Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's history. I'm standing on the south shore of the city of Venice. I'm looking out the sun is setting south-western, turning the sky crimson over a series of churches, cathedrals, basilica that I cannot pronounce and will embarrass myself I attempt to do so.

My first foreign trips in its Covid, so I decided to come to a place where there's a great concentration of history almost anywhere else in the world. You'll be hearing more about it on the pod, on the TV channel over the next few weeks and months.

But in the meantime, I've got a podcast now that's nothing whatsoever to do with Venice. It's about the Berlin Mall all this year we've been talking about the anniversary of the Berlin Mall going up. We've been looking at people trying to get under it. We've been looking at wars that were about to be fought over it.

And now we're going to talk to Ian McGregor, author of Checkpoint Charlie, talking about the most dangerous place on earth. He's going to be telling us about the Berlin Mall. What it was like for Berlin is what it was like for the rest of the world as they watched this extraordinary place.

The membrane between East and West. If you want to know the other podcasts about the Berlin Mall, the Cold War, please get a history hit TV. It's a digital history channel. It's where we've got all of our documentaries, all of our podcasts.

It's all kicking off. We got tens of thousands of people watching stuff now. We're watching the Trafalgar content from last week. I'm very proud of that documentary made on Nelson's Navy. So I'm glad everyone's enjoying that.

Lots of people also watching the North of England starting with William the Conqueror harrowing the North. That's doing very, very well in our charts as well. So congratulations to the team behind that.

But for the moment, before you go to history hit dot TV and subscribe, get 30 days free. If you subscribe today, all you will do is listen to this brilliant pod. Here's Ian McGregor. Enjoy.

Ian, thanks very much. Come on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

Well, let's start with checkpoint Charlie. People, my older, it was one of the great touch points of culture and history and politics of the second half of the 20th century. What was checkpoint Charlie?

It was the designated official crossing point that the Allies agreed with the Soviets. I suppose these Germans too. After the first barriers of the Berlin Wall had gone up after August 13th.

So they'd always been an open crossing point as they had been. There was over 80 of them throughout the city before the barriers went up. Once the barrier had gone up, there had to be a crossing point that the Allies would still have their rights of access into East Berlin.

And it's just phonetically it was checkpoint Charlie because checkpoint alpha was the crossing point that got you from West Germany through into East Germany. Then either by train or on the Autobahn, you'd be going into the hinterland of West Berlin and the Allied sectors.

That crossing point was checkpoint Bravo. And then the final crossing point would be checkpoint Charlie, which would take you from free each tracer across into East Berlin. If you were in the Allied military garrison or you were an international diplomat.

Yes, I mean, he also had to cross just those people. I mean, I think my dad could have been journalist at the time. We probably would have been allowed in that way. Would you with other roots?

The media were I'm just talking about those first few weeks after August 13th, once the wall had gone up and then it became much more fluid. And that was basically the international crossing point. So there would be another over 10 crossing points that would be allowed through the center of Berlin.

Each of them had different rules and accesses depending on who you were, whether you were a West German that come into West Berlin and wanted to go and visit into East Berlin, whether you were West Berlin, who was going into East Berlin and so forth. There were different crossing points that allowed you access depending on who you were.

And the weird thing about it wasn't the East German side was you were immediately straight into the communist government HQ kind of sector of the city. The West Berlin side was all kind of cool and counter cultural right. So it was mad going from one to the other.

It depending which side you were coming from. So if you were going from the West into the East, I wish I'd done it beforehand, but I only did it once the wall had come down. Yeah, you're going into a very, very drag dilapidated.

East and half of Berlin, obviously the East Germans and the Soviets to degree and restructured various aspects of the city to showcase.

The new government of the new people that were in charge and that developed obviously over the years once the Berlin Wall had gone up, but if you coming from the East going into the West, it'd be like going to Disneyland to a degree if you are used to lack of consumer goods, lack of what to wear, what to eat, etc.

Bright lights, big city, literally was that and obviously it was a very exciting city on the West and side because it was an international garrison.

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