Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Cut-your-own Christmas trees that have grown in the Berlin Wall’s former “death strip” are to go on sale this weekend for one day only, the city’s forestry agency said.

Since German reunification in 1990, thousands of pine trees have grown wild in what used to be the death strip, a zone formerly stripped of vegetation to give East German border guards a clear line of fire to shoot anyone who tried to escape from the communist state.

“The trees are doing well and need to be thinned out, so Christmas trees are the perfect use,” Heinrich Kiso, a city forester, said today in a telephone interview from Berlin. The conifers will go on sale Dec. 20 for those who want to select and chop down their own tree, he said. A 2-meter tall (6.6-foot) specimen will cost 10 euros ($14).

The 155-kilometer (96-mile) Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to keep people from fleeing to the West and was opened in 1989 as the communist regime collapsed amid mass protests. A total of 222 people were shot dead or died trying to escape over the Wall, Alexandra Hildebrandt, head of the Berlin Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, said in a phone interview. Commemorative events are planned next year to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall.

Sprayed Away

Trees and other vegetation were kept out of the death strip through the spraying of “large amounts” of herbicides by border guards, said Marc Franusch, a spokesman for the Berlin State Forest that manages woods in the Berlin Wall areas.

“You could see it in the poor health of the pine needles for several years after unification,” Franusch said in an interview. “But the soil has recovered and things look much better now.”

Germans are expected to buy a total of 27.5 million Christmas trees this year, Jan Boehm, a spokesman for the Berlin-based German Forest Owners’ Association, said in a phone interview. That equates to one tree for every third inhabitant of Europe’s most populous nation.

To contact the reporter on this story: Leon Mangasarian in Berlin at Lmangasarian@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: December 17, 2008 09:37 EST