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
the Hungarian government began dismantling its border fence with Austria. The
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. Hungary was at that time a popular tourist destination for East
Germans; 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. This 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 via
Czechoslovakia. 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.
Opening of the border and the
fall of the GDR:
The East German government sought
to defuse the situation by relaxing the country's border controls with effect
from 10 November 1989; the announcement
was made on the evening of 9 November 1989 by Politbüro member Günter
Schabowski at a somewhat chaotic press conference in East Berlin, who
proclaimed the new control regime as liberating the people from a situation of
psychological pressure by legalising and simplifying migration.
Misunderstanding the note passed to him about the decision to open the border,
he announced the border would be opened "immediately, without delay",
rather than from the following day as the government had intended. Crucially,
it was neither meant to be an uncontrolled opening nor to apply to East Germans
wishing to visit the West as tourists. At an interview in English after the press
conference, Schabowski told the NBC reporter Tom Brokaw that "it is no
question of tourism. It is a permission of leaving the GDR [permanently]."
As the press conference had been
broadcast live, within hours, thousands of people gathered at the Berlin Wall
demanding that the guards open the gates. The border guards were unable to
contact their superiors for instructions and, fearing a stampede, opened the
gates. The iconic scenes that followed – people pouring into West Berlin,
standing on the Wall and attacking it with pickaxes – were broadcast worldwide. While the eyes of the world were on the
Mauerfall (the fall of the Wall) in Berlin, a simultaneous process of
Grenzöffnung (border opening) was taking place along the entire length of the
inner German border. Existing crossings were opened immediately. Within the
first four days, 4.3 million East Germans – a quarter of the country's entire
population – poured into West Germany. At the Helmstedt crossing point on the
Berlin–Hanover autobahn, cars were backed up for 65 km (40 mi); some drivers
waited 11 hours to cross to the West. The border was opened in stages over the next
few months. Many new crossing points were created, reconnecting communities
that had been separated for nearly 40 years. To the surprise of many West Germans, many of
the East German visitors spent their DM 100 "welcome money" buying
great quantities of bananas, a highly prized rarity in the East. For months
after the opening of the border, bananas were sold out at supermarkets along
the western side of the border as East Germans bought up whole crates,
believing supplies would soon be exhausted. The rush for fruit made the banana the
unofficial symbol of the changes in East Germany, which some dubbed the
"banana revolution". Some West
German leftists protested at what they saw as rampant consumerism by tossing
bananas at East Germans coming to visit the West. The easterners' obsession
with bananas was famously spoofed by the West German satirical magazine Titanic
on the front cover of its November 1989 edition, which depicted "Easterner
Gaby” happy to be in West Germany: My first banana". Gaby was shown
holding a large peeled cucumber. The opening of the border had a profound
political and psychological effect on the East German public. For many people,
the very existence of the GDR, which the SED had justified as the first
"Socialist state on German soil", came to be seen as pointless. The
state was bankrupt, the economy was collapsing, the political class was
discredited, the governing institutions were in chaos and the people were
demoralised by the evaporation of the collective assumptions that had
underpinned their society for 40 years. Membership of the Party collapsed and
Krenz himself resigned on 6 December 1989 after only 50 days in office, handing
over to the moderate Hans Modrow. The removal of restrictions on travel
prompted hundreds of thousands of East Germans to migrate to the West – more
than 116,000 did so between 9 November and 31 December 1989, compared with
40,000 for the whole of the previous year.
The new East German leadership initiated "round table" talks
with opposition groups, similar to the processes that had led to multi-party
elections in Hungary and Poland. When
the first free elections were held in East Germany in March 1990, the former
SED, which had renamed itself as the Party of Democratic Socialism, was swept
from power and replaced by a pro-reunification Alliance for Germany coalition
led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Chancellor Kohl's party. Both
countries progressed rapidly towards reunification, while international
diplomacy paved the way abroad. In July 1990, monetary union was achieved.[182]
A Treaty on the establishment of a unified Germany was agreed on in August 1990
and political reunification took place on 3 October 1990.
Abandonment of the border:
The border fortifications were
progressively torn down and eventually abandoned in the months following its
opening. Dozens of new crossings were opened by February 1990, and the guards
no longer carried weapons nor made much effort to check travellers' passports. The guards' numbers were rapidly reduced; half
were dismissed within five months of the opening. On 1 July 1990 the border was abandoned and
the Grenztruppen were officially abolished; all but 2,000 of them were
dismissed or transferred to other jobs. The
Bundeswehr gave the remaining border guards and other ex-NVA soldiers the task
of clearing the fortifications, which was completed only in 1994. The scale of
the task was immense, involving both the clearing of the fortifications and the
rebuilding of hundreds of roads and railway lines. A serious complication was
the presence of mines along the border. Although the 1.4 million mines laid by
the GDR were supposed to have been removed during the 1980s, it turned out that
34,000 were unaccounted for. A further 1,100 mines were found and removed
following reunification at a cost of more than DM 250 million, in a programme that was not concluded until
the end of 1995. The border clearers' task was aided unofficially by German
civilians from both sides of the former border, who scavenged the installations
for fencing, wire and blocks of concrete to use in home improvements. Much of
the fence was sold to a West German scrap-metal company. Environmental groups
undertook a programme of re-greening the border, planting new trees and sowing
grass seed to fill in the clear-cut area along the line.
Border area today:
(Sign marking where the Inner-German Border was from 1945-1990.)
Very little remains of the
installations along the former inner German border. At least 30 public, private
and municipal museums along the old line present displays of equipment and
other artifacts relating to the border. Among the preserved sites are several
dozen watchtowers, short stretches of the fence and associated installations
(some of which have been reconstructed), sections of the wall still in situ at
Hötensleben and Mödlareuth, and a number of buildings related to the border,
such as the GDR crossing point at Marienborn. Substantial sections of the Kolonnenweg remain
in place to serve as farm and forestry access roads, though the accompanying
anti-vehicle ditches, fences and other obstacles have been almost entirely
removed. Artworks, commemorative stones, memorials and signs have been erected
at many points along the former border to mark its opening, to remember its victims
and to record the division and reunification of Germany. The closure of the border region for nearly 40
years created a haven for wildlife in some places. Although parts of the East
German side of the border were farmed, intensive farming of the kind practised
elsewhere in Germany was absent and large areas were untouched by agriculture.
Conservationists became aware as early as the 1970s that the border had become
a refuge for rare species of animals and plants. Their findings led the
Bavarian government to begin a programme of buying land along the border to
ensure its protection from development. In
December 1989, only a month after the opening of the border, conservationists
from East and West Germany met to work out a plan to establish a "German
Green Belt" (Grünes Band Deutschland) stretching from the Baltic Sea to
the Czech border. The Bundestag voted unanimously in December 2004 to extend
federal protection to the Green Belt and incorporate it into a "European
Green Belt" being developed along the entire 6,800-kilometre (4,200 mi)
length of the former Iron Curtain. The German Green Belt now links 160 natural
parks, 150 flora-and-fauna areas, three UNESCO biosphere reservations and the
Harz Mountains National Park. It is home to a wide variety of species that are
rare elsewhere in Germany, including the wild cat, black stork, otter and rare
mosses and orchids. Most of Germany's red kites – more than half of the 25,000
that live in Europe – live along the former border. The Bund Naturschutz, one
of Germany's largest conservation groups, is campaigning to extend the area
within the Green Belt designated as nature conservation zones.
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