East Germany built the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s, an eleven-foot-high barrier manned around the clock by guards who shot to kill. Over the next twenty-eight years, at least five thousand people attempted to break through. Here is a powerful, fascinating, and groundbreaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States confronted the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

"Checkpoint Charlie is the story of the men and women - from both sides of the Cold War's political divide - who lived, served on, or escaped through the Berlin Wall during its life span (13th August 1961 - 9th November 1989). This physical monstrosity created by the East German communist state was to divide one of the most beautiful and by 1961, ruined cities of the world; dividing families, friends and lovers. Its creation, and its sudden collapse twenty-seven years later, were the key moments of the Cold War. Checkpoint Charlie was the one place in a paranoid continent where East faced West across one hundred yards of No Man's Land. Where soldiers served, spies watched through trained binoculars, escapees fled, politicians made speeches, people died and, mothers wept. The Wall was seen by many as permanent as the Himalayas. Across the Wall's almost three decades of existence, over two hundred people died trying to escape through it to the West, and these are just the recorded deaths