The Night the Berlin Wall Fell and the Press Conference Slip That Opened It

The most dangerous thing a totalitarian state can do is answer a reporter's question honestly. It happened on a Thursday evening in East Berlin, in front of live cameras, and within hours a wall that had stood for twenty-eight years was crowded with people sitting on top of it.

I want to tell this story the way it should be told, which means giving the accident its due and then refusing to let it carry more weight than it can bear. A bureaucrat's mistake opened the Berlin Wall. But a mistake only opens a door that is already straining against its hinges, and it took forty years of patient, unglamorous, sometimes unpopular work by free nations to bend those hinges. Both halves belong in the history.

August 1961: The Wall Goes Up

Germany was divided at the end of the Second World War into four occupation zones, and Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, was divided into four sectors. In 1949 the western zones became the Federal Republic and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic, the East German state. The two Berlins sat side by side, and for years a person could walk or ride the subway from one to the other.

That open door was a problem for East Germany's rulers, because people used it. Millions of East Germans moved west between 1949 and 1961, and many of them were the doctors, engineers and skilled workers a state needs. A government that must stop its citizens from leaving has already lost the argument about whether it deserves them.

In the early hours of Sunday, August 13, 1961, East German troops and police began stringing barbed wire across the streets of Berlin, and in the days that followed they replaced it with concrete blocks and, over the years, a system of walls, fences, watchtowers, dog runs and a cleared strip known as the death strip. The regime called it an "anti-fascist protection barrier." Everyone knew what it was for. Its guns pointed inward.

Those Who Died Trying

Please do not skip this part, because the wall is easiest to remember as a backdrop and hardest to remember as a killing machine. On August 17, 1962, an eighteen-year-old construction worker named Peter Fechter was shot while trying to cross near Checkpoint Charlie and was left to bleed to death at the base of the wall, in sight of people on the Western side who could not reach him. His death became an emblem of the wall's cruelty.

Researchers who have studied the records count at least 140 people who died at the Berlin Wall during its existence. The last person shot dead trying to cross is generally identified as Chris Gueffroy, a twenty-year-old killed on February 5, 1989, nine months before the wall fell. The numbers matter because they are the argument. A state that must shoot its citizens to keep them cannot claim their consent.

The Declaration of Independence states the principle the wall denied: governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." The right of the people to leave is the quiet test of that consent, and the East German state failed it with machine guns.

The Long Containment

Now the first half of the argument. The West did not stumble into a good outcome. It spent forty years working at one.

• March 12, 1947: President Truman asked Congress to support free peoples resisting subjugation, in what became the Truman Doctrine. The Marshall Plan followed, rebuilding Western Europe's economies.
• June 1948 to May 1949: the Soviets blockaded West Berlin, and the Western allies kept it alive by air for nearly a year. The full story is in The Berlin Airlift Fed a City by Air for Eleven Months Without Firing a Shot.
• April 4, 1949: the North Atlantic Treaty created NATO, an alliance whose Article 5 says an armed attack against one is an attack against all. The text is short, and Read the North Atlantic Treaty, All Fourteen Articles Take Ten Minutes walks through it.
• June 26, 1963: President Kennedy stood in West Berlin and told the crowd, "Ich bin ein Berliner," a promise of solidarity with a city that had been walled in.
• June 8, 1982: Reagan told the British Parliament that the march of freedom would leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history, a prediction covered in Reagan at Westminster in 1982 Predicted the Soviet Collapse Out Loud.
• June 12, 1987: Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall, a speech read in Tear Down This Wall Read Closely as the Speech Diplomats Tried to Soften.

Each step was controversial when taken. Each was attacked as dangerous, as needlessly provocative, as an obstacle to a "peaceful coexistence" that never quite arrived. The people who argued for firmness were told they were warmongers. The record, in 1989, favored the firm.

There is a lesson here about how freedom wins, and it is not a thrilling one. It wins by outlasting the alternative, by keeping the alliance together, by showing the better system next door, and by waiting for the other side's internal contradictions to do the rest. For the economic side of the contest, the comparison in Two Germanys and two Koreas, the natural experiments that socialism lost is blunt.

The Year 1989: The Pressure Builds

By 1989 the Eastern bloc was cracking. Poland held partly free elections in June in which the Solidarity movement did very well. In the summer, Hungary dismantled its border fence with Austria, and East Germans on holiday in Hungary began crossing west. Around September 11, 1989, Hungary formally opened its border to East Germans, and thousands left through the gap. Others took refuge in West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. The East German state was losing its people without a wall to stop them.

