The Night the Wall Opened

After the Second World War, Germany was divided. The western part became the Federal Republic of Germany, a democracy allied with the United States and western Europe. The eastern part became the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, a communist state controlled by the Soviet Union.

The city of Berlin lay deep inside East Germany. But it, too, was divided. West Berlin was an island of the West, surrounded on all sides by the East.

The wall goes up

In the 1950s, millions of East Germans left for the West, many of them by simply crossing from East Berlin into West Berlin. The East German government was losing its doctors, engineers, teachers and skilled workers.

On the night of 13 August 1961, East German soldiers and workers closed the border in Berlin. They rolled out barbed wire across streets, through parks and along canals. In the following days and years, it became a concrete wall, around 155 kilometres long, encircling West Berlin.

Families were split overnight. Friends could no longer visit each other. People who lived on one side of a street could not cross to the other.

The death strip

Over the years, the wall grew stronger. On the eastern side there was a second wall, and between them a wide, empty strip of sand, lit at night, with watchtowers, guard dogs, alarms and armed guards with orders to shoot. People called it the "death strip".

Still, people tried to escape. They dug tunnels, hid in cars, flew home-made balloons, swam across rivers. Thousands succeeded. At least 140 people are known to have been killed at the Berlin Wall, or died in connection with it.

For twenty-eight years, the wall stood as the most famous symbol of the division of Europe, and of the Cold War between East and West.

1989

In 1989, things began to change across eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union, the leader Mikhail Gorbachev was introducing reforms and had made it clear that Soviet tanks would no longer be sent to keep communist governments in power. In Poland and Hungary, the communist parties began to share power and open borders.

Thousands of East Germans began escaping through Hungary to Austria. Others crowded into the West German embassy in Prague.

At home, in East German cities, people began to protest. In Leipzig, every Monday evening, crowds gathered after prayers at the St Nicholas Church and marched peacefully through the streets with candles. At first there were a few thousand. By October, there were tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Their chant was simple: Wir sind das Volk, "We are the people."

The government, losing control, decided to relax its travel rules, hoping to calm things down.

The press conference

On the evening of 9 November 1989, an East German official named Günter Schabowski held a press conference, broadcast live on television. Near the end, he read out a note he had been handed shortly before. It said that East Germans would be allowed to apply to travel abroad, including through the crossing points into West Berlin.

He had not been fully briefed. The new rules were supposed to start the next day, with an orderly process of applying for visas.

A journalist asked when the new rules would take effect.

Schabowski shuffled his papers, looked confused, and said that, as far as he knew, it was effective immediately, without delay: "sofort, unverzüglich."

To the border

West German television, watched by most East Germans, reported that the wall was open.

Within hours, thousands of East Berliners gathered at the border crossings, demanding to be let through. The border guards had received no orders. They did not know what to do.

At the Bornholmer Straße crossing, the crowd grew larger and louder. The officer in charge that night, Harald Jäger, could not reach anyone in authority who would make a decision. Faced with a huge, peaceful crowd and the risk of disaster, at about 11:30 that night, he ordered the gates opened.

People poured through. Across the city, other crossings opened too.

The party

That night, Berlin celebrated as never before. Strangers hugged and cried. West Berliners met East Berliners with flowers and bottles of sparkling wine. People climbed onto the wall at the Brandenburg Gate and danced on top of it. Some began chipping away at the concrete with hammers and chisels.

No shots were fired.

Afterwards

Within a year, on 3 October 1990, East and West Germany were reunified as one country. Over the following two years, communist governments fell across eastern Europe, and in 1991, the Soviet Union itself broke apart.

Almost all of the Berlin Wall was torn down. Today, a double row of cobblestones runs through the city's streets to mark where it once stood, and a short stretch has been preserved as a memorial at Bernauer Straße.

Want to read more?

Mary Elise Sarotte's The Collapse tells the story of 9 November 1989 hour by hour, showing how much of it happened by accident. The Berlin Wall Memorial website has free exhibitions and the stories of those who died trying to cross.