Bailiffs and workers arrived at dawn to take down the memorial erected by owners of the nearby Checkpoint Charlie museum. The owners had refused to remove it after their lease on the land expired in December.
"Where are the Berliners?" asked 59-year-old resident Wilfried Gordan, among the scattered crowd that watched in the rain as a crane prepared to move a slab of the notorious barrier. "It's such a disgrace. There should be 100,000 people out here in protest today."
"Today, they have shot the dead a second time," added Berlin's Burkhardt Sach, 52. "It's a joke, and it stinks."
Museum owners built the memorial in October, using original sections to reconstruct a stretch of wall next to 1,065 crosses -- their tally of those who died at communist East Germany's fortified border.
They had leased the land from the Hamm-based BAG Bank, which sued to have it vacated after the lease expired. The museum failed to come up with the necessary $43 million to purchase the plot.
As work started Tuesday, museum director Alexandra Hildebrandt confronted a group of police: "Do you really want to defend this process?" she asked to no reply.
Workers in yellow raincoats unscrewed the crosses from their pedestals before carrying them away one by one. The crane hauled away the pieces of wall, which the museum had brought out of storage for the memorial.
Several hundred protesters jeered and whistled as the work began. Four men briefly chained themselves to crosses but unchained themselves after police spoke to them.
"It's too late now for a solution," Hildebrandt said.
The checkpoint was established by the US Army in 1961 after East Germany closed its border and later that year was the scene of a dramatic face-off between US and Soviet tanks.
It became the main crossing where foreign tourists, diplomats and military personnel entered and left the Soviet sector of the divided city, with multilingual signs warning:
The memorial lay in what is now a high-rent shopping district. The adjacent Checkpoint Charlie museum -- established in 1963 on the West German side of the border and Berlin's second-busiest with 700,000 visitors last year -- is not in jeopardy.
Hildebrandt's memorial had drawn a mixed response in Berlin. The wall remnants used did not originally stand at the site, and the monument did not recreate how Checkpoint Charlie looked before the wall fell in 1989.
Mark Sadler, a 36-year-old Scottish artist living in Berlin, questioned whether crosses were an appropriate commemoration of the various victims of communist-era repression.
"It's a little theatrical," he said, watching the crosses being removed. "As a gesture it's appropriate, but it's temporary -- for me it's always felt very subjective, and a subjective memorial is a contradiction in terms."
A few sections of the Berlin Wall still stand in their original locations as reminders of the barrier, which snaked around the 103-mile perimeter of West Berlin, with about 27 miles running through the center of the city.
An official memorial to the victims, which includes a piece of the wall, opened in 1998 on Bernauer Strasse, a residential street that was the scene of spectacular East German escape attempts.
Hildebrandt, however, maintains that the wall should be remembered at Checkpoint Charlie and rules out re-erecting the memorial elsewhere. She said she would continue trying to buy the site and will keep the crosses in storage.
By afternoon, half the field of crosses had been removed and a bulldozer was obliterating all traces of its presence.
"It's a real shame that for those more than 1,000 victims there will no longer be any central memorial," said Wolfdietrich Peiker, 20, a Humboldt University student whose parents fled East Germany.
"When someone sees those crosses in front of a wall, one understands immediately what it means."
American Reuben Doetsch, visiting from Chicago with his high-school German class, said it was "sad for Berlin."
"It's part of the city and the history," the 15-year-old said. "I think it takes away the spirit of the wall."
