I saw newly wedded couples in all their finery waving to parents on the other side … the other side of the fence which had stopped these parents coming to the wedding.  I remember a young woman holding up a newborn infant so that an elderly couple on the other side could get a first glimpse of their grandchild…. scenes to make one weep. Later we wept far more, but that was after the East German Volkspolizei tossed tear gas canisters into our chanting Western crowd.

There were people who, for ideological reasons, dug secret tunnels to help escapers. They were soon followed by profiteers who smuggled out people for money.

But by far the greatest number of beneficiaries from that fence were not human beings at all but — wait for it — rabbits … thousands of rabbits. One saw their warrens all around the border area and in the nearby Tiergarten park.

    Now, decades later, the prime ministers of Germany have their offices on the very site which – I recall – was once monopolised by rabbits.

At what was then a tense Cold War frontier, nobody dared shoot at them.  Who could be certain that it might not trigger a world war?

Could the rabbits not have been poisoned? I asked a duty policeman. No, he told me, poison would have endangered children and pet dogs. So the rabbits continued to breed in great numbers – or, as they say -“like rabbits!”