At the height of its powers, the stasi held 125 miles of shelving full of spy files on its citizens

The cold wind chills me to the bone and, as I stamp my feet on the cobbled floor in a feeble attempt to stay warm while photographer Tom Salt perfects his shot, the significance of our mission in Berlin begins to sink in.

It’s 3am and I’ve driven up from Munich in a BMW 840Ci to be here – and, right now, we’re stood in the entrance of a concrete office block. It seems an unlikely place to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – but I needed to come.

The sprawling office complex has real Cold War resonance. Inside is the headquarters of Berlin’s feared Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Stasi, a place that intricately monitored the lives of 17 million East German citizens, and which successfully subjugated them during a reign of paranoia that lasted from 1945 to 1990.

At the height of its powers, and within this building, the Stasi held 125 miles of shelving full of spy files on its citizens, harvested by a network of informers that numbered one in 17 of all East Germans. The imposing wall that split Berlin in two might have been a stark symbol of the East’s disdain for the capitalist West, but the real power to control was in those files. And in how the information in them was gathered.

The thought is too unsettling at this ungodly hour, and I climb back into the BMW, flick on the heated seat, and let Tom get on with his job. Our 840CSi is certainly the right car to be prowling round the mean streets of East Berlin – sinister-looking, smooth and fast. On the run up the autobahn it was even more impressive; its effortless 140mph cruising signalled loud and clear just how much the West German car industry had achieved by the end of the Cold War.

The 840Ci is an evolution of a car launched in the weeks leading up to the fall of the Wall, the 850i, West Germany’s latest flagship. Originally offered with a brand-new 300bhp V12 in a handsome pillarless bodyshell, it was a glamorous and high-tech step into the unknown for BMW: the most advanced luxury car of its time.

Compare that with what the East was building in 1989. The Trabant and Wartburg were two cars with their roots in the 1960s, built in filthy factories and hopeless to drive. They also had a ten-year waiting list. It’s difficult to find a starker indicator of the relative performances of the two Germanys than this. Yet it was the Trabant that would go on to become Europe’s most recognisable car of 1989 and 1990…

Twenty years on, and they’ve all but disappeared from Berlin. Many of the signs that the city was split into two have also vanished, as Berlin’s prosperity and importance increase. However, Communism’s reach extends to the present, and it doesn’t take much to find ghosts of the past. East Berlin is full of them. And many are still scary.

Any tour of the city needs to begin at the East Side Gallery. Driving through the deserted streets of late-night Berlin to get there, it’s easy to warm to the big BMW. The combination of a reclined driving position, deep-chested performance from our 1993 model’s V8 engine, and snappy manual ’box allows us to make mincemeat of aggressively driven taxis. Arriving at a freshly decorated section of the Wall, you appreciate its scale. It’s 12 feet high and cast in concrete sections, difficult to scale, nigh-impossible to pull down, and it surrounded West Berlin.

The origins of the Wall lay in the rubble of World War Two. Germany had been carved up into French, British, American and Soviet sectors, with its capital city similarly split in four. By 1947, the occupying powers were at odds over their ambitions for Germany – the Allies wanted the country self-sufficient, and used the Marshall Plan funding to make it happen. Stalin wanted the German Soviet zone to form a part of the emergent Soviet Eastern Bloc, and was dead against the country’s revival as an independent European power. Winston Churchill declared that

‘…an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.’

In 1948, and with West Berlin effectively an island of democracy within Soviet-controlled East Germany, Stalin decided to turn the screw and make a play for the city by sealing off road and rail access. His plan was to starve the city into submission, forcing the Allied powers into relinquishing their grip on West Berlin. Instead, they dug in and instigated the Berlin Airlift, flying food into Flughafen Tempelhof day-and-night, and forcing the Soviets to abandon their ploy in May 1949.

It was a setback, but East Germany’s integration into the Soviet sphere advanced significantly in October that year. The creation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) cemented Moscow’s plans for the country, which were tactical as well as economic. Its formation also saw the creation of a new government, police force and intelligence service, as well as the introduction of a new currency, the Ost-Mark.

Although western powers initially refused to acknowledge the existence of the GDR, within the Eastern Bloc the country flourished. Berlin and Dresden were rebuilt, with the former looking like a facsimile of Moscow, while policies of guaranteed jobs and education for all created an almost utopian environment for undemanding citizens who valued security over freedom of choice.

Of course, it wasn’t all milk and honey. For those who questioned the regime’s intentions, life as an enemy of the state lay ahead – and the Stasi ensured that anyone suspected of sympathising with the imperialist West would be sentenced to prison. Or worse.

Although a heavily fortified border between the GDR and Federal Germany was built during the early 1950s, Berlin remained very much open to cross-border commuting. Those who lived in the East of the City were free to work in the West – and vice versa – but Berlin was also the place people came to if they wanted to flee the GDR. Throughout the ’50s, a flood of bright young East Germans did just that.

The GDR government, under First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party and GDR State Council chairman , Walter Ulbricht, mindful of the brain drain its country was suffering, sought to restrict travel. But it simply didn’t work, and the emigration to the west by up to 400,000 East Germans per year was becoming an intolerable situation. It is estimated that between 1950 and 1960 over three million crossed the border and never returned.

The answer was clear: erect an impenetrable barrier around West Berlin. And during the summer months of 1961, and with the Soviet Union’s assistance, a plan to do just that was hatched in complete secrecy. In public, Ulbricht was doing all he could to throw the public off the scent, claiming, ‘No-one has the intention of erecting a wall.’ No-one outside the party or the upper echelons of the intelligence service knew the day was coming. But those that did referred to it as ‘X Hour’.

