Live through incredible Berlin Wall escape stories with YouTube's VR history project

The world we live in today seems so polarised and divided that we often take for granted how much has changed in the space of a single generation. 

A new YouTube Originals documentary project, made to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is trying to bridge at least one of these gaps in history by using VR to transport viewers back in time. 

Using oral histories and recreated photographs of individual moments of resistance — a group of students building an escape tunnel, a family fleeing their home, a young man celebrating the process of German unification in 1989 — Virtually History relies on technology to retrace the steps of an increasingly forgotten recent history.

Created in partnership with Remarkable TV, the 30-minute YouTube Originals special features historian Emma Daibri guiding three people with a family connection to the Berlin Wall (as well as three YouTubers) through key moments in its history.