Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

A wall opened by mistake

The Berlin Wall did not "fall" on 9 November 1989. It was opened by accident.

At 18:53 on a Thursday evening, an East German politburo spokesman called Günter Schabowski held a routine press conference to announce new emergency travel regulations. A reporter asked when the new regulations would take effect. Schabowski, who had not read the document carefully before the press conference, looked at his notes, hesitated, and answered:

Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis... ist das sofort, unverzüglich.

As far as I'm aware... that is immediately, without delay.

The document on his desk actually said the regulations would take effect the following day with normal passport applications. Schabowski misread it. By 19:17 West German television had rebroadcast his words. By 20:30 East Berliners were arriving at checkpoint gates demanding to be let through.

The border guards on duty had received no new orders.

Bornholmer Straße at 23:30

The first crossing to open was at Bornholmer Straße in the north of the city. The duty officer was Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger, a Stasi-trained career border guard. He had no idea what to do.

He called his superiors. He called them again. The answers were contradictory — let through only the ones with permits, stamp passports invalid so they cannot return, gather names. Behind the gate the crowd grew from a few hundred to several thousand. By 23:00 it was over twenty thousand.

Jäger gave the order on his own initiative at 23:30. Open. Without checking documents. The first East Berliners walked through.

Within an hour, every checkpoint along the wall was opening, the crowd at each gate forcing the question that the gate officer had to decide on the spot. By 01:00 on 10 November there were East Berliners on top of the wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, chipping at the concrete with hammers borrowed from neighbours, dancing.

Twenty-eight years, two months, twenty-six days

That is how long the wall had stood — from the morning of 13 August 1961, when East German workers began rolling out barbed wire across Bernauer Straße and Potsdamer Platz, to the night of 9 November 1989.

It had killed at least one hundred and forty people.

The youngest, Chris Gueffroy, was a fifteen-year-old shot dead trying to cross on the night of 5 February 1989 — just nine months before it opened. The last to die, Winfried Freudenberg, was killed when his homemade hot-air balloon crashed in West Berlin on 8 March 1989. He had successfully crossed the wall. The balloon failed on the wrong side.

The official East German term for the wall, in all government documents from 1961 to 1989, was the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall — the "anti-fascist protective rampart". The state insisted, until its last week, that the wall existed to keep western fascists out, not to keep East Germans in.

Eleven months to a single Germany

The political consequences of the opening were faster than anyone predicted.

By the end of November 1989, mass emigration from East to West was producing economic collapse in the GDR. East German leader Egon Krenz resigned on 6 December. The Berlin Wall checkpoints were opened permanently. The free elections that East Germans had been demanding for forty years were held on 18 March 1990 and produced a landslide for parties seeking immediate unification.

The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany — the so-called Two Plus Four Agreement, which formally ended the occupation rights of the four wartime Allies and restored full German sovereignty — was signed in Moscow on 12 September 1990.

Three weeks later, on 3 October 1990, East Germany was dissolved into the Federal Republic. Eleven months and three weeks after a politburo spokesman misread a press release.

The Cold War formally ended at the Charter of Paris signing six weeks after that. The Soviet Union itself dissolved thirteen months later, on 25 December 1991.

An international order that had structured global politics for forty-five years unwound in twenty-five months. It began with one man misreading one document at one press conference.