The border between East and West Berlin is opened and daily half a million people cross the border from one part of the city into the other. Many East Berliners go into the cinema or discos in the West, they even work in the West or they go shopping in the West.
Women get the first seamless panty hoses in the West, tropical fruits are only available there.
In the afternoon of August 12 at 4 p.m. Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, signed the commands to close the border. The wall is built and separates the city into two parts for more than 28 years. Nothing is forgotten and the East Germans will not be allowed to travel to the West until 1989. A press conference is held where the SED government announced that travel restrictions for East Germans had been lifted. In that night people from East Berlin flooded into the western part of the city and hundreds of thousands celebrated throughout the city.