Symbol of the Cold War
The Glienicke Bridge as last hope of the spies
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a lot of traffic on the once mysterious place between Berlin and Potsdam: The Glienicke Bridge. Its English nickname is “The Bridge of Spies“. The bridge became world famous as a bottleneck in the Iron Curtain, in its function as a swap point for spies of the Great Powers.
The Glienicke Bridge is a place of many facets. Before the wars, it was an important link of the Reichsstraße 1 between Aachen and Königsberg. It also served as a backdrop for the movie “Unter den Brücken” (“Under the bridges”) which was shot during bombing in 1944. Furthermore, in spring 1945, thousands of people escaped from Berlin across the bridge to the West. Eventually, the bridge was blown up by the German Armed Forces before the war ended.
The “Bridge of Unity“ becomes a symbol of the division

In the last days of the Second World War, Germans and Soviets fought on the bridge, which was heavily damaged. The Soviet occupiers soon repaired the bridge and gave it the name “Bridge of Unity”. And yet, up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bridge was the symbol of Germany's division. On the 10th of November 1989, thousands streamed across the bridge, which used to be the best guarded bridge in the world for decades, to West-Berlin. Nowadays, more people cross the bridge in one day than in 40 years of the German division.
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