Download or read book A very risky escape from the DDR written by Dietmar Dressel and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The GDR in the seventies. Many leading politicians live in luxury. The Stasi and the police with the appropriate facilities ensure fear, terror and violence, worse than the inquisition in the middle Ages. Denunciation of people among one another flourishes in all colors, the mass of the people makes unrestrained use of the national wealth and increasingly refuses to work. Two young people fall in love and want to spend their life together in a country where they are free from political constraints. What the two have to experience and suffer on this very dangerous path is hell and horror itself.
Download or read book Escape from Berlin written by Anthony Kemp and published by Hyperion Books. This book was released on 1987 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[This book] is the story of the escape organisers and the peole who they have helped to escape, and it takes the reader into the real life world of the thriller and the spy novel. Opening with a concise account of the background to and the construction of the Wall, [the author] describes Wolfgang Fuchs who built at least seven tunnels, and freed the woman who was to become his wife. He visits the pub near the Wall from where many escapes were planned and which now serves as a museum. He describes some of the most spectacular escapes, using hot air balloons, hang-gliders, light aircraft and diving equipment. The daring work of today's escape organisers who use couriers, passports forged on trains and specially built cars concludes the book."--Book jacket.
Download or read book East German Girl written by Sigrid Jackson and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2011-09-07 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War memories do not have an age requirement. They force you to mature and give you no choice but to cope with the realities of the world. In this memoir, author Sigrid Jackson tells what it was like being a child of war in East Germany before and after World War II. In East German Girl, Jackson describes what it was like to live through the bombing raids, food shortages, diphtheria, communism, and being forced to leave her home with her mother and brother to be relocated to a rural farm. Using personal anecdotes to illustrate how God has worked in her life, Jackson demonstrates the courage that was necessary to escape East Germany to freedom in the west when she was just twelve years old. From an alcoholic, absentee father to an unsuspecting future husband, life continuously threw her curveballs, but East German Girl narrates an inspirational story of war, communism, family betrayal, and finally resilience.
Download or read book Checkpoint Charlie written by Iain MacGregor and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'As convoluted and deadly as the plot of a novel by John le Carre, but all too real' Daily Mail, Must Reads 'With a gripping narrative and vivid interviews with those on all sides whose lives were directly affected by that grim symbol of the East-West divide that poisoned Europe for almost half a century, [MacGregor] has made an important contribution to the history of our times' Jonathan Dimbleby 'Captures brilliantly and comprehensively both the danger and exhilaration that I and other reporters, soldiers, and people experienced intersecting with the wall - a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the Europe we have inherited' Jon Snow A powerful, fascinating, and ground-breaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary and most important military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States and her allies confronted the USSR during the Cold War. As the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches in 2019, Iain MacGregor captures the mistrust, oppression, paranoia, and fear that gripped the city throughout this period. Checkpoint Charlie is about the nerve-wracking confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union that contains never-before-heard interviews with the men who built and dismantled the Wall; lovers who crossed it; relatives and friends who lost family trying to escape over it; German, British, French, and Russian soldiers who guarded its checkpoints; CIA, MI6 and Stasi operatives who oversaw secret operations across its borders; politicians whose ambitions shaped it; journalists who recorded its story; and many more whose living memories contributed to the full story of Checkpoint Charlie. A brilliant work of historical journalism, Checkpoint Charlie is an invaluable record of this period.
Download or read book Stasiland written by Anna Funder and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-11-22 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight and in which one in fifty East Germans were informing on their fellow citizens, there are thousands of captivating stories. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who as a sixteen-year-old might have started World War III; she visits the man who painted the line that became the Berlin Wall; and she gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to “no longer exist.” Each enthralling story depicts what it’s like to live in Berlin as the city knits itself back together—or fails to. This is a history full of emotion, attitude and complexity.
