'Witnesses of history': the man who kept slabs of the Berlin Wall
Hans Martin Fleischer bought the sections on impulse in 1990. His luck trying to sell them ran out, so he held on.
“The Berlin Wall was lifted – it did not fall,” insists Hans Martin Fleischer. The bureaucrat produces photographs and film footage shot on hand-held camera on 12 November 1989 – three days after the East German border was first breached. They show the first segments of the concrete barrier that had encircled West Berlin for 28 years being removed at night, amid a sea of camera flashes and applause.
Sparks fly as a worker in a hard hat uses an angle grinder to slice a huge slab emblazoned with a red swastika from one bearing an interlocking hammer and sickle – graffiti painted on the western side in protest at the 1939 non-aggression pact between the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, which
