PART III
Chapter Six
WHEN GÜNTER SCHABOWSKI’S press conference ended, the journalists in the room asked themselves what had just happened.1 Because they had not received a copy of the group of four’s text, despite Schabowski wrongly asserting on camera that they had, the reporters—especially wire correspondents, under pressure to send news immediately—had to rely solely on Schabowski’s confusing statements in the closing minutes of the press conference in deciding what to report.
Unsurprisingly, their initial accounts varied. The first wire report came from Reuters at 7:02 p.m., even as journalists still inside the press conference room were mobbing the stage in the hope of getting clarification from Schabowski. “Leaving via all GDR checkpoints immediately possible,” Reuters reported, and then followed up with a longer notice saying that “East German citizens wanting to depart can, starting immediately, use all border crossings . . . those who want to depart no longer need to take a detour via Czechoslovakia. The responsible police offices are instructed to issue visas for emigration immediately.” At 7:04 p.m., a West German wire service announced that “starting immediately,” GDR residents could exit “directly through all checkpoints between the GDR and the FRG.” At the same moment, ADN, the East German news agency, released the group of four’s text. The staff at ADN apparently felt that if Schabowski could ignore the embargo until 4:00 a.m. on November 10, they could as well. Next, the Associated Press chimed in at 7:05 p.m. with “GDR opens borders.”
Television coverage appears to have started as late as 7:17 p.m. The first major evening news show to air after the press conference, broadcast by the West German network ZDF, decided to cover Schabowski only as its sixth item of news. Once it had dispensed with the previous five, ZDF reported that “starting immediately, East German citizens are allowed to exit directly over all border crossings between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany. With this decision today, a temporary rule until the passage of a new travel law has been created.”2 Its competitor news broadcast at the other major West German network, ARD, airing at 8:00 p.m., informed viewers that the “detour” through Czechoslovakia had become unnecessary and that the Wall “should become permeable.” Its coverage then turned to a long report on Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s visit to Poland, which had clearly been intended as the main story for the evening.3
Despite their reports, journalists remained unsure about what was actually unfolding. Since the Stasi conducted surveillance on foreign journalists, their confusion that night is manifest in the ministry’s files. At 7:17 p.m., for example, one television reporter called his office in Cologne to say that Schabowski “probably had not even known himself what he was announcing.” This journalist and his conversation partner agreed that the new rules applied solely to émigrés, not to anyone just wanting to travel. Cologne advised the reporter in West Berlin to “keep your camera team ready” just in case.4
Back at the International Press Center, Tom Brokaw, Marc Kusnetz, and Michele Neubert hurried into the side room already prepared for Brokaw’s one-on-one conversation with Schabowski. They hoped that, despite the chaos erupting in the main auditorium of the press center, the East German would keep his word to give them an exclusive interview. Fortunately for them, Schabowski wanted to get out of the auditorium as quickly as possible too. An English-speaking reporter had pushed his way up to the front of the room and was trying to convince the East German to translate the wording of the new regulation into English. Dismayed, Schabowski refused to do so, saying, “It is too difficult for me to express it in English.” After exchanging a few more words with the crowd of journalists jostling each other, Schabowski put up his hands and said that he needed to get back to the central committee meeting, so “please permit me to leave.” In fact, he intended to exit the auditorium, to give Brokaw the promised interview, and to go home, but presumably he thought it would sound better to plead that he had to get back to work.5
Elbowing his way out, Schabowski finally managed to make his way into the side room where Brokaw, Kusnetz, Neubert, and the NBC camera crew were waiting for him.6 After he entered, Neubert used her own back to barricade the door against entry by other reporters, who kept trying to push their way in during the roughly ten-minute interview. Brokaw immediately started asking the Politburo member the questions every journalist wanted to ask: “Mr. Schabowski: Do I understand it correctly? Citizens of the GDR can leave through any checkpoint that they choose for personal reasons? They no longer have to go through a third country?” In broken English, Schabowski responded, “Uh . . . they are not further forced to leave GDR by . . . uh, uh . . . transit, uh, through another country.” Brokaw tried again: “It is possible for them to go through the Wall at some point?” “It is possible for them to go through the border,” was Schabowski’s response. Brokaw followed up by saying, “Freedom of travel?” Schabowski replied, “Yes of course,” and then added, “It is no question of tourism. It is a permission of leaving GDR.”
