Berlin Wall pieces on military bases and in military museums

Most of the Wall left Berlin by sale or by diplomatic gift. The pieces here came by a third route, through the forces that had stood on the other side of it. In 1990 the commander of US Forces in West Berlin arranged for three segments to go to the Patton Museum at Fort Knox. The Royal Engineers, whose 38 Squadron dismantled the stretch along the British sector, were given three in thanks when the corps left the city in 1994 and show them at Gillingham beside a V2 rocket and a Harrier; the RAF was handed one at its Berlin airfield before the garrison withdrew, and it is now built into a reconstructed border scene at Cosford. The Air Force museum at Dayton neither bought nor was given its first four segments: it exchanged two transport aircraft of the Berlin airlift type for them and flew the sixteen tonnes to Ohio in a chartered Starlifter.

Where the forces chose to put them is the second half of the story. At Fort Leavenworth three sections are set at angles to read as crumbling, falling and standing, the only installation in the atlas that stages the collapse. At Langelandsfort in Denmark and the Musée des Blindés at Saumur the segment stands among submarines, MiGs and tanks, read as equipment rather than as a civic symbol. At SHAPE a fragment stands outside the former Live Oak building, where a tripartite staff spent thirty years planning what the West would do if access to Berlin were cut. And the Bundeswehr's own command in the United States, at Reston, keeps a segment the Luftwaffe flew over in 1991 that faces both ways: a daily warning for the staff inside, and for American visitors a piece of history many of them helped to shape. Several of these sites are active installations, and the record says where the public is not admitted.