Berlin memorial crosses cleared to protesters' jeers

To jeers from protesters, demolition crews yesterday began uprooting hundreds of crosses from the site of former Checkpoint Charlie set up to commemorate victims killed trying to escape from communist East Germany.

In an effort to stop the unofficial memorial being cleared, several protesters chained themselves to the wooden crosses from the place where the legendary Cold War checkpoint once stood on the line separating East and West Berlin. Police stood by.

A German court ruled in April the crosses had to go to make way for a building planned by a bank.

An order to remove the crosses and a 200-metre stretch of replica wall expired some time ago but a court official finally ordered the clearance to take place yesterday.

German politicians and media have criticised the private exhibit, which has drawn throngs of communist-era memorabilia merchants, as tacky, saying it has turned the area into a tourist "Disneyland".

Supporters of the exhibit point out there is no other major memorial to one of the Cold War's most famous landmarks.

The German capital has an uncomfortable history of dissent and delay over commemorative sites, including the recently opened Holocaust memorial. Critics have decried Berlin's failure to create a more prominent public monument to the Wall.

Maria Nooke, who runs the official Berlin Wall Documentation Centre, said the crosses were politically motivated and amateur.

"Berlin needs a more authentic and professional treatment of the Wall's history," she said.

Berlin's culture minister Thomas Flierl hoped to establish Nooke's museum as the site of a future, official commemoration to the 28-year long division of the city.

But Alexandra Hildebrandt, head of the nearby Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, who set up the private exhibition, said Mr Flierl simply wanted to get rid of the crosses because he once belonged to the East German government.

"Of course he doesn't like what's here," she said. She was supported by Hubertus Knabe, director of a Berlin museum about East Germany's infamous secret police, the Stasi. He told Monday's edition of Die Welt newspaper that the Berlin Wall needed a memorial.

"As long as there is nothing better, this memorial should stay," he said.

The Berlin Wall was built by communist East Germany in 1961 to stop a growing exodus to the West. But thousands still escaped past the cement and barbed wire barrier.

Checkpoint Charlie was the set up by the Americans also in 1961 and was the place where tourists and diplomats crossed to and from the Soviet sector of the divided city.