Schabowski’s English skills were not equal to the challenge of discussing the provisions of the regulation, as he himself had just admitted moments earlier in the main auditorium. Brokaw and the producers in the room with him, Kusnetz and Neubert, had to make a very quick judgment call as a result: how should they interpret Schabowski’s answers? Schabowski had just, on camera, replied “Yes of course” when asked if his words meant freedom of travel for East Germans. He had also confirmed that East Germans could “go through the border.” In addition, Schabowski had confirmed earlier during the press conference itself—also on camera—that the border under discussion included the one around West Berlin. The assembled journalists had no way of knowing, of course, about Schabowski’s unfamiliarity with the group of four’s text. Taken at face value, his comments implied that freedom of travel had come to both the GDR and to East Berlin, and that was what Brokaw and his team decided to report. Still, in his initial broadcast, Brokaw would state—correctly and more accurately than some of the German-language coverage—that the new border-crossing options required visas beforehand.7
After the brief interview ended, and despite his remarks that he needed to return to the central committee, Schabowski tiredly made his way to his chauffeured car and asked the driver to take him home. Home was East Berlin’s gated Wandlitz compound, where the party’s elite resided, securely sealed off from the rest of the population. Schabowski and his family were in house number nineteen, down the street from Mielke. He could still remember decades later how, when his car pulled up on the evening of November 9, he saw almost no lighted windows in the houses in the compound. The leaders of the party, he guessed, had not even watched his press conference.8
In contrast, Brokaw, Kusnetz, and Neubert left the room in a state of excitement as they headed for their own car and driver. Other journalists, watching them exit the room where they had been speaking to Schabowski, shouted at them, “Is it true?” As he and his producers rushed out, Brokaw hurriedly replied over his shoulder, “It’s true, the Wall is coming down.” Brokaw’s comments carried a special weight with the members of the world media who heard them, since he was the only one who had had the chance to get clarification from Schabowski one-on-one that night. These comments increased the degree of certainty that other journalists displayed when they communicated with their own editors and networks.9
Brokaw and his producers soon found their driver and, using their car phone, called New York. The network decided that Brokaw would provide an immediate voice update from that car phone, since the full Nightly News television show was still about five hours away. Kusnetz stood outside the vehicle to ensure that there was no disruption while Brokaw spoke live on NBC from the car phone and provided a quick summary of the press conference. The technology of the day did not allow the network to show a live shot of Brokaw as well, however. Live images required a “satellite window,” or pre-booked time for satellite use, but such periods had to be scheduled well in advance. NBC did have a satellite window reserved for the potential Nightly News broadcast from West Berlin, but only starting at the beginning of the show, which would not be until 12:30 a.m. Berlin time, or 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time.10
The network had also secured the necessary city permits for a potential broadcast from a location in West Berlin near where the Wall ran in front of the Brandenburg Gate. NBC’s head of foreign news coverage, Jerry Lamprecht, had instructed Nightly News crew members to secure those permits and to make extensive preparations at the site. Overseen by Maralyn Gelefsky, by the evening of November 9 they had already built a twenty-by-twenty-foot platform. They had also installed powerful floodlights known as HMIs, anticipating a broadcast in the middle of the night, Berlin time. Lamprecht and Gelefsky even arranged for a cherry picker to be brought in, so that camera operators could get overhead shots of the Wall behind Brokaw if needed. There were also small trailers available for editing tape on-site.11
The setup was so perfect that conspiracy theorists would later suggest that NBC must have received some secret advance word of the opening of the Wall, but all NBC staff present that historic night deny it. The whole Nightly News installation was simply on standby; the final decision to broadcast the show live from West Berlin had not yet been made when Schabowski started his press conference. Indeed, Brokaw had even apologized to Gelefsky earlier that day, saying that all her hard work was probably for naught, since there was nothing to merit airing Nightly News from the Berlin Wall after all. He had also told Cheryl Gould, a senior producer coordinating the show from the NBC control room in New York, that “we came all this way and there is no real story.”12
After his interview with Schabowski, however, it was clear to Brokaw and his team that both the satellite window and the setup had suddenly become invaluable. They were the only such preparations by any network from any country at the visually stunning site. Now the live broadcast of Nightly News was obviously a go.13 Brokaw and his producers made their way back from East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie to their location at the Wall near Brandenburg Gate. Observing the network’s team from the eastern side of the Wall, Stasi agents noted when the NBC floodlights snapped on at 7:50 p.m., as preparations for the show began.14
There was, however, one enormous problem: there were not yet any images of East Germans actually crossing through, or over, the Wall. Kusnetz remembered it as a “stomach-churning situation.” Brokaw had already announced on NBC that the Wall was going to open, and the network had made the decision to broadcast from West Berlin. For that broadcast, starting at 12:30 a.m. local time, they clearly needed images of people crossing the Wall—and it was the responsibility of Kusnetz and the camera operators working for him to find and to feed such images to New York. The clock was ticking, and Wheatley, the show’s executive producer, kept asking, “When are we going to get that feed?” Answering, “It’ll be there,” Kusnetz tried to figure out what to do.15
HE WAS HARDLY the only one wondering what to do. A similar question occurred to those East Germans on duty along the Berlin Wall that night, especially at the biggest inner-city border crossing, the one on Bornholmer Street. The “control territory,” as the Stasi called it, of this checkpoint in the north of the divided city covered about seven hundred by four hundred feet, or roughly six and a half acres, and contained a dense complex of buildings, gates, security fortifications, and lanes for both pedestrians and cars.16
Bornholmer managed a number of different kinds of traffic. Residents of both West Berlin and West Germany used the crossing to move from West to East and back again, while travelers with diplomatic credentials took advantage of special reserve lanes to shorten their wait times. These lanes also allowed, at least for a time, the cook for the Swiss embassy in East Berlin to run his own personal love ferry. He would regularly carry his girlfriend through Bornholmer in his car trunk for shared nights out in West Berlin. The authorities at Bornholmer began to suspect something but did not know if the cook enjoyed diplomatic immunity, meaning they were not sure whether they had the right to search his trunk. The bureaucrats got busy. An internal investigation came to the conclusion that the cook was not covered by immunity, and both he and his trunk-riding girlfriend were hauled over (and out) the next time they tried to head to the West.17
The Stasi took this aerial photo of the Bornholmer Street border crossing, with West Berlin at the top on the far side of the bridge, in about 1985. The checkpoint itself is the large, walled-off complex in the center of the photo. It includes a number of barriers, lights, service buildings, and, at left, numbered lanes for processing vehicles. (MfS, from file HA XXII 5724/2, 34, on display at Bornholmer Street in 2013; photo by the author)
Schabowski’s press conference on November 9 put Bornholmer in a particularly difficult position because while the crossing was big and well fortified, it was in a tricky location—at least from the point of view of the East German regime. The site was highly accessible. It was near Schönhauser Allee, a major access road to downtown. It could easily be reached with public transport. Bornholmer also stood near the Prenzlauer Berg residential district of East Berlin, where large numbers of “hostile-negative forces”—such as Aram Radomski and Siggi Schefke—lived.18
On the evening of November 9, those two “hostile negatives” were indeed heading to the border crossing. Radomski had watched Schabowski’s press conference live at his girlfriend’s place on Metzer Street in Prenzlauer Berg. After the opening minutes, she had found it so tedious that she had wandered away. Radomski, however, had kept watching. “Aram, turn that TV off, that’s all just shit,” she had called out to him from another room. Radomski had refused, saying, “Hold on, something seems new to me . . . I don’t know what exactly.”19 Over the protests of his girlfriend, Radomski watched and listened as Schabowski mumbled his way through his confusing text about emigration. As the press conference abruptly ended, Radomski decided that he wanted to find out what Schabowski’s statement of “right away” meant. After a futile attempt to persuade his girlfriend to come with him, he left her apartment and went to the nearby Metzer Eck pub, a regular hangout for Radomski, Schefke, and their friends.
