Charlie Checks Out of Cold War Aboard a Truck

Checkpoint Charlie, the temporary prefabricated hut that came to symbolize Cold War confrontation and intrigue for a divided world, was dismantled Friday in one of the most powerful signs yet of Europe’s blossoming detente.

With the foreign ministers of six nations looking on, the beige, 50-foot-long building that for 29 years served as an Allied military checkpoint on the edge of the Berlin Wall, was lifted onto a flatbed truck and hauled away.

A U.S. Army band played and thousands of Berliners from both sides of the wall applauded as the structure rose off its foundation and dangled briefly from a crane.

Local residents and office workers crowded onto balconies and leaned from windows to witness the event.

One banner read, “Sad! Dear Checkpoint Charlie.”

The six leaders included the foreign ministers of the two main Cold War adversaries, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

“Twenty-nine years after this barrier was built, we meet here today to dismantle it and to bury the conflict that created it,” Baker told a crowd. “And in its place, together we pledge to build a bridge between East and West, a bridge not of cement and steel but of peace and freedom.”

In his brief remarks, Shevardnadze referred to a “gradual removal of the confrontational legacy”.

“One more of the emotionally charged and at times dramatic pages in Berlin’s postwar history has been turned,” he said.

The decision to dismantle such a famous symbol of the Cold War was one more step in the gradual knitting together of a city and a people divided for nearly three decades.

The manner in which it was removed, in the presence of both the Soviet and East German foreign ministers, accentuated the sense of change for Berliners. From windows bordering the wall where desperate East Germans once leaped to freedom--windows later barred and placed behind a death strip filled with mines--men and women Friday laughed and cheered, some in near disbelief.

“I would have said you were crazy if you described such a scene to me one year ago,” said Heinz Beckmann, an East Berlin electrician.

Neither U.S. nor Allied authorities would comment officially on where the hut is going. But West German television news indicated Friday evening that there are differences of opinion. It reported that the United States wants to take the structure to an unspecified museum in Washington. Berlin city officials had said privately that they would prefer it to be part of a museum of German history in Berlin.

Checkpoint Charlie was erected as a military post shortly after the East Germans sealed off East Berlin in the tense summer of 1961 to prevent an exodus to the West. To defend the freedom of movement in the city, the checkpoint was placed directly opposite the lone crossing point for foreigners designated by the East German authorities.

Because two other American military checkpoints between West Germany and West Berlin were called Alpha and Bravo according to the military alphabet, the new checkpoint became Checkpoint Charlie.

Initially manned by U.S. military police, it later was staffed by units from all three Allied powers--Britain, France and the United States, whose job was to ensure freedom of movement through the crossing point.

For seven tense days in October, 1961, after East German border police tried to halt an Allied patrol entering the eastern section of the city, the checkpoint became a superpower flash point. Soviet and American tanks squared off in one of the most dramatic confrontations of the Cold War.

As an anxious world watched, Moscow eventually backed down and the crisis faded.

In the years that followed, the checkpoint was the scene of dramatic escapes from the East, including one by a young German who removed the windshield from an MG sports car and sped under a horizontal steel barrier pole to freedom.

It was also where an 18-year-old East German named Peter Fechter was shot by East German guards in 1962 as he tried to escape and was left to bleed to death at the foot of the wall.

It became a scene frequently featured in spy novels and films and was where the hero of John le Carre’s “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” tried to live up to the title.

In recent years, political tensions have eased and the military units stationed there were more involved in answering tourist questions than in confrontation.

At Friday’s ceremony, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, himself a novelist, referred to the 1963 Le Carre novel, stating: “At long last we’re bringing Charlie in from the cold.”