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Founder of Berlin Wall Museum Dies
OT - but the man kept the lamp of freedom burning in the bad times and left a legacy for generations.
Rainer Hildebrandt, who founded a Berlin Wall museum at the Checkpoint Charlie crossing that attracts thousands of tourists each year, has died. He was 89. Hildebrandt died on Jan. 9 at his Berlin home after a long illness, according to the museum.
The world loses one of the good guys...
Born on Dec. 14, 1914, in Stuttgart, Hildebrandt moved to Berlin in the early 1940s to study psychology. He befriended and was profoundly influenced by one of his professors, Albrecht Haushofer, an anti-Nazi activist who was shot by the SS near the end of World War II. Following the war, during which Hildebrandt was imprisoned for political reasons, he founded the "Fighting Group against Inhumanity" that searched for missing prisoners of war and opposed the regime in the Soviet sector of divided Berlin. After communist East Germany built the Berlin Wall in 1961 to keep its citizens from fleeing to the West, Hildebrandt started an exhibit depicting shootings along the concrete boundary. By 1963 the museum, which documents East Germans’ escapes to the West and memorializes those who were killed trying, found a permanent home at Checkpoint Charlie, the most famous Cold War crossing point from West Berlin to the communist east. It remains there today, 14 years after the Wall fell. According to his last wishes, Hildebrandt was to be buried in a Berlin cemetery near Haushofer, the museum said. Survivors include his wife, Alexandra.
The museum was on the street just before you got to Checkpoint Charlie, and it was a pretty moving place to go. It was also right next to the wall. It fully documented the inhumanity of the wall and the regime that built it. The museum and its contents were carefully ignored by the asshats of the time...

Posted by: Super Hose 2004-01-12
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=24211