Berlin Wall: Why Germany Was Divided — and How It Fell Because of a Bureaucratic Mistake at a Press Conference

On the night of 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Not because of a military operation, not because of a diplomatic breakthrough, and not because the East German government had a change of heart. It fell because a spokesman at a press conference was handed a note he had not read, was asked when a new travel regulation would take effect, hesitated for a few seconds, and said 'immediately.' Within hours, thousands of people were at the checkpoints. Border guards had no orders they were willing to follow. The gates opened. This is the full story.

By BookOfWorldHistory·May 30, 2026·History·14 min read · 2,615 words

Originally published at: https://www.bookofworldhistory.com/blog/berlin-wall-history-divided-germany-fall-1989

History

Berlin Wall: Why Germany Was Divided — and How It Fell Because of a Bureaucratic Mistake at a Press Conference

BookOfWorldHistory May 30, 2026 14 min · 2,615 words

On the night of 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Not because of a military operation, not because of a diplomatic breakthrough, and not because the East German government had a change of heart. It fell because a spokesman at a press conference was handed a note he had not read, was asked when a new travel regulation would take effect, hesitated for a few seconds, and said 'immediately.' Within hours, thousands of people were at the checkpoints. Border guards had no orders they were willing to follow. The gates opened. This is the full story.

The Berlin Wall fell because of a press conference. Not because of a revolution, exactly. Not because East Germany had been defeated militarily. Not because the Soviet Union intervened or because West Germany struck some crucial diplomatic deal. The specific mechanism by which the most famous barrier of the Cold War opened was that a spokesman named Günter Schabowski sat down in front of cameras on the evening of 9 November 1989, was handed a note he had not previously seen, and when a journalist asked him when new travel regulations would take effect, he hesitated, said he was not sure, and then said: immediately. He was wrong about that. The regulations were not supposed to take effect until the following day. But by the time anyone figured out the mistake, it was 19:04, the wire services had already sent bulletins, West German television was broadcasting his words to most of East Germany, and thousands of people were already putting on their coats and heading to the checkpoints. The guards at those checkpoints had no orders they were willing to follow. Nobody in the East German government was prepared to authorize lethal force against that many people. The commander at the Bornholmer Straße crossing, Harald Jäger, eventually made a decision on his own authority, opened the gates, and went home afterward expecting to be arrested. He was not arrested. The Wall was already over.

Crowds of East and West Germans at the Berlin Wall on the night of 9 November 1989.

Why the Wall Existed in the First Place

Germany was divided at the end of World War II into four occupation zones — American, British, French, and Soviet. Berlin, sitting deep inside the Soviet zone, was itself divided the same way. By 1949, the western zones had merged into the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet zone had become the German Democratic Republic. Two countries where there had been one, separated by what Winston Churchill had named the Iron Curtain. Berlin was the weak point in that curtain. The division of the city into sectors meant that for over a decade after the war, a person living in East Berlin could relatively easily cross into West Berlin and from there travel to West Germany. Millions did. Between 1949 and 1961, roughly 2.7 million people left East Germany — engineers, doctors, teachers, skilled workers the GDR could not afford to lose. The exodus was draining the country of the people it needed to function. On 13 August 1961, East Germany sealed the border. Initially it was barbed wire. Within days, construction of concrete barriers began. The final version of the Wall that most people picture — the iconic structure that defined Berlin's geography for twenty-eight years — consisted of two parallel concrete walls four metres tall, separated by what the regime called the Todesstreifen: the death strip. The death strip was not simply empty space. It was 155 kilometers of carefully engineered killing ground — mined, lit, covered by 302 watchtowers, and patrolled by guards who had standing orders to shoot anyone attempting to cross. The orders are sometimes described euphemistically in historical accounts. The practical reality is that somewhere between 140 and 200 people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. The exact number is still disputed. The lowest credible estimates are around 140. Higher estimates run past 200 when deaths in other parts of the inner German border are included.

The Berlin Wall death strip in 1977, showing the watchtower, cleared ground, and Czech hedgehog obstacles.