Sure enough, Schefke was already drinking at the bar, along with a few others. Radomski shouted, “Good thing you’re here. We need to go to the Bornholmer Street border crossing immediately!” The rest of the men at the bar thought Radomski was crazy, but Schefke trusted Radomski’s intuition, even though he himself had not heard the press conference. The two hurried off with the parting words “If we are not back in two hours, then we are in the West.” Their friends laughed at their self-delusion.20 The two men stopped briefly at Schefke’s place on nearby Gotland Street, on the way to Bornholmer, in order to grab some of his stash of West German currency, just in case. They then drove the short remaining distance to Bornholmer and parked the car on a nearby street, not suspecting how long it would be before either of them would see it again.21
Bornholmer had become a giant magnet, just as the Nikolai Church had one month to the day earlier—and it was not just Berliners who were showing up. Katrin Hattenhauer was headed to Bornholmer as well. On October 9, she had been in solitary confinement in Leipzig, wondering if the noise she could hear in her cell came from tank treads and if she was about to be executed.22 Word of what was actually happening outside that day, however, had spread through the prison by messages tapped on walls and heard through toothbrush cups used as earpieces. The sound of laughter, specifically banned, had begun echoing in the prison corridors.23 Then, a few days later, Hattenhauer had mysteriously been released from solitary confinement in Leipzig but told that she had a restriction on her movement, so she should not leave the city limits.24 Ignoring the restriction, in November Hattenhauer had gotten on a train to see friends in East Berlin. She intended to celebrate with them through the night until the dawn of her twenty-first birthday, November 10, 1989. On the evening of the ninth, she and her friends chose a bar near the Bornholmer Street border crossing for the start of her birthday celebration. Their evening took an unexpected turn, however, once they heard about Schabowski’s press conference secondhand. Although they learned the news later than Radomski and Schefke, when they did hear it, Hattenhauer and her Berlin friends had the same idea: go to Bornholmer, the nearest border crossing, and see what might be possible.25
Neither Radomski, Schefke, nor Hattenhauer had a detailed plan, only an intuitive sense that now was the moment to show up and to speak up. Radomski was guessing that the new rules applied only to those who were prepared to emigrate for good, which neither he nor Schefke was. He wondered, however, how a border official could enforce such rules. How would checkpoint authorities make sure that someone who was leaving was leaving forever? Would they really refuse reentry? He figured that he and Schefke could say that they wanted to emigrate, just to see what would happen. Radomski also had a camera with him and hoped for some interesting photos, although in the chaos of the evening it would be smashed.26
Radomski and Schefke remembered being among the first dozen or so “early adopters” of the new regulations to arrive at Bornholmer. The two immediately started asking the border officials posted at the eastern entry to the checkpoint whether they could exit, but they were turned back. Radomski next demanded to speak to a senior officer, and someone came out to talk with him, but the answer was no different. He and Schefke decided to keep complaining and probing nonetheless.27
This Stasi map of the Bornholmer Street border crossing complex, with the eastern entry at the bottom and West Berlin at the top above the dashed line, indicates its east-west length as being 210 meters (roughly 700 feet) with an additional bridge span to the west of 113 meters (roughly 400 feet). The typed map key at right reads roughly: “Explanation of Symbols: 1. Service Buildings; 2. Barrier Gates; 3. Guard Posts; 4. Pre-Control Area; 5. Customs and Passport Clearance Area.” The area to the bottom left, marked with the number 5, contains the vehicle processing lanes. (MfS, from file BStU, MfS HA I, Nr. 3510, 14)
Inside the Bornholmer border-crossing complex itself, the senior officer on duty that night was Harald Jäger. Jäger, born in 1943, had long been a loyal servant of the regime: by 1989, he was a veteran with twenty-five years of service at Bornholmer. At the age of eighteen, he had started working as a border policeman, following in the footsteps of his father, and had signed up just in time to contribute to the construction of the Berlin Wall. Both father and son felt that the overriding goal of their state should be to avoid another war on top of the two brutal conflicts that had already occurred that century. The younger Jäger was convinced for that reason that the Berlin Wall had been tragic but necessary. In his eyes, it had been preferable to what he saw as the alternative: war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO.28
In 1964, three years after the Wall went up, Harald Jäger secured a position in passport control at Bornholmer Street. Over the following twenty-five years, he worked his way up to the rank of lieutenant colonel and deputy head of the passport control unit.29Despite the military-sounding title and the fact that he worked at the border, his post was in many ways a desk job. A normal workday for Jäger consisted of inspecting the papers of travelers crossing at Bornholmer. He or his colleagues would take photos of an individual’s papers by placing them on a table with a camera underneath. A live feed would transmit the photos to backroom operatives. The operatives would go through a massive card catalog to see if their colleagues needed to take action of some kind. By 1989, the card catalog at Bornholmer Street contained about sixty thousand names, twenty to a card.30 The names were mostly those of West Berliners and West Germans (many of whom were former East Berliners and East Germans) along with a few other foreigners who crossed regularly. Numbers on the cards corresponded to the control measures the Stasi would undertake against that individual. A number in the eight hundreds meant that the secret police would maintain surveillance on the traveler during the visit to the East. A number in the two hundreds usually meant “do not let this person into the GDR at all.” The backroom operatives would activate a light signal based on the cards: green light, no operational measures necessary, traveler can cross; red light, measures necessary. In addition, Jäger, his colleagues, and the customs officers might initiate a conversation to figure out the purpose of a traveler’s trip, or might inspect vehicles and bags.31 While he carried a pistol, Jäger had never killed an attempted border crosser.32 He was essentially a record keeper, one of the deputies to the senior figure who kept tabs on the identities of those individuals crossing at Bornholmer.
