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. Over that weekend, more than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin to participate in the mass celebration.
Gorbachev agreed on negotiations with the U. President George H. On Oct. Despite the initial euphoria, the road to recovery for East Germany was long and difficult with economic and social dislocation. And the fallout from the fall continues to this day: citizens were still paying slightly higher taxes than before the merger in order to cover the costs of unification.
Contact us at letters time. By Albinko Hasic. An undated photo of a West Berlin couple talking to relatives in an East Berlin apartment house see upper window open over the Berlin Wall. A crowd at the Berlin Wall on Nov. Related Stories. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Visit our Help Center. Go here to connect your wallet. Erected in haste and torn down in protest, the Berlin Wall was almost 27 miles long and was protected with barbed wire, attack dogs, and 55, landmines.
The wall had its origins in the end of World War II, when Germany was carved into four pieces and occupied by Allied powers. Although Berlin was located about 90 miles east from the border between the GDR and West Germany and completely surrounded by the Soviet sector, the city was also originally divided into four quarters, but by was consolidated into east and west zones.
In , the two new Germanies were officially founded. Socialist East Germany was wracked by poverty and convulsed by labor strikes in response to its new political and economic systems. Revisit National Geographic' s reporting from West Berlin before the wall fell. East Germans began fleeing through the more permeable border between East and West Berlin instead. At one point, 1, people a day sought refugee status by crossing from East to West Berlin, and about 3 million GDR citizens went to West Germany through the via West Berlin between and In the wee hours of August 13, , as Berliners slept, the GDR began building fences and barriers to seal off entry points from East Berlin into the western part of the city.
The overnight move stunned Germans on both sides of the new border. As GDR soldiers patrolled the demarcation line and laborers began constructing a concrete wall, diplomatic officials and the militaries of both sides engaged in a series of tense standoffs.
Eventually, East Germany erected 27 miles of concrete wall through the city. People did try to escape. Initially, they fled from houses right along the Wall; later, those houses were emptied and turned into fortifications for the Wall itself.
Others plotted riskier escapes through tunnels, on hot air balloons, and even via train. Between and , over 5, people made successful escapes. Others were not so lucky; at least were killed or died while trying to cross the Wall.
Over the years, the Wall became a grim symbol of the Cold War. By , many East Germans had had enough. They staged a series of mass demonstrations demanding democracy. Meanwhile, the Soviet bloc was destabilized by economic woes and political reforms.
East Germany ended up closing its border with Czechoslovakia in October to stem the tide. But by then the revolution had spread to East Germany itself. It began with demonstrators rallying for freedom in the centre of the city of Leipzig. On 9 October, within days of East Germany celebrating its 40th anniversary, 70, people took to the streets. There were calls for free elections from West Germany, and talk of reform from East Germany's new communist leader Egon Krenz.
No-one knew the fall of the Wall was weeks away. In late October parliament in Hungary, which had been among the first to hold mass demonstrations, adopted legislation providing for direct presidential elections and multi-party parliamentary elections.
And then on 31 October, the numbers demanding democracy in East Germany swelled to half a million. Mr Krenz flew to Moscow for meetings - he recently told the BBC that he had been assured German reunification was not on the agenda. Find out more about East Germany, On 4 November, a month after the East German protests had begun, around half a million people gathered in Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin. Three days later, the government resigned. But there was no intention to give way to democracy and Egon Krenz remained head of the Communist Party and the country's de facto leader.
He would not be there long. Five days later, Mr Schabowski gave his world-changing press conference. Earlier in '89, Beijing demonstrators in Tiananmen Square who had called for democracy in China were crushed in a major military crackdown. The USSR had used its military to put down rebellions before. So why not now? Within the Soviet Union itself, it did, killing 21 pro-independence protesters in the Soviet republic of Georgia. But elsewhere in the communist bloc, they did not.
In a break with Soviet policy, Mikhail Gorbachev decided against using the threat of military might to quell mass demonstrations and political revolution in neighbouring countries. Student demonstrators in Prague clashed with police, triggering the Velvet Revolution which overthrew Czechoslovak communism within weeks. In Romania, demonstrations ended in violence and saw the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
A new government took over as the ousted leader fled his palace and angry crowds stormed it. He and his wife Elena were captured and executed on Christmas Day. More than 1, people were killed in unrest before and after the revolution, setting Romania apart from the largely bloodless events elsewhere. In , Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia took advantage of their new-found political freedoms to vote out their communist governments and make moves towards independence.
The Soviet Union was falling apart, but Mr Gorbachev made one last ill-fated attempt to reform it by calling together the leaders of the 15 Soviet republics. Hardline communists opposed to his reforms pre-empted him, attempting a coup while he was on holiday in Crimea in August and putting him under house arrest.
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