The Summer of 1989: Before the Press Conference

What happened on 9 November 1989 did not come out of nowhere. The fall of the Wall was the visible end of a process that had been building across the summer. It started with a picnic. On 19 August 1989, a Pan-European Picnic was organized on the Austrian-Hungarian border — partly as a symbolic gesture, partly to test Soviet and East German reactions to an opening of the Iron Curtain. Otto von Habsburg, an Austrian politician, was behind the idea. Hungary had been gradually dismantling its fortified border with Austria, and the picnic was meant to mark that symbolically. What nobody fully anticipated was that thousands of East German tourists vacationing in Hungary had been watching the news. When the border was briefly opened for the picnic, hundreds of them walked across into Austria. They did not come back. The East German leadership in Berlin did not dare seal their own border with Hungary to stop the exodus — the optics would have been catastrophic. The Soviets, under Mikhail Gorbachev, did nothing. The bracket of the Eastern Bloc, as one account put it, was broken. By autumn, tens of thousands of East Germans had found their way through Hungary to West Germany. Others crowded into the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. On 30 September, the West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher appeared on the balcony of the Prague embassy to tell thousands of refugees they could leave for West Germany. His speech was interrupted by cheers before he even finished the first sentence — the crowd understood what he was about to say before he said it. Inside East Germany itself, Monday demonstrations had been happening in Leipzig for years — small prayer services at the St. Nicholas Church that had gradually grown into something the regime could not easily shut down. On 9 October 1989, police and army units were given authorization to use force against the assembled crowd. Seventy thousand people showed up. Not a shot was fired. Whatever the regime was prepared to do, it was not prepared to do that.

The New Regulations Nobody Explained Properly

By early November, Erich Honecker had been replaced as party leader by Egon Krenz. The change of leadership was not a change of direction — the East German public mostly understood Krenz as a continuation of Honecker rather than a departure from him, and demonstrations demanding his resignation continued immediately after his appointment. The Krenz government was trying to draft new travel regulations that would relieve pressure without actually opening the floodgates. The Interior Ministry had been working on text that would allow East German citizens to apply for travel abroad without the previous bureaucratic requirements. The draft went through several versions. A 6 November version had been published and immediately condemned — the West Berlin mayor called it complete trash, and hundreds of protesters crowded the West German embassy in Prague in response. On 9 November, the Politburo approved a revised version. The new regulations would allow East Germans to cross into West Germany, including through Berlin checkpoints, and would take effect the following day — after border guards had been briefed and the relevant administrative machinery prepared. That last part — the part about taking effect the following day — is what Günter Schabowski did not know when he sat down to lead the evening press conference.

The Press Conference: Eighteen Minutes That Changed Everything

Schabowski had not been in the Politburo meeting where the travel regulations were discussed. He had been doing other things. Shortly before the 6 p.m. press conference, Krenz handed him a note summarizing the new policy. No briefing. No context about when it was supposed to take effect. Just a note. For most of the press conference — it ran an hour — Schabowski covered other topics. Central Committee votes. Personnel changes. Electoral reform. Normal political management content that would have been forgotten within a week. At 6:53 p.m., near the end, an Italian journalist named Riccardo Ehrman asked about the 6 November travel draft and whether it had been a mistake. Schabowski gave a confused answer and then remembered the note. He announced that a new regulation had been drafted allowing permanent emigration at any border crossing. The room got noisy. Reporters started asking questions over each other. Someone — either Ehrman or a reporter from Bild-Zeitung named Peter Brinkmann — asked when it would take effect. Schabowski looked at the note. Hesitated. Then said: as far as I know, immediately, without delay. His colleague Gerhard Beil tried to interject that it was up to the Council of Ministers to decide implementation timing. Schabowski read over him. A journalist then asked whether the regulation applied to the crossings to West Berlin. Schabowski shrugged and read item 3 of the note, which confirmed that it did. The Daily Telegraph's Daniel Johnson asked what this meant for the Wall. Schabowski sat frozen for a moment, then gave a rambling answer about disarmament questions. He ended the press conference at 7 p.m. The journalists were already running for the phones. At 7:04, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur sent a bulletin: East Germans could cross the inner German border immediately. At 7:17, ZDF's evening news broadcast the announcement live. At 8 p.m., ARD led with it. Later that night, ARD anchorman Hanns Joachim Friedrichs told his audience: this 9 November is a historic day. The gates in the Wall stand open wide. They did not, yet. But they were about to.

Günter Schabowski at the 9 November 1989 press conference where he announced the opening of the Berlin Wall.

At the Checkpoints: Three Hours of Nobody Giving Orders

East Germans hearing the broadcast did what anyone would have done. They got up and went to the Wall. At the six checkpoints between East and West Berlin, crowds began gathering and demanding to be let through. As Schabowski said we can, they told the guards. The guards made phone calls. Their superiors made phone calls. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for what would happen if they let people through. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for what would happen if they did not. For a period, the guards tried stamping passports with a special mark that would bar people from re-entering East Germany — effectively revoking citizenship on the spot. It was a desperate improvisation that solved nothing. Thousands of people were still demanding to cross, and the stamp procedure was not making them leave. At some point it became clear that no one in the East German government was going to issue an order to use lethal force against thousands of their own citizens on live international television. The soldiers at the checkpoints were vastly outnumbered and had no realistic options. At 10:45 p.m. — some accounts say 11:30 — Harald Jäger, the commander at Bornholmer Straße, made a decision. He ordered the gates opened and told his guards to let people through without identity checks. People flooded through. West Berliners who had been watching from the other side came forward with flowers and champagne. People wept. People laughed. People who had not seen family members in years found themselves on the same side of a line for the first time in a generation. Soon after, people started climbing on top of the Wall itself. The Mauerspechte — wallpeckers — began immediately, chipping off chunks with hammers and whatever else was available. Within days, people were selling pieces of concrete as souvenirs.

