During the 28 years of separation, there were thousands of attempts to cross the Berlin Wall. Many didn't succeed due to the design of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was almost 12 feet tall (11 feet 10 inches to be exact). Being more than 87 miles long, the Berlin Wall inevitably separated West Berlin and East Berlin. With a wire fence, a concrete wall, and a border wall, the Berlin Wall was near impenetrable. Especially with the infamous "Death Strip." The Death Strip was 110 yards long, as a result of a second parallel wall being built in 1962. The Death Strip was a small strip of road between the walls where many people who attempted to cross were sadly killed. The strip took about 136 lives, however 5,000 successfully passed from East Berlin to West Berlin, mainly in the early days of the wall's existence. Those who crossed evidently lived in East Berlin after the Berlin Wall was erected. Some of these people would stop at nothing to cross. A couple of ways people got over the wall, were very creative. According to http://mentalfloss.com/, in early 1963, a German Acrobat named Horst Klein put his acrobatic skills to use and used a high-tension cable cord that stretched over the whole wall. Klein was 60 feet above guards and fell gracefully on the other side of the wall. Klein escaped and landed in West Berlin. Another story of a person getting over was Conrad Schumann. On August 15th, 1961, three days into construction, Schumann was a guard for the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall, at the time, was just a bunch of barbed wire. Schumann jumped over the barbed wires with his Machine Gun. A photographer caught Schumann jumping over the wires. The photo below became iconic for the Cold War, the photo is known as, "The Jump To Freedom."
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