Download or read book Tunnel 29 written by Helena Merriman and published by Public Affairs. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a hit podcast series, this book tells the unbelievable true story of an escape tunnel under the Berlin Wall--the people who built it, the spy who betrayed it, and the media event it inspired. In September 1961, at the height of the Cold War, 22-year-old Joachim Rudolph escaped from East Germany, one of the world's most brutal regimes. He'd risked everything to do it. Then, a few months later, working with a group of students, he picked up a spade... and tunneled back in. The goal was to tunnel into the East to help people escape. They spend months digging, hauling up carts of dirt in a tunnel ventilated by stove pipes. But the odds are against them: a Stasi agent infiltrates their group and on their first attempt, and dozens of escapees and some of the diggers are arrested and imprisoned. Despite the risk of prison and death, a month later, Joachim and the other try again and hit more bad luck: the tunnel springs a leak. After several attempts, run-ins with a spy and secret police, and some unlikely financial aid from an American TV network, they finally break through into the East, and free 29 people. This is the story of their great escape, the NBC documentary crew that filmed it, and the U.S. government's attempts to block the film from ever seeing the light of day. But more than anything, this is the story of what people will do to be free.
Download or read book The Berlin Exchange written by Joseph Kanon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From “the most accomplished spy novelist working today” (The Sunday Times, London), a “heart-poundingly suspenseful” (The Washington Post) espionage thriller set at the height of the Cold War, when a captured American who has spied for the KGB is returned to East Berlin, needing to know who arranged for his release and what they now want from him. Berlin, 1963. An early morning spy swap, not at the familiar setting for such exchanges, nor at Checkpoint Charlie, where international visitors cross into the East, but at a more discreet border crossing, usually reserved for East German VIPs. The Communists are trading two American students caught helping people to escape over the wall and an aging MI6 operative. On the other side of the trade: Martin Keller, a physicist who once made headlines, but who then disappeared into the English prison system. Keller’s most critical possession: his American passport. Keller’s most ardent desire: to see his ex-wife Sabine and their young son. The exchange is made with the formality characteristic of these swaps. But Martin has other questions: Who asked for him? Who negotiated the deal? The KGB? He knows that nothing happens by chance. They want him for something. Not physics—his expertise is out of date. Something else, which he cannot learn until he arrives in East Berlin, when suddenly the game is afoot. Intriguing and atmospheric, with action rising to a dangerous climax, The Berlin Exchange “expertly describes what happens when a disillusioned former agent tries to come in from the cold” (The New York Times Book Review), confirming Kanon as “the greatest writer ever of historical espionage fiction” (Spybrary).
Download or read book The Victims at the Berlin Wall 1961 1989 written by Hans-Hermann Hertle and published by Ch. Links Verlag. This book was released on 2011 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many deaths at the Berlin Wall have been publicized over the years in the media, the number, identity and fate of the victims still remain largely unknown. This handbook changes this by answering the following questions: How many people actually died at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989? Who were these people? How did they die? How were their relatives and their friends treated after their deaths? What public and political reactions were triggered in the East and the West by these fatalities? What were the consequences for the border guards who pulled the trigger and the military and political leaders who gave them their orders after the East German border regime collapsed and the Wall fell? How have the victims been commemorated since their deaths? By documenting the lives and circumstances under which these men and women died at the Wall, these deaths are placed in a contemporary historical context. The authors, in addition to systematically researching the relevant archives and examining all the legal proceedings and Stasi documents, also conducted interviews with family members and contemporary witnesses.
Download or read book The Berlin Wall written by Frederick Taylor and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse. This threat would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison, breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989. Frederick Taylor's eagerly awaited new book reveals the strange and chilling story of how the initial barrier system was conceived, then systematically extended, adapted and strengthened over almost thirty years. Patrolled by vicious dogs and by guards on shoot-to-kill orders, the Wall, with its more than 300 towers, became a wired and lethally booby-trapped monument to a world torn apart by fiercely antagonistic ideologies. The Wall had tragic consequences in personal and political terms, affecting the lives of Germans and non-Germans alike in a myriad of cruel, inhuman and occasionally absurd ways. The Berlin Wall is the definitive account of a divided city and its people.
