Why is it called Checkpoint Charlie?

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie was never named after a person. Charlie is simply the letter C in the phonetic alphabet radio operators use to spell, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. West Berlin lay deep inside East Germany, and travelers coming by road from the West drove a transit autobahn about 170 km long. The Western Allies lettered their checkpoints in order:

1. Alpha, at Helmstedt, where the autobahn left West Germany.
2. Bravo, at Dreilinden, where it entered West Berlin.
3. Charlie, on Friedrichstraße, in the middle of the city, where the American sector met the Soviet one.

Charlie was the crossing for Allied soldiers, diplomats and other foreigners; West Berliners and West Germans used other crossings. On the American side there was only a small hut in the middle of the street and a sign warning, in English, Russian, French and German, that you were leaving the American sector. The modest booth suited the Western position that this was a line between sectors, not a border between states. In June 1963 Kennedy climbed a platform there to look east, on the day he spoke four famous words of German.

A passport and a principle

The name became world news in October 1961, ten weeks after the Wall went up. On the evening of Sunday, October 22, East German police stopped a car with American plates at Friedrichstraße. In it were Allan Lightner, the senior American diplomat in West Berlin, and his wife, on their way to the theater in the East. The police asked for his passport, and he refused.

Under the four-power agreements of 1945, American officials could move through every sector of Berlin, and only Soviet officers could check them. Showing papers to East German police would have treated East Germany as a state, which Washington would not do. East Germany replied that it was simply checking travelers at its own border, in its own capital. Kennedy’s envoy in the city, General Lucius Clay, the man who had ordered the Berlin Airlift in 1948, had armed soldiers walk Lightner’s car through, then sent more escorted cars, then tanks. Kennedy had set the line in July:

We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force.

Tanks a hundred yards apart

Late in the afternoon of Friday, October 27, ten Soviet tanks rolled up Friedrichstraße and stopped facing the American tanks across the line, about 90 meters (a hundred yards) apart. By midnight thirty Soviet tanks stood nearby. Soviet commanders concluded, wrongly, that the Americans meant to break through the new border. All night Berliners watched from their windows.

At 10:30 the next morning the Soviet tanks started their engines and pulled back; about half an hour later the American tanks followed. How the retreat was arranged is still argued: Khrushchev later wrote that he moved first to let the Americans save face, while Robert Kennedy said he had asked for it through a secret channel. No document settles it. A year later, the same two powers faced off again, this time over Cuba.

Where the booth is today

Checkpoint Charlie stayed in use until 1990. On June 22, 1990, during the negotiations on German unity, the last American booth was lifted away by crane. It stands today in the Allied Museum (AlliiertenMuseum) on Clayallee, the avenue West Berlin named for General Clay. The booth on Friedrichstraße now is a replica, a few steps from a private museum about escapes that has stood beside the crossing since the 1960s.