Inner German Border - Fall of The Inner German Border

Fall of The Inner German Border

For more details on this topic, see Fall of the inner German border.

The fall of the inner German border came rapidly and unexpectedly in November 1989, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its integrity had been fatally compromised in May 1989 when a reformist Communist government in Hungary, supported by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, began to dismantle its border fortifications. Hungary was already a popular tourist destination for East Germans. Its government was still notionally Communist but planned free elections and economic reform as part of a strategy of "rejoining Europe" and reforming its struggling economy.

Opening the Hungarian border with Austria was essential to this effort; West Germany had secretly offered a much-needed hard currency loan of DM 500 million ($250 million) in return for allowing citizens of the GDR to freely emigrate. Pictures of the barbed-wire fences being taken down were transmitted into East Germany by West German television stations.

They prompted a mass exodus by hundreds of thousands of East Germans which began in earnest in September 1989. In addition to those crossing the Hungarian border, tens of thousands of East Germans scaled the walls of the West German embassies in Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, where they were regarded as "German citizens" by the federal government, claiming "asylum".

Czechoslovakia's hardline communist government agreed to close its border with East Germany to choke off the exodus. The closure produced uproar across East Germany and the GDR government's bid to humiliate refugees by expelling them from the country in sealed trains backfired disastrously. Torn-up identity papers and East German passports littered the tracks as the refugees threw them out of the windows. When the trains passed through Dresden, 1,500 East Germans stormed the main railway station in an attempt to board. Dozens were injured and the station concourse was virtually destroyed.

The small pro-democracy Monday demonstrations soon swelled into crowds of hundreds of thousands of people in cities across East Germany. The East German leadership considered using force but ultimately backed down, lacking support from the Soviet Union for a violent Tiananmen Square-style military intervention. Reformist members of the East German Politbüro sought to rescue the situation by forcing the resignation of the hardline Party chairman Erich Honecker, replacing him in October 1989 with the marginally less hardline Egon Krenz.

The new government sought to appease the protesters by reopening the border with Czechoslovakia. This, however, merely resulted in the resumption of the mass exodus through Hungary. On 8 November 1989, with huge demonstrations continuing across the country, the entire Politbüro resigned and a new, more moderate Politbüro was appointed under Krenz's continued leadership.

Read more about this topic:  Inner German Border

Famous quotes containing the words fall of, fall, german and/or border:

    The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in years ... there is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome.
    Stefan Zweig (18811942)

    The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.
    Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)

    I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)