Berlin Wall Memorial (Bernauer Strasse)

On 13 August 1961, East German soldiers strung barbed wire down the middle of Bernauer Strasse, where the buildings stood in the East but their pavements lay in the West. Residents jumped from upper-storey windows into Western firefighters' nets before the windows were bricked up. Here 59-year-old Ida Siekmann became the first Wall fatality on 22 August 1961, dying from a leap. The official Berlin Wall Memorial now preserves the last intact section of the fortified border strip — the wall, the death strip, a watchtower and the raked sand — as a sombre 1.4-kilometre open-air record of the 140-plus people who died trying to cross.