall.
Near Helmstedt is Marienborn, the former highway checkpoint to the road through East German territory into West Berlin.
Motorists feared the Berlin checkpoint
Because most of the east-west traffic flowed through Marienborn, it was known as the "eye of the needle."
Vehicle booths and the two-story headquarters building at Marienborn station (right) now are a museum, where visitors can get a sense of the old fears and tensions.
In the bad old days, if you were on the West German side, driving east toward Berlin, at Marienborn you handed over your passport, with trepidation, because travelers did not trust the Soviets and the general rule of international travel was: Never let your passport out of your sight. To follow that rule of survival, many travelers have kept their passport in a sealed plastic pouch that never left their body, including during a bathroom shower.
At Marienborn, once your passport was in Soviet hands, it disappeared into a red pouch and moved indoors on an elaborate series of belts. We now know that upstairs, at Marienborn, Soviet security officers whipped through picture books and lists of names to see if you were a suspected enemy of East Germany. And some Western passports were copied by the Soviets for later use when making fake ones for spies. As you left Marienborn toward Berlin, your passport was returned.
If you were traveling west, out of West Berlin and headed for West Germany, Soviet police were looking for forbidden photos and sensitive documents or anything that aroused their suspicions.
Police inspected gas tanks, cut cakes in half to see what was inside, dumped coffee beans from a sack, looked under cars with mirrors, and at one point used a heat sensor to estimate the number of bodies inside the car, comparing that count to the heads the guards could see.
Vehicles (like the one above) had been modified to create secret compartments to smuggle people through the Soviet border.
Next: Remembering when East Germans met West Germans at the Iron Curtain
Information on Planning a trip to Germany
First blog: Back in Berlin again, 20 years after the fall of the wall
Also from Berlin: Coffee at Brandenburg Gate
To read the entire series: Back in Berlin again, 20 years after the fall of the wall Poking about pieces of the old Berlin Wall Guns, dogs, and fear along the old Iron Curtain When East met West on peaceful soil in 1989 Lies and dreams east of the old Iron Curtain
