"Шпионский мост" "Spy Bridge"

Rating 9110

The metal Glienicke Bridge (Glienicker Br? cke) across the Havel River in Potsdam appeared to replace the wooden one in 1907. In 1945, it was destroyed by German troops retreating under the onslaught of the Red Army. After the war, the bridge was restored and ended up on the border of the GDR and three parts of the German capital, which the USSR transferred to its allies in the anti-Hitler coalition, from which West Berlin was later formed. There were exchanges of intelligence officers and dissidents discovered and convicted on different sides of the border, for which the bridge received the name "spy" in the media. The first exchange took place in 1962, when they exchanged the Soviet intelligence officer Abel, issued by a traitor, for the pilot of the American Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft shot down over the Urals, Powers - my relative and boyish playmate observed this salute during the May Day demonstration in Sverdlovsk.
Powers was obliged, in case of failure, to take poison from a special ampoule, but he had the sense not to carry out this inhuman order. Soon the then US President Kennedy (JFK) banned further flights of reconnaissance aircraft over the USSR.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and in 1990 the GDR and West Berlin were annexed to the FRG, Potsdam became the capital of Brandenburg as part of a single German state. It soon turned out that the process of revising post-war borders in Europe, which started with this joyful event, was easier to start than to finish!