Stasi file photo of Harald Jäger, the senior officer on duty at Bornholmer Street on the night of November 9, 1989. The photo is undated but, judging by Jäger’s age, shows his appearance roughly as it would have been in 1989. (MfS, from file BStU HA KuSCH AKG KA HM Jäger, Harald)
Authority at this checkpoint, and at all border crossings, was actually split among three groups: border guards, customs officers, and passport control officers such as Jäger. This division of labor meant they were all keeping an eye on one another. The first group, the border guards, bore responsibility for physically protecting the Wall and its checkpoints. There were seven border guard regiments for the roughly hundred-mile-long Wall overall, each with one thousand to fourteen hundred troops; on an average night, about half a dozen of them were on duty in the Bornholmer checkpoint itself.33 The second group, the customs officials, carried out basic searches of people attempting to cross the border. There were a little under twenty of them on duty at Bornholmer that night. But the most important group at any border crossing was always the passport control unit, because it represented a kind of Stasi branch office at the checkpoint. Jäger, his boss, and all of his colleagues worked for the Ministry for State Security and reported directly to superiors at that ministry.34 To conceal their identities, they wore uniforms identical to those of the border guards, and so to travelers they were indistinguishable from those guards. Everyone who worked at the border crossing, however, knew that the official in charge of the passport control unit on any given day was the senior Stasi officer on duty, and therefore the man in charge. The head of the Bornholmer passport control unit in 1989 was Werner Bachmann, not Jäger, but during the key hours of November 9 Bachmann would be absent, having been called away to a night meeting.35
As a result, the night of the ninth unfolded on Jäger’s watch as he supervised about a dozen passport control staff members. He had reported for duty at eight o’clock that morning for an uninterrupted twenty-four-hour shift.36 Eating dinner in one of the Bornholmer control buildings, he watched Schabowski’s press conference live, together with some of his men. Unable to restrain himself, he yelled “Bullshit!” at the television screen, then immediately called Colonel Rudi Ziegenhorn, the superior officer on duty at the Stasi’s Operational Command Headquarters on Schneller Street that night to find out what had happened. Ziegenhorn surprised Jäger by replying that everything remained the same as always.37 Manfred Sens, the officer in charge of the border guards at Bornholmer on the evening of November 9, also tried to get instructions by calling his regiment command, but Sens’s superior officer knew nothing out of the ordinary either.38 Next, Jäger called the sentries on watch at the border crossing’s eastern entry, near where Radomski and Schefke were causing trouble. They reported that within minutes of the end of the press conference at 7:00 p.m., about ten to twenty people had gathered and were demanding to be allowed to pass.
In Jäger’s decades on the job, he had dealt now and again with such unapproved attempts to cross. Especially at night and under the influence of alcohol, would-be border crossers would show up, and border officials would admonish, detain, or otherwise deter them. Jäger and his men even had a nickname for such characters: “wild pigs.” What was new on the night of November 9, however, was not only the rapidly increasing number of “wild pigs” but also their determination. They simply would not leave.
Jäger called Colonel Ziegenhorn again. The colonel said that the troublemakers should be made to wait around for a while and then “sent back.” Jäger communicated these instructions to the staff at the eastern entry at about 7:30 p.m. In return, they informed him that the number of “wild pigs” had jumped from ten or twenty to fifty or one hundred. Some were even approaching in vehicles. Jäger directed his men to tell the crowd that there were no instructions to let them out.39 However, people were appearing not only at Bornholmer Street but also at other crossing points. Stasi officers in the passport control unit at the Sonnenallee checkpoint, for example, reported similar developments. By 7:45 p.m., a crowd of East Germans were pressuring the border officials there to let them pass, citing as justification “the reports appearing in the mass media.”40
People had also begun to call various regime offices. As early as 7:14 p.m., one East German called a council of ministers office to complain that the travel application offices all seemed to be closed despite Schabowski’s announcement. At 7:20 p.m. came another call, asking whether the newly approved travel could take place by train.41 And one East Berlin resident named Peter Leonhardt dialed a local police station that evening, requesting to speak to the senior officer on duty. When put through, he explained that he had just heard Schabowski say that applications for travel were being accepted immediately, so he wanted to deliver his application that very minute on the phone. The officer on the other end of the line had no idea how to respond and replied that he knew nothing about it. Leonhardt persisted. The police officer said that he would call Leonhardt back and, amazingly, actually did, saying that while “usually” Schabowski was right, in this case the rules were valid only the next day. Leonhardt’s query led to orders to all major Berlin police stations, telling police to respond in a similar manner to other callers.42
BACK AT BORNHOLMER, by 8:30 p.m. Radomski and Schefke had a lot of company. Jäger’s men estimated that the crowd was now well into the hundreds, possibly more. A police car turned up, and the officer inside tried using a loudspeaker to announce that crowd members should go to a nearby station to receive a visa and to return only after they had one. This announcement made matters worse. People either ignored it, thus placing the authority of the police in question, or did in fact go to the nearest station, only a few minutes away on foot. The officers on duty there had no idea what the people were talking about and no authority to distribute such instant visas, and so sent them away. In some cases the round-trip from Bornholmer to the police station and back took as little as ten minutes, with the result that the “wild pigs” came back enraged at having been sent on a fool’s errand.43
Whether at Bornholmer, Sonnenallee, or elsewhere, officials were soon outnumbered as the number of determined border crossers rose into the thousands. But, if they were smaller in number, the officials were still powerful, because they had access to weapons. A number of them were carrying pistols, including Jäger, and they also had larger machine guns on-site. As a result of both Karin Gueffroy’s successful efforts to publicize the death of her son Chris in February and the incident in which a Stasi officer had shot at escapees in full view of Western cameras in April, Jäger and his men had received the instructions issued reluctantly by Honecker to refrain from using those firearms. But the border officials still had the weapons in their possession. Moreover, there had long been ambiguity surrounding the orders to shoot. The excuse of using deadly force to defend one’s own life could serve as a justification for gunfire under nearly any circumstances. Since they thought their checkpoint to be under siege, it was not out of the question in their minds that their lives might in fact be in danger.44 Jäger was particularly worried that members of the crowd might try to grab weapons from checkpoint staff.45
Jäger called Ziegenhorn repeatedly, trying to get some kind of instructions on how to deal with the chaotic situation, but Ziegenhorn replied every time that it was business as usual. Jäger kept calling in hope of getting a more useful response. Later, Jäger would estimate that he placed about thirty phone calls in the course of the night, all in a mostly fruitless attempt to get new instructions in light of the dramatic developments unfolding in front of him. There was only one time when Ziegenhorn told Jäger to vary from normal procedure, and what Ziegenhorn instructed would end up making matters worse.
