Inner German Border - Fall of The Inner German Border

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.