What Was Checkpoint Charlie? – Mythbusting Berlin

“I can understand the Chinese Wall: it was built as a defense against marauders. But a wall such as that in Berlin, built to prevent people from seeking freedom, is almost beyond comprehension.”
Robert Kennedy

As the victorious Allies convened at the jaunty palace of Cecilienhof in July and August 1945, their agenda extended beyond the division and occupation of defeated Germany to the broader reordering of the European continent—and, with it, the shaping of a new world order. The Prussian city of Potsdam, with its plush gardens and resplendent royal residences, became the alternative meeting place just south-west of Berlin—the originally intended venue having been too ravaged by war to serve its purpose—for the final wartime gathering of the Big Three powers.

Beyond the major points discussed and agreed upon, there were numerous seemingly minor decisions that would, in fact, come to define the increasingly fraught relationship between the British-French-American West and the Soviet East in the decades of Cold War confrontation that followed.

The solidification of these opposing blocs into two rival German states would take another four years, but the cracks in their relationship were already visible, threatening to widen into tectonic shifts. To anyone even remotely familiar with the fundamentally opposed political systems of the ‘individualist’ West and the ‘collectivist’ East, it would have seemed self-evident that any pretense of friendship was bound to collapse into antagonism.

More than mere pragmatic negotiations, the agreements reached in Potsdam were the early outlines of ideological battle lines.

At the conference’s conclusion, US President Harry Truman proposed a follow-up meeting in Washington, D.C.—one that would never materialise. Hands were shaken, photos taken, and celebratory drinks poured.

Yet, for the time being, the pretense of cooperation, born of a shared struggle against a common enemy, had to be maintained.

In that spirit, one of the lesser-known agreements at Potsdam—seemingly absurd under the circumstances—would come to play a significant role in shaping Cold War relations: the guarantee of freedom of movement for all Allied personnel.