Ziegenhorn said that he would secretly add Jäger to a conference call with Ziegenhorn’s own Stasi superiors, including Gerhard Neiber, a deputy of Mielke’s. Ziegenhorn told Jäger that he should “be quiet” and not let anyone know he was on the line. Jäger was patched into the call as Ziegenhorn summarized Jäger’s reports from Bornholmer. Not knowing that Jäger was listening in, Neiber asked brusquely, “Is this Jäger capable of assessing the situation realistically or is he simply a coward?”46
At that, Jäger’s connection suddenly cut off. Holding the dead phone in his hand, Jäger felt a wave of anger wash over him. For close to two hours he had been dealing with an unprecedented and threatening situation. He had received no substantive replies to his urgent, repeated requests for guidance. He had been on duty for over a dozen hours and would be there, at a minimum, all night. And, as if the chaos at his place of work were not enough, the next day he had to face a personal issue as well: he had undergone tests to diagnose whether or not he had cancer, and was scheduled to get the results.47
Jäger felt himself reaching his limit. He had provided twenty-five years of loyal service at Bornholmer. He had served three years before that, too, including the period during the construction of the Wall. In all that time, he had received a number of awards for his service and gotten only one minor black mark on his record. He knew about the mass flight from his state, and he also knew that the GDR was in trouble, yet he remained willing on a dark November morning to put on his uniform and to report for a twenty-four-hour shift. Now his superiors were questioning his ability to provide an accurate situation report and suggesting that he was a coward. Looking back, Jäger would see that his choices from then on were affected by that moment. A man who had not disobeyed an order in nearly three decades had, with that insult, been pushed too far.48
The crowds at Bornholmer continued to grow. Standing in the front ranks of the assembled crowd, Radomski and Schefke demanded loudly, again and again, that the border guards let them pass. Hattenhauer and her friends were by now on their way to Bornholmer as well, along with many others. Inside the control barracks, before Jäger could translate his anger into action, Ziegenhorn called back. The colonel told Jäger that there were new instructions: to prevent the situation from getting worse, all passport control units should institute what they soon started calling the “let-off-steam solution.” This solution would, in theory, work as follows: Jäger was to instruct his men to identify a handful of the most aggressive members of the crowd—people like Radomski and Schefke—and to pull them out. Then Jäger’s subordinates should tell the troublemakers individually that they could exit. Before actually letting them out, however, Jäger’s staff should first record their personal information and then place a stamp in their personal identity paperwork right next to the ID photo or even on it. The stamp in that unusual location would serve to invalidate the ID and to end the GDR citizenship of its bearer—although no one should tell the unwitting expellees that, because it might cause more problems. The idea was that the most aggressive troublemakers would then trickle out in a controlled way to the West and disappear for good. Ziegenhorn and his superiors apparently hoped that, with the worst irritants out of the picture, the crowds at the checkpoints would disperse. Only if the troublemakers tried to reenter the GDR later were they to be informed that they had no right of return. Ziegenhorn issued these instructions not only to Bornholmer but to other border crossings as well.49 Later that same night, Ziegenhorn’s superior, the head of Stasi Main Department VI himself, General Heinz Fiedler, confirmed in writing that the stamp near or on the photo invalidated the ID and left the recipient without any right of return.50
Jäger, still angry, was skeptical about this plan, but he began to implement it around 9:00 p.m. He had his men begin the process of fishing the most worrisome people out of the crowd and opened three control windows for the purpose of processing these troublemakers.51 Since Radomski and Schefke had been doing their best to complain and to make noise for hours—as Radomski later claimed, “We were the loudest!”—they were among the first taken aside.52 The two dissidents, along with others, were then taken into the checkpoint facility proper. Officials recorded all of their personal information and stamped their IDs. Perhaps to drive the point home, the official who stamped Schefke’s ID did so directly on his photo. The two activists had thereby just been expelled from East Germany and did not even know it.53
As if in a dream, they suddenly found themselves walking across the bridge just beyond the border crossing and into the West. Schefke was sure that at any moment they would be grabbed by Stasi agents and thrown into the back of a truck, but it did not happen. The western side of Bornholmer, they soon discovered, was a sleepy and run-down district of West Berlin named Wedding. Late on a Thursday in November, Wedding was not exactly glamorous. Schefke later recalled that his first thought upon seeing West Berlin was “Wow, is this really the West? We must be in the middle of nowhere!” They decided to go downtown by taxi. Only when they had successfully gotten into a cab did Schefke decide that they really must be in the West, because the taxi was a Mercedes.
In the cab, they then had to reply to the driver’s question, “Where to?” Because of their hesitation and appearance, the driver sensed that there was something unusual about his passengers. Upon hearing that they were from East Berlin, the driver tried to throw them out, concerned that they would only have Eastern currency, which would have been of little value in West Berlin. Radomski and Schefke showed the driver their Western cash. Not knowing that it would cost them most of it, they asked to be taken to an apartment in the Schöneberg district where a couple of Schefke’s acquaintances lived. Schefke had met one of them during a biking trip in Hungary before he had been banned from traveling. As the East Germans got out of the taxi in Schöneberg, they told the driver, despite his earlier rudeness, “Go back to that bridge, you’ll earn a lot of money tonight.”54
Schefke’s acquaintances were suitably shocked to see the East Berliners. After the initial greetings, Radomski and Schefke borrowed their phone to call Jahn.55 Jahn had his hands full. He was on the job at the Berlin TV station SFB, where Momper was broadcasting his “as if” commentary. Jahn was simultaneously appearing in and coordinating his station’s news coverage that night—all as he tried to take in the news on a personal level. He had been forcibly thrown out of East Germany in 1983, and now it seemed that the Wall, which stood between him and his hometown, Jena, was coming down.56
Still, when Radomski and Schefke reached him to say that they were in the West, Jahn did not believe them. To prove that they were not joking, the two East Berliners described the unusual winding staircase in the penthouse where their West Berlin friends lived. Jahn knew the same West Berliners and was familiar with the staircase. He suddenly realized that Radomski and Schefke were telling the truth. They had made it to the West. The Wall had opened.
