A dozen striking photos show how the Berlin Wall actually fell in 1989

Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the barrier that divided West Berlin from East, and enclosed the West from the rest of East Germany.

From 1961 to 1989, the iconic wall stood and symbolized the height of Cold War tensions.

Built by East German officials allied with Soviets, the wall aimed to stop those in East Germany from going to the West and came to represent the ideological differences between the Eastern Bloc and western countries at the time.

People who tried to flee from the East after the wall went up faced brutal punishment. However, beginning in the late 1980s, then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev relaxed tensions, and his openness eventually led East Germany to allow Czechs, Poles and others to immigrate to the West through its territory in September 1989.