The fall of the Berlin Wall: Europe as we know it today was born 25 years ago, when the Berlin Wall came crashing down.

• Author: Brown, Bryan
• Position: TIMES PAST 1989

Imagine it was illegal to leave the United States and if you tried to escape, armed guards all along the Canadian and Mexican borders would be waiting to shoot you down. That's what life was like for millions of people in Eastern Europe after World War II, when the Soviet Union seized control of their countries. And there was no greater symbol of Communist repression and isolation than the Berlin Wall. The concrete and barbed wire structure, reaching up to 15 feet in some areas, ran for 96 miles, cutting off Communist East Berlin from West Berlin and the rest of democratic Europe for nearly three decades.

All that changed 25 years ago, when East German authorities gave up trying to keep their people locked in. Birgit Cristaudo, a nurse who lived in East Berlin, remembers the moment vividly: "I was watching television," she says, "And suddenly the announcer proclaimed that the Wall was open, repeating it again and again. I ... sat there stunned. "

The Cold War

The Berlin Wall epitomized the Cold War--the decades-long conflict pitting the U.S. and its democratic allies against Communist nations led by the Soviet Union. During World War II (1939-45), the U.S., Great Britain, and the Soviet Union joined forces to fight Adolf Hitler's Germany. But as their armies advanced separately on Berlin, Germany's capital, to finish the war, the Soviets seized control of a third of Germany and most of Eastern Europe, where it installed puppet Communist governments.

In March 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned that "an iron curtain has descended across the continent." In 1949, Germany was formally split into two nations: a democratic West and a Communist East.

Though Berlin sat entirely in East Germany, American, French, and British forces controlled West Berlin (see map). That part of the city remained democratic and accessible to the West by plane, trains, and highways.

For 12 years, Berliners could travel freely within the city. That changed when more and more East Germans used Berlin as an "escape hatch," as historian Frederick Taylor says, to flee Communism altogether. According to Taylor, about 2.5 million East Germans escaped to freedom in West Berlin from 1949 to 1961.

Alarmed that their country was losing its professionals and skilled workers to the West, East German leaders came up with a drastic solution.

On Aug. 13,1961, Berliners awoke to a barrier of barbed wire and concrete posts laid through the heart of the city. At a train station, one elderly woman asked a police officer when the next train to West Berlin would be.

"None of that anymore, Grandma," he said. "You're all [living] in a mousetrap now."

Soon, East German authorities began building the Berlin Wall, along with watchtowers from which guards would shoot to death anyone attempting to flee to the West.

"In some cases, the Wall went down the middle of streets," says Taylor, "brutally dividing neighborhoods and even families."

Crossing the Wall was a crime punishable by heavy fines, prison sentences, and worse. But East Berliners never stopped trying to escape. Over the years, about 5,000 of them made it, another 5,000 were caught, and nearly 200 were killed. Among them was 18-year-old Peter Fechter, a bricklayer shot dead by East German police while trying to jump the Wall in 1962, a year after it was built.

The Wall cut off East Berliners from the world in many ways. Living under a police state deprived them of basic freedoms. The restrictive Communist economy meant people had to stand in long lines to buy few consumer goods.

"Nobody had a home phone," says Bert Esenherz, who lived in East Berlin--unless you were a "privileged person" like a doctor or government official. The...