Jahn immediately said to the East Berliners that they should get right back into a cab and come to SFB. Jahn would put them in front of cameras and have the two of them announce to the world that the Wall was open. They would reveal themselves as smugglers of information in the most spectacular possible way; they would find the recognition that they had been craving. The unreal aspect of the evening and the fear of the repercussions from the Stasi were still too strong, however. Neither Radomski nor Schefke had fully processed the collapse of control on the part of the East German regime. They worried about the consequences when they tried to return to East Berlin and so declined Jahn’s request. Schefke replied to Jahn regretfully with words along the lines of No, I cannot go on television tonight, because I would like to be able to go back.
Disappointed, Jahn said that he understood. The three decided to meet later, once Jahn felt that he could leave the television studio. They would rendezvous at a bar called the Cuckoo’s Egg, where another former East Berliner and dissident worked. After celebrating with their West Berlin friends in their penthouse for a while, Radomski and Schefke headed back to the border. There they blended in with the expectant West Berlin crowds while waiting for more East Germans to cross.57
Radomski and Schefke were at that moment rare exceptions, however. Most of the potential border crossers, such as Hattenhauer and her friends, were still in East Berlin, where the Stasi’s plan to let only the biggest troublemakers through was backfiring spectacularly. Rather than reducing pressure, word of people actually getting out spread like wildfire. People suddenly thought, “Here we go,” and expectations rose with frightening swiftness, Jäger recalled. The remaining crowds quickly figured out the system: if they yelled loudly enough, they could get out, and so they acted accordingly. Jäger called Ziegenhorn yet again to report on the problematic nature of their tactics, but Ziegenhorn responded, “There is nothing else,” so they pressed on. Jäger also activated an alarm system that called up extra troops to join him, bringing the number of men on duty at the checkpoint to about sixty.58
Then Jäger learned of yet another problem: the let-off-steam plan was creating a crisis at the western entry to Bornholmer as well as on the eastern side. Among the first people let out had been young parents. Unlike Radomski and Schefke, the parents had only wanted to take a quick look in the immediate area just to the west of Bornholmer and then rejoin their young children, who were at home in bed and asleep. Flush with the heady experience of a swift visit to the West, they had returned quickly to the western entry of the checkpoint and had happily presented their IDs, saying in merry tones, “Here we are again! We are coming back!” And in response, they heard that they could not go home. No one had told them that the stamps on the ID photos in their outstretched hands represented their permanent expulsion from East Germany.59
At first they did not understand, but then they realized that the officers were serious. The construction of the Wall had, as all Berliners knew, split families without warning. Affected relatives had been forced to wait years to be reunited, if at all, and often were only able to do so with help from Bonn.60 Now the East German ruling regime threatened to shatter families once again, just as it had done in 1961. Overwhelmed, the parents gave full vent to a powerful mixture of emotions.
The border officials posted at the western entry, cowed by the intensity of their reaction, called for Jäger to come deal with the anguished parents. When Jäger got to the western outpost of his checkpoint, he gave in to his own personal anger as well. He had been skeptical of the plan to allow the troublemakers through, and now found that he was unwilling to argue with grieving parents on behalf of superior officers who had insulted him. Jäger snapped.
Despite having personally received instructions from Ziegenhorn to prevent anyone with a stamp on or near their photo from reentering East Germany, he told the young parents that he would make an exception for them. Hearing that, other East Germans standing near the western outpost who also wanted to return asked to be allowed back in as well. Jäger felt that, having already taken one step on the path toward disobedience, he might as well take a few more. He instructed the officials at the western entry to let several others return as well. Jäger then returned to the heart of the checkpoint. The thought crossed his mind that he ought to at least tell Ziegenhorn what he had just done, but then he thought, why bother?61
AS THE CROWDS at the border crossings swelled, an East German television channel—in other words, an organ of the ruling regime—interrupted the broadcast of a movie and cut to an announcer, who stridently declared, “Trips have to be applied for!” The East German news show AK Zworepeated this admonition at 10:28 p.m.62 Such statements contrasted with the steadily more exuberant media coverage issuing from Western radio and television stations. Still, the anchorman of the Western news show Tagesthemen, broadcast on the national German network ARD, had to go on air that night a bit later than his usual 10:30 p.m. start time because of his producers’ decision to wait for the end of the soccer match before starting the news. Nothing took precedence over the big game in the soccer-mad country, not even the end of the Cold War.
At about twenty minutes before eleven, Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs, the ARD anchorman, could finally open his show with the following words: “In using superlatives, it is necessary to be cautious, but tonight one is allowed to risk using one.” He then forgot to use a superlative at all, saying instead, “This ninth of November is a historic day. The GDR has announced that its borders are, starting immediately, open for everyone.” Friedrichs announced that his news show would turn live to a journalist at the Berlin Wall. Once Robin Lautenbach, the correspondent in West Berlin, appeared on camera standing at the Invaliden Street border crossing, however, Lautenbach could only show what looked from the West very much like an average night at that location. As a result, ARD was forced to air a prerecorded report on the history of the Wall instead of dramatic live shots. Closer to 11:00 p.m., the network wanted again to cut to an exciting sight, but Lautenbach could only say again, in apologetic tones, “Perhaps the big rush has possibly not happened yet.”63
By about a quarter past eleven, the crowd on the eastern side of Bornholmer had grown into the tens of thousands, filling all of the approach streets. It was impossible for latecomers to get close to the border now, either on foot or in a vehicle. Loud chants of “Open the gate” erupted regularly. Jäger had by this point made dozens of phone calls since 7:00 p.m. in an attempt to get orders that were capable of ratcheting down the tensions. Instead of receiving such instructions, however, he had heard himself called a coward and received instructions that had made matters worse, and now was facing a situation that had become uncontrollable: a sea of thousands of agitated, chanting people. He worried that he and his men might soon be in danger.
