Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me

Max Pearson history as told by the people who were there. Today a special edition to mark 60 years since the

Berlin Wall split the city between capitalist West and Communist East. We'll hear from Berliners on both sides, including the West Germans, who helped people escape across the wall.

I was a genuinely idealistic student, I never wanted to be paid.

It was mainly the wish truly to help.

We'll be inside one of East Germany's most notorious prisons and one of the country's most

popular singers remembers becoming an enemy of the state.

I had six Stasi operatives tailing me day and night for 12 years and young people in the

GDR who sang my songs were locked up.

That's all coming up, but let's begin with the construction of the wall itself.

Simon Watts is here and you've been looking at the events of August 1961 Simon.

Yes, that's right Max.

This was one of those programs where I had the absolute pleasure of going back through the BBC

archive to see how our reporters cover one of the great events in history and when the Berlin Wall was being

built we literally had a correspondent of the refugee camp seeing East Germans fleeing

desperately across the border we had correspondence that went into East Berlin to see what were going on there.

And some of their really gripping coverage is in my report.

And I've also included a West Berliner and an East Berliner who featured in a previous edition of Witness History to give a really

rounded picture of that dramatic day in Berlin in August 60 years ago.

East Berliners were awakened early this morning by heavy army lorries roaring through the

streets and by the sirens of police cars. This was their first indication of the fact that the

East German authorities had decided to seal off West Berlin, from East Berlin and

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