Posted on 06/28/2005 1:31:26 PM PDT by minus_273
BERLIN, Germany (AP) -- The museum at the former Allied Checkpoint Charlie, a front-line outpost of the Cold War, is stepping up its campaign to raise funds to save a memorial to people killed trying to escape communist East Germany, the director said Tuesday.
The privately run museum has until July 5 to raise €36 million ($43 million) to purchase the land where it erected the memorial in October -- a rebuilt section of the Berlin Wall and crosses representing the 1,067 people the museum says were killed at the border from 1961 to 1989.
The museum had been leasing the land, but its agreement expired at the end of 2004, and a court ordered the memorial removed.
Director Alexandra Hildebrandt, whose late husband Rainer founded the popular museum in 1963, said the museum was now appealing to private and corporate donors to step in and help, while also pressing the bank that owns the land to give them more time.
"We don't want to look back at the past, what we want to do is concentrate on the future, which is right now," she said at a news conference. "And the question here is how can we save Checkpoint Charlie."
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
When I first heard this on the radio the other night I was outraged. The President should have brought this up with Schroeder yesterday. The communist-socialist government of Berlin wants to erase the history of the wall. Communism bad? Never! Quite sad for a country dotted by many monuments reading "Nie Wieder". I suppose they'll be taking down Dachau too? No? And doing it on the morning of the Fourth of July is just a bonus poke-in-the-eye to us.
Why don't we just move it down to the mexican border and use it in the wall folks want to build down there ?
Checkpoint Charlie. Went through that once just to see what the deal was. The most entertaining was taking the subway into East Berlin.
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