When was berlin wall torn down

Eventually, East Germany erected 27 miles of concrete wall through the city. People did try to escape. Initially, they fled from houses right along the Wall; later, those houses were emptied and turned into fortifications for the Wall itself. Others plotted riskier escapes through tunnels, on hot air balloons, and even via train.

Between and , over 5, people made successful escapes. Others were not so lucky; at least were killed or died while trying to cross the Wall. Over the years, the Wall became a grim symbol of the Cold War. By , many East Germans had had enough. They staged a series of mass demonstrations demanding democracy.

Meanwhile, the Soviet bloc was destabilized by economic woes and political reforms. Meet the forgotten 'wolf children' of World War II. Thousands of East Berliners flooded toward border crossings along the Wall, where confused guards eventually opened the gates. As East Berliners pushed through, tens of thousands of West Berliners met them in a massive outpouring of emotion and celebration.

As they celebrated with champagne, music, and tears, Berliners began to literally tear down the wall with sledgehammers and chisels. Less than a month later, the GDR collapsed entirely, and in , Germany reunified. The Berlin Wall was erected almost to completion in a single night, without warning, on August This famous photo from September shows a woman trying to escape East Berlin through an apartment block where one side of the building faced the West.

Some men try to pull her back inside while others wait underneath, hoping to aid in her escape. Amidst mounting internal and international pressure, a mistaken announcement by an East German official on November 9, led to the wall being opened.

Germans on both sides of the border celebrated for days. New openings were made in the wall, like here at Potsdamer Platz two days later. Today, some parts of the Berlin Wall still stand as a memorial to hard-won freedoms. Politicians for the state government of Berlin lay flowers along the site of the Berlin Wall on Bernauer Strasse, 56 years to the day after it was constructed. At least people were shot dead by East German border guards at the wall from to That all changed in an instant on November 9, , when a new East German travel policy was announced at a press conference live on state TV.

The law announced that — effective immediately — all East German citizens were free to travel to the West. Thousands of people ran straight to the guarded border crossings in the heart of Berlin, which would be opened just hours later. The images of people celebrating together on both sides of the border flashed across the world, poignantly marking the end of German division.

Read more: East Germany: A failed experiment in dictatorship. Concessions made by Mikhail Gorbachev, a Soviet reformer who came to power in , were key to the agreement. Axel Klausmeier, director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, said Gorbachev's policies of "glasnost" openness and "perestroika" reform were a clear break from the Brezhnev doctrine — a policy that aimed to ensure that Warsaw Pact countries the Soviet Union and its satellites would not diverge from the political course set out by the Kremlin.

With Gorbachev, said Klausmeier, suddenly there was a new policy: "No matter what happens in our socialist brother countries, these states are responsible for themselves. Before Gorbachev, calls for freedom in the Eastern Bloc had been brutally crushed by the Soviets: in East Germany in , Hungary in and the former Czechoslovakia in Read more: Understanding East Germany: A never-ending look at the past. Increasingly, civil rights activists felt emboldened to push for glasnost and perestroika in their own countries.

In Poland, contacts between communist leaders and the union pro-democracy movement Solidarity, which was still officially banned, began as early as the summer of It began with demonstrators rallying for freedom in the centre of the city of Leipzig. On 9 October, within days of East Germany celebrating its 40th anniversary, 70, people took to the streets. There were calls for free elections from West Germany, and talk of reform from East Germany's new communist leader Egon Krenz.

No-one knew the fall of the Wall was weeks away. In late October parliament in Hungary, which had been among the first to hold mass demonstrations, adopted legislation providing for direct presidential elections and multi-party parliamentary elections. And then on 31 October, the numbers demanding democracy in East Germany swelled to half a million. Mr Krenz flew to Moscow for meetings - he recently told the BBC that he had been assured German reunification was not on the agenda.

Find out more about East Germany, On 4 November, a month after the East German protests had begun, around half a million people gathered in Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin. Three days later, the government resigned. But there was no intention to give way to democracy and Egon Krenz remained head of the Communist Party and the country's de facto leader. He would not be there long. Five days later, Mr Schabowski gave his world-changing press conference. Earlier in '89, Beijing demonstrators in Tiananmen Square who had called for democracy in China were crushed in a major military crackdown.

The USSR had used its military to put down rebellions before. So why not now? Within the Soviet Union itself, it did, killing 21 pro-independence protesters in the Soviet republic of Georgia. But elsewhere in the communist bloc, they did not. In a break with Soviet policy, Mikhail Gorbachev decided against using the threat of military might to quell mass demonstrations and political revolution in neighbouring countries. Student demonstrators in Prague clashed with police, triggering the Velvet Revolution which overthrew Czechoslovak communism within weeks.

In Romania, demonstrations ended in violence and saw the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. A new government took over as the ousted leader fled his palace and angry crowds stormed it. Having gone that far, it was simply too late. Thousands of people were demanding that the gates be opened. He was facing a momentous decision — open fire on the civilians, or let them through. At pm, Jager phoned his superior and reported his decision: he would open all the remaining gates and allow the crowds to stream across the border.

West Berliners greeted their counterparts with music and champagne. Some citizens began to chip away at the physical barrier with sledgehammers and chisels. By midnight, the checkpoints were completely overrun. Over that weekend, more than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin to participate in the mass celebration. Gorbachev agreed on negotiations with the U. President George H. On Oct. Despite the initial euphoria, the road to recovery for East Germany was long and difficult with economic and social dislocation.

And the fallout from the fall continues to this day: citizens were still paying slightly higher taxes than before the merger in order to cover the costs of unification.

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