Download or read book The Tunnels written by Greg Mitchell and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling Cold War narrative of superpower showdowns, media suppression, and two escape tunnels beneath the Berlin Wall. In the summer of 1962, the year after the rise of the Berlin Wall, a group of young West Germans risked prison, Stasi torture, and even death to liberate friends, lovers, and strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the Wall. Then two U.S. television networks heard about the secret projects and raced to be first to document them from the inside. NBC and CBS funded two separate tunnels in return for the right to film the escapes, planning spectacular prime-time specials. President John F. Kennedy, however, was wary of anything that might spark a confrontation with the Soviets, having said, “A wall is better than a war,” and even confessing to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “We don’t care about East Berlin.” JFK approved unprecedented maneuvers to quash both documentaries, testing the limits of a free press in an era of escalating nuclear tensions. As Greg Mitchell’s riveting narrative unfolds, we meet extraordinary characters: the legendary cyclist who became East Germany’s top target for arrest; the Stasi informer who betrays the “CBS tunnel”; the American student who aided the escapes; an engineer who would later help build the tunnel under the English channel; and the young East Berliner who fled with her baby, then married one of the tunnelers. The Tunnels captures the chilling reach of the Stasi secret police as U.S. networks prepared to “pay for play” but were willing to cave to official pressure, the White House was eager to suppress historic coverage, and ordinary people in dire circumstances became subversive. The Tunnels is breaking history, a propulsive read whose themes still reverberate.
Download or read book Cold War Germany the Third World and the Global Humanitarian Regime written by Young-sun Hong and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines global humanitarian efforts involving the two German states and Third World liberation movements during the Cold War.
Download or read book Creating Learning Spaces written by Joachim Bröcher and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can we learn from a teacher's journal about working with challenging youth? Why does the Training Room Program in German schools impede the development of an empowering learning culture? What experiences transpire during a train trip to the sea with an unruly crew of school boys? Or: what happens when children plan a trip on their own? Anyone who has accumulated experiences in teaching faces creative choices when putting that legacy to paper. The author chose to use this selection of studies to illustrate formative and inspirational moments from his years as a dedicated teacher and father.
Download or read book Forty Autumns written by Nina Willner and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family—of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than forty years, and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Forty Autumns makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. At twenty, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany. But the price of freedom—leaving behind her parents, eight siblings, and family home—was heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband and had children of her own. Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead sensitive intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Though only a few miles separated American Nina and her German relatives—grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin, Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic training team—a bitter political war kept them apart. In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her family’s story—five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk. A personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation, and continues to haunt us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love—of five women whose spirits could not be broken, and who fought to preserve what matters most: family. Forty Autumns is illustrated with dozens of black-and-white and color photographs.
Download or read book Born in the GDR written by Hester Vaizey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The real life stories of eight East Germans caught up in the dramatic transition from Communism to Capitalism by the fall of the Berlin Wall - and what they feel about life after the Wall.
Download or read book Driving the Soviets up the Wall written by Hope M. Harrison and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-27 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War. For the first time, this path-breaking book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the communists' decision to build the Wall in 1961. Hope Harrison's use of archival sources from the former East German and Soviet regimes is unrivalled, and from these sources she builds a highly original and provocative argument: the East Germans pushed the reluctant Soviets into building the Berlin Wall. This fascinating work portrays the different approaches favored by the East Germans and the Soviets to stop the exodus of refugees to West Germany. In the wake of Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviets refused the East German request to close their border to West Berlin. The Kremlin rulers told the hard-line East German leaders to solve their refugee problem not by closing the border, but by alleviating their domestic and foreign problems. The book describes how, over the next seven years, the East German regime managed to resist Soviet pressures for liberalization and instead pressured the Soviets into allowing them to build the Berlin Wall. Driving the Soviets Up the Wall forces us to view this critical juncture in the Cold War in a different light. Harrison's work makes us rethink the nature of relations between countries of the Soviet bloc even at the height of the Cold War, while also contributing to ongoing debates over the capacity of weaker states to influence their stronger allies.
Download or read book Remembering 1989 written by Anke Pinkert and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-10-07 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of the “laboratory of radical democracy” in the months before East Germany’s absorption in the West challenges memories of Germany’s reunification. For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten interregnum: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory. Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.
Download or read book The Grey Men written by Ralph Hope and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Fascinating and powerful.’ Sunday Times What do you do with a hundred thousand idle spies? By 1990 the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. For forty years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Almost a hundred thousand Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed overnight. This is the story of what they did next. Former FBI agent Ralph Hope uses present-day sources and access to Stasi records to track and expose ex-officers working everywhere from the Russian energy sector to the police and even the government department tasked with prosecuting Stasi crimes. He examines why the key players have never been called to account and, in doing so, asks if we have really learned from the past at all. He highlights a man who continued to fight the Stasi for thirty years after the Wall fell, and reveals a truth that many today don’t want spoken. The Grey Men comes as an urgent warning from the past at a time when governments the world over are building an unprecedented network of surveillance over their citizens. Ultimately, this is a book about the present.
