East Berlin & the Wall

Start your walking tour next to Hackescher Markt train station in East Berlin at 10am. Your guide will begin your tour by setting the scene: how did the U.S. and the USSR fall into a Cold War? How was Berlin caught in the middle of everything? How did military tensions Berlin split into two?

Your guide will take you to the Berlin Wall memorial, where you’ll see a section of the Wall preserved in its original state, as well as a birds-eye view of the ‘Death Strip,’ where East Germany’s shoot-to-kill orders were carried out on would-be escapees.

Next you’ll travel to the north of Berlin to Bornholmer Strasse, where the Wall came down on November 9, 1989. Here, your guide will explain the unlikely tale of how one East German politician’s mistake brought down the Berlin Wall.

Continue deeper into East Berlin. You’ll see the Karl-Marx-Allee, a boulevard built as a monument to Stalin to demonstrate the new socialist utopia of the German Democratic Republic.

You’ll also visit the headquarters of East Germany’s terrifying secret police, the Stasi, and learn how the East German state increasingly spied upon its own people, creating a system of complete government control over its citizens. Finish your walking tour at Alexanderplatz, the site of the iconic TV tower in the heart of the former East German capital.