Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie was the crossing point between the American and Soviet sectors of divided Berlin, and the one that foreign visitors, diplomats and Allied personnel were required to use. In October 1961, American and Soviet tanks stood muzzle to muzzle here for several days, the closest the Cold War came to shooting in Berlin. The name comes from the NATO phonetic alphabet: it was simply the third Allied checkpoint, after Alpha and Bravo.

Be clear about what you are looking at today. The guard house is a replica, the surroundings are commercial, and the men in uniform posing for photos have nothing to do with the historical site. The substance is in the exhibits: the Mauermuseum next door tells the escape stories in detail, and the open-air panels along the sidewalk lay out the timeline for free.

If you want the real thing rather than the replica, ride a few stops north to the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße, where an original section of the border strip, watchtower and all, has been preserved with the death strip intact. Many visitors do both in one afternoon.

The site is central in Mitte, on Friedrichstraße at the corner of Zimmerstraße. Kochstraße/Checkpoint Charlie station on the U6 subway line is a few steps away, and Gendarmenmarkt and Unter den Linden are both about a 10-minute walk north.