Upon the dissolution and fall of the Third Reich Nazi Germany, Germany was split up amongst a number of world superpowers: Britain, America, France, and Russia. Russia at that time was ruled by communism and Stalin. As relations became more and more strained and the Cold War began, many defected from East Germany escaping to West Germany.

On this day June 22, in 1990, the most famous Berlin Wall checkpoint, Checkpoint Charlie, is disassembled. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall had been taken down, and this checkpoint being taken down served to psychologically demolish the imprisonment that millions of citizens of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were forced to endure.  Once the Wall came down, Checkpoint Charlie was used for foreigners and diplomats to cross until East and West Germany was reunified in October of 1990.

Between 1949 and the building of the Berlin wall in 1961, over 2.5 million left East Germany. Many of those that left were well educated engineers, thinkers, and skilled workers, all of which greatly hurt both East Germany’s economic ability and its political credibility. With that said, if one must force people behind barbed wire and machine guns to stay in, its credibility sounds like a joke. In 1961 alone, over 700,000 people escaped to the west – which stopped in August when barbed wire went up. The checkpoint is now kept in a museum.