Adding to Jäger’s worries was the fact that Western camera crews were showing up on the eastern side of checkpoints. A camera team led by Georg Mascolo for the show Spiegel-TV was particularly irritating the guards at Bornholmer. Mascolo’s crew members ignored prohibitions against filming inside a border-crossing complex, audaciously climbing on its fences to secure better camera angles, despite repeated instructions from Bornholmer officials to stop. In their search for the best possible sightlines for filming, the camera team even used their Western IDs to pass through the checkpoint, then turned around while still in the crossing area and filmed looking backward from the West at the East Germans stuck behind the barriers. At that point, such behavior became too much for Bornholmer officials. They herded Mascolo and his crew into a control building in the center of the checkpoint, close to the final barrier gate, and began questioning them.64
Surveying the scene, Jäger sensed that the time had come to make a fateful decision. He looked at the colleagues standing nearby and said words to the effect of Should we shoot all these people or should we open up? Jäger was in charge and did not need their assent, but given the enormity of the choice facing him, he wanted a sense of the mood of his men. They all knew their instructions from April 1989 not to use their guns, but they were also not about to let themselves be attacked. The crowd of tens of thousands had stayed peaceful so far but could turn violent at any moment, they thought.
Jäger realized that he was “done” with Ziegenhorn.65 A little before 11:30 p.m., Jäger went to the phone and called his commanding officer to inform him of a decision he had made: “I am going to end all controls and let the people out.” Ziegenhorn disagreed, but Jäger no longer cared, and ended the call. His steps down the road of disobedience had taken him to the point where he was willing to ignore his superior entirely.66 He began implementing his decision. Jäger’s subordinates Helmut Stöss and Lutz Wasnick were the ones who received the order to open the main gate, a task that had to be completed by hand.67 Obeying, Stöss and Wasnick grabbed the handles on the barrier and began to pull. Before they could open the gate all the way, however, an enormous crowd started pushing through it from the eastern side. Mascolo and his crew could not believe their luck: from the control building where they had been herded, they had a perfect line of sight on the event. Mascolo’s camera operator, ignoring the guards around him, threw his video camera on his shoulder and started filming. His footage captured the precise moment when the crowd pushed the gate wide open, with Stöss and Wasnick stumbling backward to get out of the way.68 Cheers, jubilation, kisses, and tears followed as tens of thousands of people began sweeping through. The massive, unstoppable, joyous crowd poured through the gate and toward the bridge beyond, where even more camera operators caught the flood of people on film as it surged into West Berlin.
The Berlin Wall had opened—but not by force of arms. The breakthrough was nonviolent. While the enormous crowd of protestors had loudly and insistently demanded to pass, they had remained peaceful and had not smashed their way through with force, even though Jäger and his men had feared that they might. Thanks to the presence of so many camera crews, the simultaneous collapse of the regime’s control of the Wall and the ultimate moment of peaceful success for the revolution were both caught on film and, soon thereafter, televised.
The moment was an overwhelming emotional experience for everyone present, including Jäger and his men. Stöss later said that he could not stop asking himself one question over and over: “Why have I been standing here for the last twenty years?”69 Jäger was on the verge of tears. To prevent his men from seeing their acting commander cry, he ducked into a nearby control building. There he found one of his subordinates, already hunched over and weeping. Jäger pulled himself together and comforted the man.70
The East Germans who passed through the gate also shed tears, but theirs were of joy, not confusion or sorrow. Before too long, Hattenhauer and her friends were in the West. She had gone from solitary confinement and fear of execution to a birthday in West Berlin, all in less than a month. As she later put it, it was “the best birthday present” she could imagine.71 Another young woman, an employee of the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry, was on her way home from a visit to a sauna when the news of the night inspired her to head for Bornholmer. Her name was Angela Merkel. She had chosen a career in chemistry, not in politics, but that night would change her life. Merkel had been born in Hamburg in 1954, and even though she and her immediate family had moved to East Germany in 1957, she still maintained contact with an aunt in her hometown. On the night of November 9, once she made it to West Berlin, Merkel would call that aunt to say that she had crossed the border. It would be the first of many nights of crossing the East-West divide for Merkel, in both literal and figurative terms.72 She would soon become active in the new East German party Democratic Awakening, which would enter into an election alliance with the CDU, eventually bringing Merkel into the latter party’s ranks. As a member of the CDU, Merkel would start her phenomenal rise to the chancellorship of united Germany.73
Following Harald Jäger’s decision to open the gates at the Bornholmer Street border crossing on the night of November 9, massive crowds flow through the final barrier gate of the checkpoint and over the bridge (top rear of photo) into West Berlin. (RHG Fo AnKae 541; photo by Andreas Kämper)
Not even Schabowski could resist seeing for himself what was going on. After getting late-night reports in Wandlitz, he had his driver take him back downtown on a brief tour of some of the border crossings, including Bornholmer. Schabowski then returned home to Wandlitz for the second time that night without having tried to interfere or indeed to do anything at the checkpoints. Schabowski later said that, after returning home, he spoke to Krenz on the phone and found Krenz was consoling himself with the belief that “the ones who are leaving today, they will come back.”74
Krenz would later say that he had spent that evening, after the late conclusion to the day’s central committee session around 9:00 p.m., issuing orders to open all of the border crossings.75 Evidence supporting this claim has not been found. Instead, the evidence that survives shows individual checkpoint officials making uncoordinated decisions. Bornholmer was the first location where the senior figure on-site opened the barriers, and after images of the massive crowd running across the bridge there started appearing on TV, it became harder and harder for the other border crossings to hold out.76 The anxious officials at Checkpoint Charlie had, after turning down the drinks offered to them by the café owner across the street, actually sealed off the border entirely with large rolling barriers. Before too long, however, they gave up trying to keep the barriers in place and let people cross. The staff at the Sonnenallee checkpoint had been using the let-off-steam protocol as well. The officials there had been keeping a detailed list of people expelled, but by midnight they ceased trying to keep track of people’s identities. Sonnenallee informed Stasi headquarters that, as of 12:17 a.m. on November 10, they were “opening everything.”77 One by one, border officials elsewhere along the Wall similarly let the crowds pass—although some guards viewed the concession as only a temporary retreat.
