The workers used the early morning darkness to obscure their secretive task: removing pieces of the longest-remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall.
When the wall fell in 1989, Berlin's residents were eager to clear away the hated divider as quickly as they could. Now many of the people who fought to scrub it from the map are scrambling to preserve what remains. Recently, they came up against a developer determined to build on his property, situated in the former no-man's land between East and West Berlin.
The conflict comes as Germany re-evaluates its relationship to a communist era it once could not wait to forget. Berlin's streets are scattered with memorials to Nazi-era atrocities.