Piece of Berlin Wall removed in secret raid

Kate Connolly in Berlin
The Guardian
Apr. 11, 2007

The 18-metre strip of graffitied wall was removed in the middle of the night. Photograph: Rainer Jensen/EPA

One of the last remaining pieces of the Berlin Wall in the centre of the German capital was removed by government-contracted workers in a secretly engineered operation over the Easter weekend, it was revealed today.

Hoping that no one would notice because of the quiet bank holiday, the 18-metre strip of graffitied wall was yanked from its foundations in the dead of night.

Startled tourists were the first to notice on Easter Sunday when they went to take photographs of the famous strip on Potsdamer Platz, the centre of the once-divided city, and found it was gone.

At first the media spear-headed a detective-style hunt for the tourist attraction, which contains well-known murals painted by international artists.

One image is of an East German trabant car, bursting through the wall on November 9 1989. Another carries the slogan: "don't destroy history" - an appeal by artists for parts of the wall to be kept intact so that young Berliners could learn about their history.

After a couple of days spent keeping its head down, the government finally owned up. The federal civil engineering and planning office said it had removed the panels so that construction of the new environment ministry could go ahead on the site.

Quick to want to heal the public relations gaffe, a spokeswoman for the planning office said the intention was to eventually incorporate the strip of wall into a visitor centre in the ministry, which onlookers would be able to view through a window. She said the missing segment had been put in storage and was being professionally restored.

But Erich Stanke, 47, a businessman from Krefeld who claims to own various remnants of the wall after buying them from a defunct border guard in 1990, was incandescent with rage.

"I was sitting in a cafe when a friend called to say: 'the wall is gone'," he said, calling the operation a "cloak and daggers affair".

"The wall is a protected monument, and now it is gone. People were shot there, and now this piece of human world heritage has simply been ripped up - it's a disgrace."

The spokesman said that, contrary to Mr Stanke's claims, the remains of the wall belonged to the city.

Few sections of the Berlin Wall, which snaked across almost 27 miles of the border between East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, remain, despite campaigners' efforts to keep parts of it intact. Its former path is marked by a barely noticeable cobbled strip.