At each of the checkpoints, East German soldiers screened diplomats and other officials before they were allowed to enter or leave. Except under special circumstances, travelers from East and West Berlin were rarely allowed across the border. The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin.
Though he was not happy about it, President John F. In all, at least people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall. Escape from East Germany was not impossible, however: From until the wall came down in , more than 5, East Germans including some border guards managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds.
At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, , almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Berlin, the German capital city, was located deep in the Soviet zone, but it was also divided into four In June , the simmering tensions between the Soviet Union Great events do not always have great causes.
Ida Siekmann had been holed up for days. Nine days earlier, workers had sealed the border to her country by dead of night. Three days earlier, the front entrance to her apartment had been blocked off by police.
She had committed no crime, but Siekmann was in the wrong place at They had not intended to open the border up completely. The changes were meant to be fairly minor - but the way they were delivered had major consequences. When he read the note aloud for the first time, reporters were stunned.
Surprised journalists clamoured for more details. Shuffling through his notes, Mr Schabowski said that as far as he was aware, it was effective immediately.
In fact it had been planned to start the next day, with details on applying for a visa. But the news was all over television - and East Germans flocked to the border in huge numbers.
With only a handful of guards facing hundreds of angry citizens, force would have been of little use. Thousands flowed through, celebrating and crying, in scenes beamed around the world. Many climbed the wall at Berlin's Brandenburg gate, chipping away at the wall itself with hammers and pickaxes.
But Berlin was split four ways, with British, French and American zones in the west of the city and a Soviet zone in the east. West Berlin became an island surrounded by communist East Germany. The wall was eventually built in because East Berlin was haemorrhaging people to the West. By the s, the Soviet Union faced acute economic problems and major food shortages, and when a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station in Ukraine exploded in April , it was a symbolic moment in the impending collapse of the communist bloc.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the comparatively young Soviet leader who took power in , introduced a reform policy of "glasnost" openness and "perestroika" restructuring. But events moved far faster than he could have foreseen. Reform movements were already stirring in the communist bloc. Years of activism and strikes in Poland culminated in its ruling communist party voting to legalise the banned Solidarity trade union.
By February , Solidarity was in talks with the government, and partially free elections in the summer saw it capture seats in parliament. Though the Communists retained a quota of seats, Solidarity swept the board wherever it was allowed to stand. Hungarians, too, launched mass demonstrations for democracy in March.
In May, miles km of barbed wire were dismantled along the border with Austria - the first chink in the Iron Curtain. Hungary's revolution was brutally suppressed by the Soviets, but this was succeeding. By August, the revolutionary wave had truly re-ignited on the fringes. Two million people across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - then part of the Soviet Union - held one of the most memorable demonstrations of the so-called Singing Revolution when they formed a mile km human chain across the Baltic republics calling for independence.
In the heat of August, Hungary opened it borders to Austria in the west, allowing East German refugees an escape. Czechoslovakia, whose push for liberalising reform had been brutally suppressed in , provided another means of escape. East Germans could travel to the neighbouring socialist nation without restriction, and began to flood the West German embassy there by the hundreds, eventually being evacuated to the West by train.
East Germany ended up closing its border with Czechoslovakia in October to stem the tide. This was a crucial flashpoint in the history between the two sides, as the guards could have easily fired on the crowd. However, according to historian Mary Elise Sarotte in her book The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall , no one among the East German authorities wanted to take the personal authority of issuing orders leading to the use of lethal force.
By pm, Harald Jager, the commander of the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing, let the guards open the checkpoints, allowing people to pass without their identities checked. To Jager, it was obvious that the five dozen men guarding the border were grossly outnumbered. He repeatedly attempted to contact his superior, Rudi Ziegenhorn, in order to ascertain how to handle the increasingly chaotic situation, as more and more people gathered at the gates.
He was unable to get any clear guidance on how to proceed, but a superior in the background called Jager a coward for being unable to handle the situation. After 25 years of loyal service to the regime, according to Sarotte, Jager felt insulted and pushed to his limit. Jager was instructed by his superiors to let the biggest troublemakers through on a one-way ticket.
But many of these so-called troublemakers were students and other young individuals who briefly entered West Berlin and then returned to the checkpoint for re-entry into East Berlin. However, the GDR was serious in its warnings that this was a one-way ticket. Their angry parents began to plead with officials not to keep them separated from their children, and by that point Jager was unwilling to argue on behalf of his superiors. After Jager made an exception for the parents, others demanded the same treatment as well.
Having gone that far, it was simply too late. Thousands of people were demanding that the gates be opened. He was facing a momentous decision — open fire on the civilians, or let them through. At pm, Jager phoned his superior and reported his decision: he would open all the remaining gates and allow the crowds to stream across the border.
West Berliners greeted their counterparts with music and champagne. Some citizens began to chip away at the physical barrier with sledgehammers and chisels. By midnight, the checkpoints were completely overrun.
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