Google celebrates 25th anniversary of fall of Berlin Wall with video doodle

November 9, 2014 marks 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Google has commemorated the occasion with a video doodle.

The video shows poignant scenes of West Berliners uniting with those from East Germany after bringing down sections of the Wall on November 9, 1989, nearly 30 years after the wall first went up. The video also shows sections of the Wall in various parts of the world today, including Berlin, London, Seoul, Cape Town, Madrid, the Island of Langeland, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Ein Hod, Mountain View, Strasbourg, Kiev, Sofia, Washington DC, Brussels, and New York.

The Berlin Wall was constructed almost overnight on August 31, 1961 - almost 15 years after the Cold War began - to encircle and separate West Berlin from the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany). It was intended as a barrier to prevent people from communist East Berlin and the Soviet sector from defecting and going over to West Berlin. 

The Berlin Wall was over 140 km long and actually comprised two concrete barriers separated by a 160-yard "death strip" that was reinforced by watch towers, trenches, barbed wire, watch dogs, flood lights and trenches. The western side of the Berlin wall was covered in graffiti, but the East side remained bare.

With East Berlin the de facto capital of East Germany, the wall came to symbolise the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, which would divide the Western world from Soviet Russia and eastern Europe for the next three decades.