The Wall goes up

Bernauer Straße · Berlin, Germany · 1961-08-13

In the early hours of 13 August 1961 East German troops unrolled barbed wire along the sector border and began replacing it with concrete. Bernauer Straße became the Wall's most photographed street: the houses stood in the East, the pavement in the West, and residents jumped from windows in the first days before the openings were bricked up. The memorial here preserves the last complete section of the border strip.

The record

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

Every one of these is a search, not a guess: the event is documented, so the pictures exist somewhere. Start here.

• Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
• The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
• Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
• National and municipal archives of Germany, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

Newsreel and archive film of events like this often survives. Search YouTube for this event If you find good footage, send us the link and we will attach it to this page.