If you know one thing about the fall of the Berlin Wall, it might be this.
REAGAN: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
Or this.
Or maybe...
HASSELHOFF: I’ve been looking for freedom!
These moments were huge in unifying Berlin and undermining the physical symbol of a divided
Europe during the Cold War.
But they don’t top this one. The last few minutes of an otherwise uneventful press conference
on November 9th, 1989:
It might not look like it, but this is the moment the Berlin Wall became obsolete – completely
by mistake.
After the allied powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II, they divided the country
into four parts, each controlled by a separate power.
These formed into two new countries in 1949.
Democratic West Germany and Soviet-controlled communist East Germany, officially named the
German Democratic Republic, or GDR.
Through the 1950s, West Germany prospered as a free society and industrious member of
Europe, and hundreds of thousands of East Germans began emigrating west, in search of
new opportunities.
To stem the tide, the GDR erected a barrier along the Inner German Border.
Separating the two countries with barbed wire, guarded checkpoints, and, in many places,
defensive measures like land mines.
But there was a loophole – in Berlin.
And it goes back to when the 4 allied powers controlled Germany.
See, even though the German capital was well inside the Soviet zone, the allies divided
control of it equally to match the rest of the country.
And when East and West Germany formed, so did East and West Berlin.
Even as the Inner German Border fortified, Berlin had no physical barrier dividing it.
East Germans could simply walk or take public transportation to the Western part of the
city and travel freely from there.
ARCHIVE: The island of West Berlin had become the staging point for the free road to the
West.
This “brain drain” took a huge toll on East Germany’s labor force.
By 1961, more than 3.5 million East Germans, approximately 20% of the population, had fled
to the West – the majority of which were young and well-educated.
But the Berlin loophole closed on Aug 13th, 1961, when the city woke up to East German
soldiers standing shoulder-to-shoulder along the invisible line dividing East and West
Berlin.
Unannounced, they began unrolling kilometers of barbed wire through the middle of the city.
They were building the Berlin Wall.
ARCHIVE: Brick by brick, until no contact but a friendly wave.
Travel out of East Berlin became strictly regulated.
No one could leave unless they met strict requirements.
And those who didn’t faced a nearly impassable barrier, complete with floodlights and guard
towers.
Where armed border guards patrolled day and night, with orders to shoot and kill anyone
trying to cross illegally.
And that’s how it remained for 28 years.
But change came in late 1989.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had introduced social reforms meant to relax oppressive practices
and open up discourse between people and government.
These changes sparked massive peaceful uprisings throughout Eastern Bloc countries, including
East Germany.
BAUMBACH: Things had kind of heated up all summer.
In 1989, Catherine Baumbach was a young translator working for the East German news agency.
BAUMBACH: And there were the famous Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, actually my college
town. Initially thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands.
Freedom of expression and freedom to travel were key demands.
And pressure on the GDR to loosen travel restrictions only grew as neighboring countries, particularly
Hungary and Czechoslovakia, relaxed their border laws, prompting a mass southward exodus
of East Germans.
By early November 1989, more than 40,000 East German refugees had arrived at the West German
embassy in Prague, hoping to travel to the West.
The GDR was facing a crisis.
BAUMBACH: There were forces in the government that realized something had to be done. This
was not sustainable. So lifting the travel ban was one way that they thought they could
quell the protests and make people happy.
On November 8th, 1989, GDR official Gerhard Lauter was tasked with drafting looser travel
regulations, meant to be a temporary pressure release.
The new rules were finalized less than a day later, and read:
“Private trips abroad can be applied for without conditions. Permits are issued on
short notice.”
“Without conditions.” That’s the key phrase here.
This meant the strict application requirements were eliminated, and anyone who wanted could
leave East Germany and come back.
That afternoon, the updated regulations were handed to government spokesman Günter Schabowski,
just as he was about to begin a routine press conference.
BAUMBACH: And as we all know, something kind of didn’t go quite right there.
He had no time to review them before sitting in front of cameras.
And as you can see from his handwritten “roadmap” of the press conference, he scribbled in a
reminder to announce them at the very end.
And on live TV at 6:53 PM on November 9th, he read the relaxed travel laws, for the first
time, out loud.
BAUMBACH: It seemed totally unreal. But it was Schabowski saying it and it was broadcast
on official television so it had to be true. There were people around me, older colleagues,
who immediately said, “this is the beginning of the end.”
Watch a confused Schabowski shuffle his papers when a journalist asks a simple follow-up
question.
The thing is, if Schabowski had had time to read the new rules, he might have seen this
on the final page:
The new regulations were meant to go into effect the following day, in an orderly manner,
when the passport offices were open.
What happened next can only be described as a chain reaction.
By 7:05 PM, the AP wire had already gone out: GDR opens borders.
And both East and West German nightly news reports announced the stunning policy reversal.
East Berliners began gathering at the wall, and security officers tried to let them through
slowly.
But the final nail in the coffin came at 10:42 pm, when this broadcast triggered a mass rush:
They actually weren’t yet. But by this point, there was no going back.
Tens of thousands of Berliners stormed the Wall, saying they heard on the news that they
could cross.
The outnumbered East German border guards were completely overwhelmed.
BAUMBACH: Somehow they hadn’t gotten the message, or they didn’t know what to do,
or they were afraid, who knows. But they basically opened the border and thousands of people
streamed into West Berlin.
Over its 28-year history, at least 140 people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall.
BAUMBACH: November 9th, plus unification a year later, was the most decisive event in
my life. I basically went from one political system to another, and changes happened very
quickly.
And it happened unintentionally.
The result of a rushed plan and a botched announcement, delivered in a small room at
the end of a boring press conference.