Video: The Berlin Wall Comes Down

"Twenty years ago, on November 9, 1989, the most visible symbol of totalitarian evil, the Berlin Wall, tumbled down. Two years later, the Soviet Union officially dissolved on Christmas Day 1991. The fall of the Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union transpired in relative calm, but they followed decades of repression, cruelty, and murder by the Soviet regime."

Remembering the victims of Communism:


Fechter was 18 years old, an East Berlin bricklayer who was desperate to join his sister in the West. With another teen-ager, he made his dash through a deserted lumberyard that faced a relatively low stretch of the wall. The friend made it across the no-man's-land and over the barbed wire. Fechter wasn't so lucky.

Two submachine guns fired. Fechter fell to the ground, bleeding from the bullet wounds in his back. He lay at the foot of the wall for nearly an hour, in full view of the East German border guards -- and of the horrified West Berliners on the other side. "Helft mir doch," he kept crying. But no one helped him, and he slowly bled to death.

Schandmauer. A kid murdered for wanting to live in freedom -- murdered not by accident but as a matter of policy, and not the first it had happened to, not the second, not the 10th, but the 50th in a single year -- this was the hideous shame of the Berlin Wall and of the savage ideology it epitomized. This was communism reduced to its essence: Accept slavery, or die.

by Mary Katharine Ham