The Official Demolition: Slowly, Then All at Once

The Wall did not disappear overnight. The unofficial dismantling by citizens — the wallpeckers and their hammers — created dozens of holes and several unofficial crossing points in the days after 9 November. The East German regime announced ten new official border crossings in response, including historically charged locations like Potsdamer Platz and Bernauer Straße. For the Brandenburg Gate, there was a particular choreography. It was not opened until 22 December 1989, when West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl walked through and was greeted by East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow. West Germans and West Berliners were only allowed visa-free travel to the east starting 23 December — meaning that for roughly six weeks after the Wall came down, East Germans could actually travel more freely than Westerners could in the other direction. The formal East German Border Troops began official demolition in June 1990, starting in Bernauer Straße. The full operation employed 300 border guards and later 600 Bundeswehr soldiers, working with 175 trucks, 65 cranes, 55 excavators, and 13 bulldozers. By the time they were done, they had removed 184 kilometers of wall, 154 kilometers of border fencing, 144 kilometers of signal systems, and 87 kilometers of barrier ditches — producing approximately 1.7 million tonnes of rubble. German reunification happened on 3 October 1990 — 339 days after the Wall opened. The demolition of the last Wall segments was completed in 1994. Six sections were preserved as memorials. Painted Wall segments with artistic value were auctioned in 1990. Some went to Berlin. Some went to Monte Carlo.

Cranes removing sections of the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate in December 1989.

Thatcher and Mitterrand Did Not Want This to Happen

The fall of the Wall and German reunification are now treated as an unqualified triumph of freedom, and by most measures that characterization is defensible. But the historical record shows that two of the most prominent Western leaders of the era would have preferred things to work out differently. Margaret Thatcher privately told Mikhail Gorbachev in September 1989 — before the Wall fell — that she did not want a united Germany. She said a reunification would lead to changes in postwar borders and could endanger the stability of the whole international situation. She apparently hoped that Gorbachev, of all people, might do something to prevent it. He did not, for the obvious reason that by 1989 the Soviet Union was not in any position to enforce the continued division of Germany. François Mitterrand was more colorful about it afterward. After the Wall fell, Mitterrand reportedly warned Thatcher that a unified Germany could make more ground than Adolf Hitler ever had. This assessment — made about a democracy that had spent forty years carefully subordinating itself to multilateral institutions — reflects the particular anxieties of a generation of European leaders for whom World War II was not yet history but living memory. Both leaders eventually accepted what they could not prevent. Germany reunified. Europe did not collapse. The fears, in retrospect, were not vindicated.

The Night That Followed — and a Few Numbers Worth Sitting With

Leonard Bernstein gave a concert in Berlin on Christmas Day 1989, conducting Beethoven's Ninth with the word Joy in the Ode to Joy changed to Freedom. The orchestra was drawn from East and West Germany, from Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States — the four powers that had divided the city. On New Year's Eve, David Hasselhoff stood on the partly demolished Wall in front of 200,000 people and sang Looking for Freedom. Roger Waters staged a full performance of the Pink Floyd album The Wall near Potsdamer Platz the following July, with a guest list that included Sinéad O'Connor, Joni Mitchell, Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, and the Scorpions. The anniversary debates that followed contain an oddity worth noting. November 9 is the date of the Wall's fall — but it is also the date of Kristallnacht in 1938, the date of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, and the date of Kaiser Wilhelm II's abdication in 1918. German Unity Day was set on 3 October instead, the date of formal reunification in 1990. The loaded weight of what 9 November means in German history made it impossible as a national holiday. The polls are their own strange footnote. In 2010, 24 percent of West Germans and 23 percent of East Germans told pollsters they wished the Wall was still standing. In 2019, 13 percent of Germans said they wanted it back. These numbers are small, but they are not zero, and the fact that they persist thirty-five years later says something — exactly what, is not entirely clear — about the complicated experience of reunification for the people who lived through it. The Wall itself: six preserved sections remain in Berlin. The longest is the East Side Gallery, a 1.3-kilometer stretch of the original Wall covered in murals painted by artists from around the world in 1990. The most famous image on it — Brezhnev and Honecker kissing — was painted by a Russian artist named Dmitri Vrubel and bears the caption: My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love. It is a good summary of the Wall, actually. Of what it was like to live inside it. And of the relief, thirty-four years ago, when it suddenly was not there anymore.