At precisely midnight on August 13, 1961, in a ruthlessly efficient operation, military units ring-fenced West Berlin and started building a wall around it while much of the city slept. Armed soldiers lined the border, forming a human chain while construction workers started erecting the Wall. By daybreak, barbed-wire fences were up, and free travel across the 97-mile border between East and West had ended.
The world’s media looked on in shock, while West Berliners 

demonstrated at the Wall. In the tense days that followed, the world wondered whether it would be the Americans or the Soviets who would blink first, perhaps starting World War Three. Days passed and it seemed that the outward flood had been stemmed, with the odd escape attempt over the barrier being caught on camera.

John F Kennedy guaranteed American support for the West Berliners two weeks later, by visiting the Wall and declaring, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’

The situation never reached breaking point and, although international tensions remained, in its own bizarre way the Wall played a part in sparing us all from the outbreak of WW3. The Soviets committed to the Wall, and that lessened the likelihood of a landgrab in West Berlin, while the Americans, who were represented by an increasing amount of firepower in Berlin, would not overstep a clearly defined mark.
But the plight of the East’s escapees was thrown into sharp focus on August 17, 1962. Peter Fechter and his friend Helmut Kulbeik (who successfully made it across) tried to climb the Wall near Checkpoint Charlie. Border guards ordered Fechter to stop and fired a warning shot, but when he continued to flee they shot directly at him. In front of a large crowd on the Western side, Fechter fell to the ground, mortally wounded. Shouting for help, Fechter bled to death while the border guards looked on.

It was the turning point in Wall history. Those who wanted to cross were in no doubt that to do so could lead to their deaths, as over 200 found out.

In the East life continued and, with the border now effectively closed, Ulbricht’s development of the GDR could continue unabated. The economy grew and prosperity increased. If you didn’t fit in, the Stasi would have ways of dealing with that. As intelligence organisations went, it was incredibly effective, relying on an extensive network of informers. If the Wall didn’t crush the spirit, the thought that your family, your friend – even your lover – could be a Stasi agent probably would.

As the GDR got stronger, so did the Wall. It started out as a wire fence, but by its 1975 fourth generation it had evolved into a sophisticated system generally regarded as being impossible to cross. Behind the Wall that westerners could see lay anti-tank devices, searchlights, landmines in raked sand, and watchtowers every 200m. This was called the death strip.

As the 1970s gave way to the ’80s, the Wall became an accepted part of Berlin life. The good times for the GDR were over. Living standards rapidly fell behind West Germany’s, and queues in grocery stores were increasingly common. The government, now with Erich Honecker in charge, was running out of money, as GDR-manufactured goods lost their export appeal. Who’d buy a Wartburg when they could have a Golf?

Time was running out, and more of the GDR’s citizens were becoming disillusioned with the promise of a Communist utopia that never materialised. Nowhere was this more evident than in Berlin: even the GDR’s political élite, who drove CitroΫn CXs and Volvo 200s, were overshadowed by the average West German tourist’s car. Imagine the effect of seeing a dramatic coupé such as the BMW 850i on the average GDR citizen who’d been brought up on a diet of Trabants.

It wasn’t wise to voice such doubts in public, though. The Stasi found increasingly inventive ways to spy on the population and sniff out what it considered to be the enemy within. High-technology surveillance systems were widely used, especially in public buildings. They were also found in the homes of ordinary citizens who just happened to have an intelligence file against them. But the Stasi’s bugs and micro-cameras seem antediluvian in comparison with the electronic systems that suffuse our BMW.

For those suspected of crimes against the State, such as expressing a desire to defect, a long and unpleasant chat with the Stasi was the likely outcome. Imprisonment would often follow, and inmates suspected of harbouring pro-capitalist views were incarcerated in the dreaded Hohenschönhausen prison in Berlin.

They wouldn’t have known where they were, though. Few outside the government knew the prison existed at all. Sentenced individuals were transported in innocuous-looking baker’s vans and driven in circles for hours on end before being deposited at the prison, which was located in the heart of what locals called ‘Stasi Town’, an area of the city that Berliners knew to avoid. Besides the prison there were spy equipment factories, windowless Soviet-run KGB offices and Stasi interrogation chambers.

The unlucky prisoners were tortured – the Stasi preferred the psychological kind – or executed. Into the 1970s the guillotine was favoured, before it was superseded by the Cossack method of a bullet in the back of the neck. The lucky ones ended up serving time (up to 15 years for the most minor political crimes) before being turned into hard cash: after their often trumped-up sentences were served, they’d be sold to West Germany for up to 100,000 Deutschmarks each.

Although it’s been a generation since such atrocities took place in Stasi Town, it’s hard not to allow such facts to weigh me down as Tom and I pull alongside the KGB ‘offices’ in the 840CSi to take another shot. The car had served to sooth jangled nerves as we’d effortlessly glided between locations, but this stop was tough. As Tom snaps away at the abandoned building, pointing his flashgun and running round like a man possessed, the eerie silence, the chill, and the weight of past bring me down. I need uplifting.
But that’s the joy of the Wall’s story. It does have a happy ending.

Well into the 1980s, change looked unlikely. Honecker famously claimed the Wall would stand for at least another 100 years but, as the decade wore on, his grip on the GDR loosened, even if people were still dying as they tried to escape. Following the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as the USSR’s leader in 1985, Soviet financial support for the Eastern Bloc dried up. And without the might of the Soviet Union backing Honecker’s government, the restless knew that public protests might be less dangerous than before. The winds of change were blowing in Berlin’s direction.