The border could be crossed legally only through a limited number of air, road, rail and river routes. Travellers to and from Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Czechoslovakia could also pass through East Germany. Access rights for non-Germans were otherwise very restricted. Foreigners had to submit an itinerary to the East German state tourist office up to nine weeks in advance, paying booking fees and registering with the local police on arrival, purchasing fuel only from specially approved petrol stations and spending a prescribed minimum of money each day. They were required to stay in state-owned "Interhotels" where rooms cost five to ten times more than in the (very few) ordinary East German hotels. Not surprisingly, East Germany did not develop much of a tourist industry; even as late as M
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| - Crossing the inner German border
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| - The border could be crossed legally only through a limited number of air, road, rail and river routes. Travellers to and from Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Czechoslovakia could also pass through East Germany. Access rights for non-Germans were otherwise very restricted. Foreigners had to submit an itinerary to the East German state tourist office up to nine weeks in advance, paying booking fees and registering with the local police on arrival, purchasing fuel only from specially approved petrol stations and spending a prescribed minimum of money each day. They were required to stay in state-owned "Interhotels" where rooms cost five to ten times more than in the (very few) ordinary East German hotels. Not surprisingly, East Germany did not develop much of a tourist industry; even as late as M
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Caption
| - The West German border crossing facility at Herleshausen in 1985, looking west along Bundesautobahn 4
- Vehicles queuing at the East German passport control at the Marienborn border crossing point, 1989
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Alt
| - View of two lines of vehicles passing between two buildings, with four passport control booths visible, under a corrugated metal roof. A long line of vehicles stretches into the distance below towers ringed with searchlights.
- Aerial view of a four-lane motorway crossing green fields, with a small village with a church spire in the distance to the left of the motorway. In the foreground, there is a white roof structure, resting on slim white pillars, across all four lanes of the motorway; to the left, the roof also extends over a slip lane which branches off from the main road and then rejoins it; on the right, just before the roof structure, there is a parking lot with diagonally parked orange and brown lorries.
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Image
| - Grenzübergangsstelle Marienborn 1 .jpg
- Herleshausen border crossing.jpg
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abstract
| - The border could be crossed legally only through a limited number of air, road, rail and river routes. Travellers to and from Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Czechoslovakia could also pass through East Germany. Access rights for non-Germans were otherwise very restricted. Foreigners had to submit an itinerary to the East German state tourist office up to nine weeks in advance, paying booking fees and registering with the local police on arrival, purchasing fuel only from specially approved petrol stations and spending a prescribed minimum of money each day. They were required to stay in state-owned "Interhotels" where rooms cost five to ten times more than in the (very few) ordinary East German hotels. Not surprisingly, East Germany did not develop much of a tourist industry; even as late as May 1990, there were only 45,000 hotel beds in the entire country. Westerners found crossing the inner German border to be a somewhat disturbing experience. Jan Morris wrote: Each of the different means of crossing the border had its own complications. Only aircraft of the three Western Allies were allowed to fly to or from West Berlin; civilian traffic was principally served by Air France, British European Airways (later British Airways) and Pan Am. River traffic was hugely important to the survival of West Berlin, conveying around five million tons of cargo a year to the city, but was subjected to numerous inspections and petty restrictions by the East German authorities. Rail traffic was excruciatingly slow; locomotives and train crews had to be changed at the border, the East German Transport Police (Trapos) carried out inspections using sniffer dogs to uncover stowaways, passports and visas had to be processed at border stations and the condition of the track was so poor that trains were limited to a maximum speed of . Road crossings were fairly straightforward but slow because of the extensive border formalities and inspections. Drivers were required to stay on designated transit routes across East Germany.
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