Fall of the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was opened on the evening of 9 November 1989 because a spokesman had not read his notes. The pressure had been building all year. Hungary had opened its border with Austria in May, tens of thousands of East Germans had left through it or through the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw, and the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig had grown from a few hundred to 300,000 without the state daring to fire. Honecker was removed in October, and the new leadership drafted a regulation to relieve the pressure by permitting private travel with permits issued at short notice. Günter Schabowski, who had not attended the meeting, was handed the text minutes before a press conference and read it out. Asked when it took effect, he searched the page and said, as far as he knew, immediately, without delay. The broadcast went out at seven, western television repeated it, and crowds began arriving at the crossing points within the hour. The guards had no orders. At Bornholmer Strasse the officer in charge, unable to reach anyone who would take responsibility and facing thousands of people, raised the barrier at about half past eleven. The rest followed within the hour, and people were on top of the wall by midnight. Nobody was killed. Germany was reunified eleven months later, on terms negotiated with four occupying powers, and the last Soviet troops left in 1994. Schabowski said afterwards that he had assumed the regulation was intended to take effect at once and had not been told otherwise. A state that had killed people at that border for twenty-eight years opened it because of an administrative misunderstanding in front of a camera.
- Year: 1989 CE
- Category: Political
