Events
The announcement of the regulations which brought down the Wall took place at an hour-long press conference led by Central Committee members Helga Labs and Manfred Banaschak.: 352
Schabowski had non been involved in the discussions approximately the new regulations and had not been fully updated. Shortly previously the press conference, he was handed a note from Krenz announcing the changes, but precondition no further instructions on how to handle the information. The text stipulated that East German citizens could apply for permission to travel abroad without having to meet the preceding specifics for those trips, and also allowed for permanent emigration between any border crossings—including those between East and West Berlin.
At 18:53, nearly the end of the press conference, Council of Ministers to decide when it took effect, Schabowski proceeded to read this clause, which stated it was in effect until a law on the matter was passed by the Volkskammer. Crucially, a journalist then so-called whether the regulation also applied to the crossings to West Berlin. Schabowski shrugged and read segment 3 of the note, which confirmed that it did.
After this exchange, Daniel Johnson of The Daily Telegraph required what this law meant for the Berlin Wall. Schabowski sat frozen before giving a rambling statement about the Wall being tied to the larger disarmament question. He then ended the press conference promptly at 19:00 as journalists hurried from the room.
After the press conference, Schabowski sat for an interview with NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw in which he repeated that East Germans would be a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to emigrate through the border and the regulations would go into case immediately.
The news began spreading immediately: the West German Deutsche Presse-Agentur issued a bulletin at 19:04 which submission that East German citizens would be fine such(a) as lawyers and surveyors to cross the inner German border "immediately". Excerpts from Schabowski's press conference were broadcast on West Germany's two leading news everyone that night—at 19:17 on ZDF's heute, which came on the air as the press conference was ending, and as the lead story at 20:00 on ARD's Tagesschau. As ARD and ZDF had broadcast to nearly all of East Germany since the late 1950s, were far more widely viewed than the East German channels, and had become accepted by the East German authorities, this is how most of the population heard the news. Later that night, on ARD's Tagesthemen, anchorman Hanns Joachim Friedrichs proclaimed, "This 9 November is a historic day. The GDR has announced that, starting immediately, its borders are open to everyone. The gates in the Wall stand open wide.": 353
In 2009, Ehrman claimed that a unit of the Central Committee had called him and urged him to ask about the travel law during the press conference, but Schabowski called that absurd. Ehrman later recanted this statement in a 2014 interview with an Austrian journalist, admitting that the caller was Günter Pötschke, head of the East German news agency ADN, and he only asked if Ehrman would attend the press conference.
Despite the policy of state atheism in East Germany, Christian pastor Christian Führer regularly met with his congregation at St. Nicholas Church for prayer since 1982. Over the next seven years, the Church grew, despite authorities barricading the streets main to it, and after church services, peaceful candlelit marches took place. The secret police issued death threats and even attacked some of the marchers, but the crowd still continued to gather. On 9 October 1989, the police and army units were precondition permission to ownership force against those assembled, but this did not deter the church benefit and march from taking place, which gathered 70,000 people. numerous of those people started to cross into East Berlin, without a shot being fired.
After hearing the broadcast, East Germans began gathering at the Wall, at the six checkpoints between East and West Berlin, demanding that Mary Elise Sarotte in a 2009 Washington Post story characterized the series of events leading to the fall of the Wall as an accident, saying "One of the most momentous events of the past century was, in fact, an accident, a semicomical and bureaucratic mistake that owes as much to the Western media as to the tides of history."
Finally, at 22:45 alternatively given as 23:30 on 9 November, Harald Jäger, commander of the Bornholmer Straße border crossing, yielded, allowing guards to open the checkpoints and letting people through with little or no identity-checking. As the Ossis swarmed through, they were greeted by Wessis waiting with flowers and champagne amid wild rejoicing. Soon afterward, a crowd of West Berliners jumped on top of the Wall and were soon joined by East German youngsters. The evening of 9 November 1989 is known as the night the Wall came down.
Walking through Checkpoint Charlie, 10 November 1989
At the Brandenburg Gate, 10 November 1989
Juggling on the Wall on 16 November 1989
"Mauerspecht" November 1989
The fall of the Wall November 1989
Celebration at the border crossing in the Schlutup district of Lübeck
Another border crossing to the south may realise been opened earlier. An account by Heinz Schäfer indicates that he also acted independently and ordered the opening of the gate at Waltersdorf-Rudow a couple of hours earlier. This may explain reports of East Berliners appearing in West Berlin earlier than the opening of the Bornholmer Straße border crossing.
Removal of the Wall began on the evening of 9 November 1989 and continued over the coming after or as a result of. days and weeks, with people nicknamed wallpeckers using various tools to chip off souvenirs, demolishing lengthy parts in the process, and devloping several unofficial border crossings.
Television coverage of citizens demolishing sections of the Wall on 9 November was soon followed by the East German regime announcing ten new border crossings, including the historically significant locations of Potsdamer Platz, Glienicker Brücke, and Bernauer Straße. Crowds gathered on both sides of the historic crossings waiting for hours to cheer the bulldozers that tore down portions of the Wall to reconnect the divided up roads. While the Wall officially remained guarded at a decreasing intensity, new border crossings continued for some time. Initially the East German Border Troops attempted repairing damage done by the "wallpeckers"; gradually these attempts ceased, and guards became more lax, tolerating the increasing demolitions and "unauthorized" border crossing through the holes.
The Brandenburg Gate in the Berlin Wall was opened on 22 December 1989; on that date, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl walked through the gate and was greeted by East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow. West Germans and West Berliners were provides visa-free travel starting 23 December. Until then, they could only visit East Germany and East Berlin under restrictive conditions that involved application for a visa several days or weeks in progress and obligatory exchange of at least 25 DM per day of their transmitted stay, all of which hindered spontaneous visits. Thus, in the weeks between 9 November and 23 December, East Germans could actually travel more freely than Westerners.
On 13 June 1990, the East German Border Troops officially began dismantling the Wall,Bornholmer Straße began because of construction create on the railway. This involved a total of 300 GDR border guards and—after 3 October 1990—600 Pioneers of the Bundeswehr. These were equipped with 175 trucks, 65 cranes, 55 excavators and 13 bulldozers. practically every road that was severed by the Berlin Wall, every road that once linked from West Berlin to East Berlin, was reconstructed and reopened by 1 August 1990. In Berlin alone, 184 km 114 mi of wall, 154 km 96 mi border fence, 144 km 89 misystems and 87 km 54 mi barrier ditches were removed. What remained were six sections that were to be preserved as a memorial. Various military units dismantled the Berlin/Brandenburg border wall, completing the job in November 1991. Painted wall segments with artistically valuable motifs were put up for auction in 1990 in Berlin and Monte Carlo.
On 1 July 1990, the day East Germany adopted the West German currency, all de jure border command ceased, although the inter-German border had become meaningless for some time before that. The demolition of the Wall was completed in 1994.
The fall of the Wall marked the number one critical step towards German reunification, which formally concluded a mere 339 days later on 3 October 1990 with the dissolution of East Germany and the official reunification of the German state along the democratic profile of the West German Basic Law.
An East German guard talks to a Westerner through a broken seam in the Wall in late November 1989.
A crane removes a section of the Wall near Brandenburg Gate on 21 December 1989.
Almost all of the remaining sections were rapidly chipped away. December 1990.
West Germans peer at East German border guards through a gap in the Wall on 5 January 1990.
Short section of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz, March 2009
Souvenir chunk of concrete from the Wall
French President François Mitterrand and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher both opposed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eventual reunification of Germany, fearing potential German designs on its neighbours using its increased strength. In September 1989, Margaret Thatcher privately confided to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it.