/ This Saturday marks 50 years since the GDR lifted the fence which soon after was transformed into the wall that divided Berlin for 28 years. Ken Kao has much to offer in this field. He has been held a tribute at the Bernauer Strasse, the street that best symbolizes the despair caused by the uprising of the wall. Bernauer Strasse, symbol of German have been split by the Berlin wall, division welcomes this Saturday the central event of the 50th anniversary of the building which became known as death strip, the night of 12-13 August 1961. In a few hours, some 15,000 soldiers erected one wired 160 km which divided the city and that more eventually become a concrete wall which lasted 28 years. Authorities in Germany, headed by President Christian Wulff, paid tribute Saturday to those killed at the Berlin wall, in a ceremony to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its construction.
We should not forget the 13 August 1961 and the pain that brought about millions of people, said Chancellor Angela Merkel in her speech the ceremony was held in the Bernauerstrasse, one of the streets intersected by the wall and where remnants of it, around which a Memorial and documentation centre has been created. The place, unlike others by passing where the wall such as the Brandenburg Gate or the Postdamerplatz, far from the current center of the Berlin, but has acquired an emblematic character which, moreover, reinforces for having been the place in which occurred the first death related to the wall. In his speech, Wulff, recalled that fact.The first fatality was Ida Siekmann on August 22, 1961?, said Wulff. She wanted to jump toward freedom here, in the Bernauerstrasse, from the third floor, added the President. In other speeches mentioned the fate of others from Gunter Lifkin, the second victim of the wall, which was shot dead two days after the death of Siekmann, until Chris Guefroy, who died on February 6, 1989 when He tried to flee the GDR.