Private Walking Tour: Berlin Wall, Cold War and Checkpoint Charlie

Your tour guide will take you on a walk along the former "death strip" in Berlin's city center, as well as to the open-air documentation center with its authentic sites. The tour starts at the Berlin Wall Documentation Center north of downtown Berlin. Here, in "Bernauer Strasse", many of the dramatic escape attempts took place, successful and tragic ones. See, where famous events of the Cold War happened, like the young East German soldier jumping over the barbed wire or where people died after jumping out of the windows into the West because the front of their houses formed the Berlin Wall. Maps and an open-air exhibition will help you to understand what it meant to live in the divided Berlin.

You will ride on one of the subways that were called "ghost trains" during the division of the city. So-called because of the gloomy atmosphere in the underground stations close to the wall. Using one of those former ghost-lines we will reach the "Palace of Tears". See where Germans from West Berlin could travel to the East and visit their relatives. When they had to go back, they had to say goodbye to each other at this checkpoint. That is why this former checkpoint is called "Palace of Tears".

The tour also covers Checkpoint Charlie, the former military checkpoint and hot spot of the Cold War. This is the site where the fate of mankind was hanging by a thread in 1961 when US and Soviet tanks confronted each other. The tour ends at the Wall Museum which you may visit afterwards.