An East German man attempting to cross into West Berlin was shot dead by border guards, a grim reminder that the Cold War's deadliest frontier remained lethal even as reform winds were beginning to stir in the Eastern Bloc. Fewer than two years later, the Wall itself would fall.
By 1988, the Berlin Wall had stood for 27 years, a 96-mile concrete scar through the heart of a divided city, patrolled by guards under standing orders to shoot escapees. Over the Wall's history, at least 140 people died trying to cross it -- drowned in canals, shot in no-man's land, or killed by mines and booby traps.
This particular incident, one of the final fatal shootings at the border before the Wall's collapse, underscored how entrenched the machinery of division remained even as Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union were beginning to loosen the Eastern Bloc's grip elsewhere. East German leader Erich Honecker had publicly insisted the Wall would stand for '100 more years.'
It stood for barely two more. By November 1989, mass protests and a bureaucratic miscommunication about travel permits led guards to simply open the checkpoints, and Berliners on both sides climbed atop the Wall with hammers and champagne. The shootings of 1988 stand as a haunting footnote -- a reminder of how quickly an apparently permanent order can dissolve.
Key people: Erich Honecker