At home, the pressure came from churches and streets. In Leipzig, prayer meetings at St. Nicholas Church grew into Monday evening demonstrations, and on October 9, 1989, tens of thousands marched through the city chanting "We are the people." The authorities had weapons and had prepared for violence, yet the security forces did not fire. Soviet leader Gorbachev, who had visited East Berlin for the state's fortieth anniversary on October 7, had made clear that Soviet troops would not be used to put down the East Germans. Party chief Erich Honecker resigned on October 18 and was replaced by Egon Krenz. On November 4, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in East Berlin's Alexanderplatz. The government was trying to buy time with reforms, and one of those reforms was a new travel law.

November 9, 1989: The Press Conference

On Thursday, November 9, the leadership was working on that law. The intent, as far as it can be reconstructed, was to allow East Germans to apply for exit permits in an orderly fashion, starting the next day. A draft decision was handed to Günter Schabowski, the Politburo member who was serving as the party's spokesman, shortly before he went before the press. The document's final sentence said it was not to be released before the following day, and he did not catch it.

At his early-evening press conference, which was being broadcast live, Schabowski read the text of the new rules, and the answer to the obvious question mattered more than the rules themselves. A journalist asked when the rules would take effect. Schabowski answered that, as far as he knew, it took effect immediately, without delay.

The news agencies ran with it. West German television that evening reported that the border was open. And East Berliners, who watched West German television as a matter of habit, took the report at its word.

The Crowds at Bornholmer Strasse

Thousands of East Berliners went to the border crossings that night. At the checkpoint on Bornholmer Strasse in the north of the city, the crowd grew by the hour, and the border guards had no orders. The officer in charge, a lieutenant colonel named Harald Jäger, called for instructions and received none that fit. By around 11:30 p.m. the crowd was so large, and so insistent, and the guards were so clearly unwilling to fire into it, that he ordered the gate raised. People poured through, into the arms of West Berliners waiting on the other side.

Other crossings followed. By morning, crowds were dancing on the wall near the Brandenburg Gate, and people with hammers and chisels began chipping off pieces. The wall, the great symbol of the Cold War, had turned in a single night from a barrier into a souvenir.

I find that scene hard to improve upon. A system that had trained its guards for decades to shoot was undone by a moment in which the guards would not. That is a reminder that tyranny depends, in the end, on obedience, and that obedience is a decision individuals make.

The Strongest Objection

An honest skeptic will say that this story proves too little for the case I want to make. If a wall falls because an official misreads a note, why credit forty years of strategy? Perhaps the lesson is simply that history is accidents.

That is the objection at its best, and it has four answers.

1. An accident needs conditions. Schabowski's slip would have changed nothing in 1979 or 1969, because the guards would have fired and the Soviets would have intervened. In 1989 neither was true. Conditions made the slip decisive.
2. The conditions were the product of policy. The East German economy was failing in comparison with the West's, the Soviet economy could not sustain the competition, and the Soviet leadership had decided not to use force. Those were the fruits of containment, of NATO's steadiness and of the military and economic pressure of the 1980s.
3. The people had to act. The Leipzig marchers, the church groups, the refugees in the Prague embassy and the crowds at the checkpoints took risks that were real. A policy of containment gave them an opening, and they used it.
4. Slips only happen where the truth is hidden. The slip occurred because a regime that controlled information was trying to manage a decision it could not announce honestly. Free societies make fewer such errors because they have a press that asks the question in advance.

None of this takes anything from the accident. The accident is a delight, and it is the part of the story that will always be told at parties. But a conservative understands that good outcomes are rarely random. They are the result of a nation keeping its commitments long enough for luck to find them.

After the Night

The fall of the wall was not the end of the story but the beginning of the last chapter. East Germany held its first free parliamentary election in March 1990, the two Germanys were reunified on October 3, 1990, and by the end of December 1991 the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist. For the American citizen, the point is that a long and costly commitment was vindicated. The people of Eastern Europe did not need to be told what freedom was. They needed the chance to choose it.

It is also a lesson about vigilance. The ideas that built the wall did not die with it, and the habit of telling people that the state knows better than they do can show up anywhere. The Constitution answers that habit by dividing power, by protecting the press and by guaranteeing citizens the right to leave a place where they are not free. See Textbook Cold War Tales the Soviet Archives Quietly Overturned for what the archives revealed afterward.

The case in brief

1. The Berlin Wall, begun on August 13, 1961, was built to stop East Germans from leaving, which is the clearest possible evidence that the state lacked the consent of the governed.
2. At least 140 people died at the wall, from Peter Fechter in 1962 to Chris Gueffroy in February 1989.
3. In 1989, pressure from Poland, Hungary, Leipzig's Monday marches and Soviet restraint pushed the East German regime to announce a new travel rule it did not fully control.
4. On November 9, Günter Schabowski's answer at a live press conference that the rule applied immediately led crowds to the checkpoints, and guards at Bornholmer Strasse opened the gate at about 11:30 p.m.
5. The accident was decisive only because forty years of containment, from the Truman Doctrine to NATO, had made the ground ready.

What you can do: read Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which takes a minute, and then ask your representative what commitments to allies they believe the next generation must keep.