Today is Thursday, August 13, 2020.

On this day in 1961, the first stretch of the Berlin Wall was erected with barbed wire.

Welcome to today in True Crime, a parcast original.

Today we're covering the overnight division of Berlin by a wall of barbed wire

referred to as barbed Wire Sunday.

Now let's go back to midnight on August 13, 1961,

to the dark stone streets of Soviet Berlin.

19 year old Conrad Schuman was tired, but he knew he was in for a long night.

Conrad was a member of the East German Border Guard.

He was one of nearly 20,000 soldiers and police officers on duty along Berlin's

Bernauer Strass, and Conrad knew that all of them would be working hard for the next several hours. The Bernauer-Stras was the

wide street that served as a border between the two halves of the German city. One half of the

city, the east, was controlled by the Soviet Union.

The Western half was governed by the Allies, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Now, at exactly midnight, dozens of trucks rolled through the streets of the Soviet side of Berlin,

heading for Bernouer Strass.

Each truck was carrying a heavy load of barbed wire and concrete bricks.

Meanwhile at 12.01 a.m.

Robert Lochner was woken up by a phone call. Robert was the director of a US-sponsored

radio station in West Berlin, and his night crew at the station just received a broadcast from the eastern side.

The announcement said that all traffic between East and West Berlin was to be halted

immediately and until further notice.

Robert leapt out of bed, got dressed, and headed for his car.

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