Berlin Wall memorial to be razed.

You probably won't see this anywhere other than The Washington Times.

A privately built memorial to the victims of the Berlin Wall is to be bulldozed on July 4, when a lease on the property near the former Checkpoint Charlie runs out, angering backers of the project and conservative politicians.

But the Socialist-led city government in Berlin has said that it is content to see the memorial taken down and there has been no move to prevent it from the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who is in Washington today seeking support for a permanent German seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Alexandra Hildebrandt, director of the private Checkpoint Charlie Museum, said a demolition crew has been scheduled to arrive at the site of Checkpoint Charlie at 4 a.m. next Monday to remove the memorial, made up of 1,067 crosses representing people killed trying to escape from East Berlin.

I wonder if all those crosses have something to do with it.

Checkpoint Charlie was the main crossing point between East Berlin and the American sector of the divided city during the Cold War. The museum, built on the site, has exhibits on the varied means used by East Germans to escape across the wall.

The monument, privately financed by the Checkpoint Charlie Museum on an adjacent site, has proven extremely popular with visitors to the city, attracting thousands of people per week. But it has never been popular with the city's political establishment, which is dominated by a coalition of the former Communist Party (PDS) and the Social Democratic Party.

Good guy:

"Nowhere else in the once-divided German capital can tourists and visitors experience better the brutality of the former communist regime," said Frank Henkel, secretary-general of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in Berlin.

"The spot around Checkpoint Charlie is important for the remembrance of the history of Berlin, as well as of Germany as a whole. We must remain able to show history in a way that it can be experienced. This memorial does exactly that," Mr. Henkel said.

Bad guy:

But PDS member Thomas Flierl, senator for culture in the Berlin government, has called the project the "wrong memorial at the wrong site."