THERE WAS NO crossing point at the Brandenburg Gate. Yet both Easterners and Westerners were drawn to it that night. For a while, the Wall in front of it remained as forbidding as ever. Gradually, however, a few individuals started braving its heights. According to Stasi reports, people began climbing on the Wall near the Brandenburg Gate at about 9:00 p.m. but initially were willing to obey orders to come down. The secret police noted that by 11:57 p.m., however, climbers were no longer listening.78 An unplanned collaboration was unfolding: the NBC floodlights made it much easier for climbers to scramble up to the top of the Wall, and in turn, NBC’s cameras filmed the striking sight. Then, minutes before the 12:30 a.m. start of the broadcast, a camera operator hand-delivered footage from the opening of Bornholmer to Kusnetz. By the time the cameraman got to Kusnetz, he was gasping for breath from the effort of running across much of Berlin. The footage was just what Kusnetz needed to feed to Wheatley, the show’s executive producer, back in New York: a video clip from Bornholmer would be the perfect start to the Nightly News broadcast.79
There was still one big potential problem with the live broadcast, however. Shortly before Brokaw was to go on air, security officials on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate had started using water cannons to force people off the Wall. The spray was not as powerful as it could have been because the hoses seemed to be leaky, but its impact was still strong enough to cause most climbers to get down. One young man, determined to stay on the Wall nonetheless, was handed an umbrella by the crowd to use as a shield. The spray bounced off the umbrella and shimmered in the bright floodlights as he held the flimsy shield between himself and the stream from the water cannons.80
Viewing images of these developments at NBC headquarters in New York, Wheatley and Gould wondered what they would do if the water cannons also managed to hit Brokaw while the show was on the air. Wheatley decided to have a backup anchorman, Garrick Utley, ready to take over from New York on a moment’s notice if Brokaw was knocked down.81 Meanwhile, Gould made her final preparations in the control room and communicated directly with Brokaw, half a world away, through his earpiece. By that point, Gould, the first woman to hold such a job at a major network, had been producing for years, but the night of November 9 would be a singular broadcast for her. The veteran producer remembered that, moments before the show went on air, she heard her heart pounding in her chest. She knew that she was orchestrating the coverage of one of the most momentous events of her lifetime. Brokaw also had some last-minute worries. Telling himself, “This is a big deal, don’t screw it up,” he calmed his nerves and turned to the camera to begin.
“A historic moment tonight,” he intoned over the opening video clip of the throngs at Bornholmer, now accompanied by soaring music. “The Berlin Wall can no longer contain the East German people. Thousands, pouring across at the Bornholmer Bridge!” After the clip ended, NBC cut to its first live shot of Brokaw. Viewers in the United States suddenly saw the astonishing image of Brokaw, the Wall, the Brandenburg Gate, the hoses, the spraying water glinting in the floodlights, and, as if that were not enough, right in the center of the screen, one soaking-wet celebrant now standing defiantly on the top of the Wall and waving his arms in victory. One of Brokaw’s producers, Lamprecht, later remarked that the scene looked as if it had been staged by a Las Vegas promoter.82
Despite the deafening commotion around him, Brokaw calmly proceeded to summarize the events of the day, pulling in prepared and live segments. Behind the scenes, NBC officials scrambled to bargain for a larger satellite window on short notice so that they could continue broadcasting beyond the time slot that they had already booked. They were able to talk other broadcasters into giving NBC their satellite time. In the end, Brokaw was able to introduce Nightly News afresh every time the show began airing in another US time zone.83 When the run of airings finished, he led an hour-long special for the network. It was well into November 10 before he got a break.
Ironically, given his millions of viewers, one person who did not hear or see the NBC coverage that night was Brokaw’s wife. Her husband had spent much of 1989 on airplanes, broadcasting everywhere from China to Eastern Europe to the Philippines, so the fact that he was abroad again was nothing unusual. She had not even turned on the television that evening, and Brokaw had not found a spare minute to go to a phone and to call her. Only when she was walking their Labrador through New York the next morning and ran into friends who spontaneously said, “Tom has never been better,” did she hear the news.84
CROWDS KEPT FLOODING across the border through the early hours of November 10. Word of Jahn, Radomski, and Schefke’s plan to celebrate at the Cuckoo’s Egg somehow spread among their friends, and throughout the night one East German after another walked through the door of the West Berlin pub. Radomski was proud of his fellow East Berliners. Even in the midst of chaos and in an unfamiliar city, they knew how to find the party.
After years of working with Jahn without ever having met him, Radomski and Schefke finally saw him in person for the first time that night at the Cuckoo’s Egg. They had learned to trust and to like each other by courier and by phone. Now they could actually share a drink. As they settled in for a celebration that would seemingly never end—it would be five days before Schefke finally picked up his car, still parked near Bornholmer Street border crossing—Radomski remembered thinking, “Now the story is at an end, and the party begins.” There would of course be new adventures, challenges, disappointments, and hurdles in the years to come. Many of their dissident friends would in fact be displeased by the opening of the Wall, feeling that they had been on the verge of democratizing East Germany themselves, and now they were facing a takeover by West Germany instead.85 That night, however, Jahn, Radomski, and Schefke felt that the risks that they had taken, the interrogations, and the time in prison had all been worth it. The story of their personal struggles had come to a breathtakingly swift and resoundingly happy conclusion.