The Berlin Wall opened because a spokesman misread a note on live TV
On the evening of 9 November 1989, East German spokesman Günter Schabowski was handed new travel rules he had not helped write. Asked by reporters when they applied, he hesitated, then guessed: immediately. West German television broadcast his words across the East within the hour, and crowds headed for the border crossings.
The Wall had actually been two walls, each 4 metres tall and 155 kilometres long, separated by a mined death strip watched from 302 towers by 1989, where guards could shoot anyone crossing. Cracks in the Eastern Bloc appeared that summer. On 19 August the Pan-European Picnic, which Otto von Habsburg conceived as a probe of Soviet tolerance, briefly opened the Austria-Hungary border. The Soviet Union did nothing, and tens of thousands of East Germans set off for Hungary.
Pressure kept building. Refugees crowded the West German embassy in Prague until, on 30 September, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told them from its balcony that they could leave. Erich Honecker resigned on 18 October in favour of Egon Krenz, whose promises of reform convinced few. East Germany was also struggling to service foreign loans. A draft travel law on 6 November was so timid that West Berlin's mayor called it complete trash.
So the Politburo drafted new rules letting citizens apply to travel abroad without the old conditions, through any crossing, Berlin included, to take effect the next day. Schabowski, not briefed properly, read them out near the end of an hour-long press conference. When the Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman or a Bild reporter asked about timing, he improvised; when asked about West Berlin, he shrugged and read the clause confirming it. A Daily Telegraph reporter's question about what this meant for the Wall left him frozen, and he ended the session at 19:00.
Most East Germans heard the news on West German channels, which reached nearly the whole country; ARD's anchor declared that the gates in the Wall stood wide open. Weeks earlier, on 9 October in Leipzig, 70,000 people had marched after prayers at St. Nicholas Church without a shot fired, despite police authorised to use force. The Malta Summit in December declared the Cold War over, and Germany reunified the following October.
Source: Fall of the Berlin Wall
