German/Nat The construction of the Berlin Wall began on August 13, 1961. It was a result of the cold war, when the government of Germany's eastern sector decided to construct a barrier to the advance of capitalism. But out of this ideological barrier came a cruel reality. Overnight there was a brutal separation of families, friends and neighbours which led to a storm of protest. On November 9, 1989 the fall of the wall was to lead to German re-unification prompting East Germans to assess what had happened to their country and families over the past thirty years. Check point Charlie was perhaps the most famous symbol of the rift between the East and the West in Germany. Named according to the American alphabetical code system, it became the emblem of a split which led to the tanks of two superpowers facing each other a matter of metres apart. And as well as the military hardware thousands of troops also backed up the system. One of the youngest was 21 year-old Hagen Koch whose job it was to paint the white line which first denoted the border line at Check point Charlie on Friedrichstrasse. As the head of the German secret service's cartography department the wall became his career. He spent his working life documenting every inch of the 46 kilometre barrier. Koch retired in 1985 since when he has been showing both Germans and tourists around the most important places along the wall. One of his stops is at the Invalidenstrasse, where the wall went right through houses, a poignant reminder of the way the two parts of the country were brutally separated. When the wall fell, new houses were built but the homes which were split in two were left as a monument to the past. The local watch tower too remains as a symbol of a society where freedom was a distant dream, where GDR guards overlooked the border. And it wasn't just the living that were split when the wall went up. In one suburb of Berlin a cemetery was divided in two when the iron curtain came down. The pull of the West was strong for East Berliners. Many people lost their lives trying to escape from the system many of them felt they had been trapped in. At the Invalidenstrasse cemetery there is a small visitor centre detailing the failed escapes and the many who lost their lives trying to cross the border. Here the visitors may begin to understand the pressures on those who lost their lives by trying to escape. Koch himself has come a long way in understanding the motivations both of those who worked for the Communists and those who tried to escape them. SOUNDBITE: (German) "It was important for me personally to experience the fall of the wall, to be here and to understand how dictatorships tempt people to work for them. I'm the living example, that dictatorships do have ideological and psychological mechanism especially to get young people to believe in their systems." SUPERCAPTION: Hagen Koch, Former secret police cartographer, now a tour guide Some escapes were successful. In October 1964 for example, 57 people managed to escape through a tunnel they dug themselves. And as time went on more and more deals were made by West and East Germany to bring people to the West. Ten years on, those who struggled and failed to break free from the Eastern system are commemorated by these crosses near the newly designed Reichstag building in Berlin. They will remain a symbol of a divided nation just as Germany's historic parliament building will begin the next century as a symbol of a united one. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/221d5230e91add4b70246c0799183ba0 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork

• published: 04 Aug 2015
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