US actor and singer David Hasselhoff has announced that he secretly married the Berlin Wall on a recent visit to the German capital.

The twice-divorced television star said yesterday he had "gone from Baywatch to Wallwatch" and tied the knot with the wall's most famous stretch, the East Side Gallery, in a bid to prevent its demolition for a luxury apartment block.

"For two decades I've been looking for freedom, but I've finally found happiness in Berlin," said Mr Hasselhoff. "Whoever lays a finger on Eastie now was to answer to me. Together we stand strong."

The civil ceremony reportedly took place in Berlin on the evening of March 17th before a small group of family and friends. Exclusive photo rights were sold to Germany's "Bunte" gossip magazine, which hits newsstands tomorrow. Mr Hasselhoff (60) said the proceeds, reported to be around €100,000, will finance the high-profile campaign to retain the longest-standing wall stretch in the German capital.

Mr Hasselhoff is the second person to marry the Berlin Wall.

Swedish woman Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer married the wall in 1979, at the height of the Cold War, after being diagnosed with a rare condition called Objectum-Sexuality.

Mrs Berliner-Mauer fell in love with the structure when she was seven, she said, and tied the knot in 1979 before a handful of guests on her second visit to the divided German city.

She took the wall's German name as her own but filed for divorce five years ago after reportedly falling in love with a neighbouring garden fence in her home town of Liden in northern Sweden.

Mrs Berliner-Mauer said in 2008 she found "long, slim things with horizontal lines very sexy".

Mr Hasselhoff declined to specify yesterday if he shared the same sexual preferences. He has, in the past, taken partial credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of German division. His single "Looking for Freedom" topped the charts in Germany in the summer of 1989, months before the structure fell in November. On New Year's Eve, Mr Hasselhoff gave a concert at the wall, sitting astride the structure in a jacket illuminated with mini-lightbulbs.