The record
Where the border ran through the river: the whole width of the Spree was East Berlin, secured with patrol boats and nail-studded underwater mats.
South-west of the Ostbahnhof the border crossed the Spree, and water was the hardest thing the border troops had to close. At the Spree, the Spandau ship canal and the Flutgraben the strip was made especially wide and given extra barriers, patrol boats, and mats of steel studded with nails laid under the surface.
Between the Schillingbrücke and the Osthafen the entire width of the river was East Berlin territory. The hinterland wall ran along the Friedrichshain bank — that run is now the East Side Gallery, which is why the most photographed wall in the world is the inner one — while on the Kreuzberg side the sector boundary needed no wall at all, because the water did the work.
About eighty metres of that hinterland wall survive on the corner plot between Stralauer Platz and An der Schillingbrücke, listed in 2001. A second, shorter piece stands on the southern bank west of the bridge, behind the Verdi headquarters: roughly eighteen metres, protected since 2005, which had the specific job of screening the border patrol boats' moorings from view.
South of the river the Wall took over the strip of green along the old Luisenstädtischer Kanal between Mitte and Kreuzberg as far as the Engelbecken. The canal, laid out in the mid-nineteenth century by Peter Joseph Lenné, was filled in in 1926 after it became polluted, and the parks director Erwin Barth made a garden of the bed. The border strip buried it in 1961; the design has been restored since reunification.
How did it get here?
In place. The eighty-metre section at Stralauer Platz was listed in 2001, the eighteen-metre section behind the Verdi building in 2005.
Sources & verification
An der Schillingbrücke — Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Wall monuments ↗
The border crossing the Spree south-west of the Ostbahnhof, the wide strips, patrol boats and nail-encrusted underwater mats used at waterways, the whole width of the Spree between Schillingbrücke and Osthafen being East Berlin territory, the hinterland wall on the Friedrichshain bank now known as the East Side Gallery and the unwalled Kreuzberg bank, the roughly eighty metres listed in 2001 at Stralauer Platz, the eighteen-metre section behind the Verdi headquarters listed in 2005 and its purpose of screening the patrol boat moorings, and the history of the Luisenstädtischer Kanal green strip.
Source accessed 2026-09-17
Last verified: Not yet verified
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