This is a taste of the lifestyle in Communist East Germany.
Team Blue Bears prepares for a ride with Trabis through Berlin.
Trabis were the most popular among a handful of car models you could buy in East Germany.
They are the opposite of what is today known as quality German car engineering.
Buyers had to be on a waiting list for ten to thirteen years
as the communist economy failed to meet demand.
Nowadays, Trabis are a tourist attraction and are being used for so-called city safaris.

But real safaris were once a distant dream for those living under communist rule.
Because East Germans were trapped.

The Berlin wall—it separated East and West Berlin in the Cold War.
A giant concrete barrier bordered by what was known as the death strip,
a zone with barbed wire, patrolled day and night by East German border guards.

Most of it has been torn down,
but some parts of it were left standing in Berlin.

A concrete reminder of a brutal regime that would shoot its own citizens
if they tried to escape to a different life in West Germany.

The wall was deadly - over 136 people died trying to cross it.
and team Yellow Submarine is on its way to meet someone
who risked his life crossing the death strip.

Meanwhile, Team Blue Bears has received its new scavenger hunt task:
Scout out an event at former Tempelhof Airport in the heart of Berlin.

Tempelhof airport played a big role in German history
It served to save Berlin when the Cold War started.
What the team doesn’t know yet:
they will be official guests at a high security international ceremony
celebrating the end of the airlift.
And they will meet an American hero who rose to fame
through his actions during the Berlin Blockade.
In 1948 the Soviet Union started to block access to West Berlin.
Not letting in any supplies, it tried to starve the city into submission
and force the West to give up the West Berlin territory.

The Berlin airlift, led by the US Air Force
flew supplies into the city for over a year
until the Soviet Union gave up its blockade.
The Berliners had called the planes “candy bombers,” thanks to this man,
American pilot Gail Halvorsen, who helped to save Berlin and tried to cheer up its children.

True heroism ended with a victory.
We have questions for you about your time when you were a pilot.
We want to learn from history. It is for a school project.
Why did the US actually help Germany?
We were enemies before.
The Germans shot down the person I taught how to fly.
So it was hard for me at first.
Then I knew it wasn't the German people.
It was Hitler. Hitler was the problem.
So we were able to separate that.
It was a terrible thing to try to starve two and a half million people into submission.
I didn't mind flying day and night.
We'd fly three times from Frankfurt to Berlin in 24 hours.
So day and night.
The people of Berlin, they let them on the airfield while we unloaded flour,
and just the faces, to see the flour, it was like heaven on earth.
While I was waiting for my airplane to be unloaded,
the children came to look at the airplane
and then I started to get two sticks of gum
that's all I had on the first trip.
I broke them in half, half a stick of gum. For four kids.
And boy, they smelled the wrapper.
I said: I got to do more than this.
So I got a lot of gum and candy bars, chocolate bars.
When I came over the airfield, the children be in groups, waving at the airplane.
So I popped it out of the airplane.
They were happy about that. We were happy to see them happy.
What can we learn from history?
What we learn from this is that there are bad people in the world.
And you don't want to follow the bad people.
You want to have as your image and your ideal
the good people and what they do to help others.
Then you have to decide what you can do.
Sometimes like in Hitler's time you couldn't decide what you got to do
He told you what to do.
Or else you got shot.
So you had to survive but you need to be productive and help others
with the same ideas, that's what freedom means.
Everybody is important and especially the young guys and girls.
Even one person can make a change in history.
And it is just really cool to think of him as you know this young soldier
who used to help us and now is this kind old man who wants to talk to us
and wants to tell us that we are the future of Germany
and we should take care of our country.
And if you take care of your country you might receive this in Germany
The order of merit, the "Bundesverdienstkreuz".
Jana and Sila talk to this man, who was honored for his actions during the Cold War.
They involved nothing less than a full-blown machine gun shootout.

Jana und Sila are meeting Rudi Thurow at the Mauermuseum at Checkpoint Charlie,
a museum featuring some of the most spectalur escapes from East Germany.
Rudi Thurow was once a border guard in East Germany.
Together with other border guards, he fled to West Berlin.
But things did no go as smoothly as planned.
Because East German border guards had the order to shoot anybody
who would try to get over the Berlin wall.

Later, in West Germany, Rudi Thurow joined a group of activists
who were helping East Germans to escape.
Risking their own lives by digging underground tunnels into East Berlin.
Thurow is being credited with helping at least 50 people escape Communist East Germany.

When the wall fell, and East German documents became public,
Thurow learned that East Germany’s secret police
had detailed a plan to assassinate him.

I learned that you don't have to accept the conditions you are living in.
There will be a point where you can say I don't want to participate anymore.
I want to change it.
Back at John Lennon High School, Team Yellow Submarine has a problem:
Only Jana and Sila had interviewed Rudi Thurow
The others were preparing for a test.
Now they are stuck creating a presentation.
The team realizes: they have to compensate with extra research.

Team Blue Bears, on the other hand, appears rather confident
about their presentation on the Berlin airlift.

We are very much looking forward to your second presentation.
Interesting person who stood by his morals.
He also used his position to help people escape from East Berlin to West Berlin.
Do you know anything about his family?
How did they react to his escaping?
What made him change his mind on the GDR [East Germany] ?
Em, he didn't really talk about it.
The Soviets started, they wanted to pressure not just West Berlin but also West Germany.
Team Blue Bears is better prepared.
They convince with historical detail and the teachers give them the win.
Yet again, the Blue Bears take the prize.
So congratulations, Blue Bears.
And as a reward you get to cook with refugees with "Über den Tellerrand".
"Über den Tellerrand" is a private initiative that tries to bring refugees and Germans together.
It promotes cooking together in order to bridge cultures.
The winning team spends an afternoon here with refugees from Syria and other countries.

Hamid, Jordan. Noor, Syria.
And this is where past and present meet.
It is one of the quintessential historical learning lessons
that Germans have taken to heart:
May be because of the World War and because some of us know
how it feels like to get thrown out of your own country, I don't know,
but I just think it is human and should be normal to be welcoming
and, yeah, to include people.
Since 2015 alone, Germany has welcomed over a million refugees
and asylum seekers into its society.

It is part of how it sees its own responsibility.
Remember what Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer and pilot Gail Halvorsen said:
"You have to help others."

But what does Germany’s future look like?

In the next round, both teams will get a glimpse into Germany’s future.
Lara and Emma check out high-tech developments in Germany’s car industry
while the others join Europe’s largest protest movement in decades
