Chapter Seven
AS THE RAUCOUS CELEBRATIONS inside the Cuckoo’s Egg continued, outside “the largest block party in history” was taking place, in the words of NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher. To Fletcher, the party was “made even more inspiring because it was a double block party—East and West.”1 People were literally dancing in the streets—not a few of them to the words of David Hasselhoff’s song “Looking for Freedom,” which had spent eight weeks as the number-one hit in West Germany in 1989. It would not be long before a promoter would bring Hasselhoff to Berlin, put him in a suit rigged with lights, and have him perform the song standing near the remains of the Wall.
On November 10, beyond the loud music and lights, however, another story was unfolding. In places, the East German security forces tolerated the partying, drinking, and climbing on the Wall, but in other places they intervened to end the celebrations. The NBC cameras on the cherry picker at the Brandenburg Gate began capturing images of East German security officials violently removing people on the eastern side of the Wall, in stark contrast to the scenes of happiness that predominated in the West. It made for an odd juxtaposition with the scenes of joy and was difficult to explain on the fly. At some point on November 10, Brokaw found that he had to provide narration for the footage of celebrants being hauled off forcibly by East German security forces. Guessing that maybe they had become drunk and disorderly, he admitted, “We don’t know what happened to these people.”2
Neither he nor any other journalist knew that reservists had been sent to reseal the area around the Brandenburg Gate. By about 3:20 a.m., as Brokaw was getting ready to introduce Nightly News for the West Coast of the United States, the reservists and other security forces retook control of the area around the gate. Around 4:30 a.m., the Stasi received a report that the area was completely clear.3 Similarly, officials at various other border crossings tried to reclaim control, and some even managed to do so. By 2:40 a.m., Oberbaum Bridge checkpoint officials reported that they had “succeeded in restoring a normal situation.”4 One Stasi officer at Invaliden Street later reported calling up armed reinforcements—saying, “we could have just set the weapons to fire fully automatically” and sprayed bullets “with our eyes closed”—but Stasi files record that, as of about 3:30 a.m. border officials had reinstated order without recourse to such measures.5 In addition, a Stasi-wide order went out on November 10, instructing all staff to remain on duty until further notice.6 At an internal Stasi assessment that day, General Rudi Mittig deemed the events of the previous night the consequence of “increased activity on the part of imperialist intelligence agencies and their agents,” who, he claimed, had been planning to “storm the Wall” since October 7.7
Over at the Interior Ministry, the main author of the text that had unexpectedly opened the Wall, Gerhard Lauter, was working through the night as well. He and his wife had seen the theater production and returned home, only to be greeted by their son’s astonishing announcement that the Wall was open. Without even taking off his coat, Lauter had headed right back to his office, certain “that a catastrophe had taken place.”8 When he got there, he looked at the board of lights signaling incoming phone calls and saw that every light was on. At first by himself, then with support after he roused colleagues, he tried to answer the phone calls, whether from high-level party members or even from the US ambassador, who somehow got through to Lauter on that chaotic night. Lauter estimated that he fielded hundreds of phone calls. At one point his boss decided that, on top of everything else, Lauter should also go on news broadcasts on the morning of November 10 in a retroactive attempt to explain that applications were still necessary.9
LAUTER WAS HARDLY the only middle-tier official working through the night in East Berlin. The Soviet embassy, which contained both the offices and residences of embassy staff, sat prominently on Unter den Linden near the Brandenburg Gate. Even decades later, Igor Maximychev, the deputy ambassador, could still recall the noise of the massive shuffling of feet going by his windows in the direction of the gate through the night. His boss, the ambassador, had gone to sleep before the rush to the gate had started, so Maximychev was the senior official awake at the embassy, the most important Soviet political institution in East Germany, when the Wall opened. It was, in the first instance, up to him to respond.10
He and the other embassy staff—most notably Vladimir Grinin, the future Russian ambassador to united Germany—debated their options. Maximychev later explained that they were conscious of a number of pressing concerns, although minute-by-minute reporting on events to Moscow was not one of them. Such reporting was the responsibility of the massive East German outpost of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, in East Berlin. Ivan Kuzmin, a senior KGB agent in East Germany, later confirmed that his outpost did send reports on the events of the evening from the GDR to Moscow during the night, but they do not seem to have reached senior political figures.11
Rather, the embassy staff had the more significant and delicate responsibility of communicating with top party leaders back in Moscow about the political impact of the events and what the next steps should be. Such communication would clearly be difficult, not only because it would involve awakening the ambassador but also because of the time difference involved. Events had broken late on November 9 in divided Germany, which meant that they had broken in the early hours of November 10, Moscow time.
Maximychev worried about the unintended consequences of middle-of-the-night efforts to wake important people in Moscow. “We all had an ill-defined fear of what might happen if, in the middle of the night, we disrupted everyone with our news. It would have been hard to avoid the impression that we were sending a call for help.” Maximychev was also concerned that the people whom he could readily get on the phone in Moscow in the early hours of the morning—as he put it, “the junior people, those who were unavoidably the only ones reachable on duty in the night hours”—might exceed their authority and introduce “measures that we would all bitterly regret later.” Anyone he contacted in Moscow, Maximychev assumed, would then immediately call East German Politburo members as well. The deputy ambassador felt certain that some East German leaders remained “active supporters of a ‘Chinese’ variant” and might use the crisis to say that the moment had come to crack down. Maximychev was also conscious of the fact that leaders of East Germany often pretended to speak Russian better than they in fact did, since there was political pressure on them to possess perfect command of the language. As a result, they would act as if they could field phone calls in Russian without translation, even if they were not up to the task. Late at night and in a crisis situation, their language skills might not be sufficient to allow them to understand critical information, and that could cause additional problems all on its own.
In short, as Maximychev later explained, he was convinced that it would not take much for an attempt at damage control by the Soviet embassy to turn into a crisis. The deputy ambassador believed that even “a single shot on this night would have been the same as a worldwide catastrophe.”12 His fears mirrored those of both Kuzmin, the senior KGB agent, and Chancellor Kohl. Kuzmin later remarked that on November 9–10, there was not only “a real danger of bloodshed” but also the possibility of “involvement of the Soviet fighting forces.”13 And Kohl wrote in his memoirs, though without revealing his sources, that he had learned that opponents of Gorbachev’s reform in both the KGB and the Stasi wanted to use the chaos in divided Berlin that night as a pretext for deploying Soviet troops in East Germany to reseal the border.14
Maximychev, after weighing all of these concerns, decided to do nothing. Neither he nor any other member of the embassy staff awakened their boss, the ambassador. They did not attempt to contact Moscow. Maximychev figured they would hear soon enough from party leaders in the morning, and he was right.
Once the day began in Moscow, the phone in the Soviet embassy in East Berlin started ringing continuously. After the long night without communication and all of the previous days of fruitless attempts to track down someone in authority about the hole variant, it suddenly felt to Maximychev as if, in the course of November 10, “half of official Moscow personally called the embassy” in East Berlin. All Soviet callers had the same question: “Was all of that agreed with us?” Maximychev would accurately respond, “Not with the embassy, maybe directly with Moscow?”15 The embassy had dealt only with the approval of the hole variant, nothing more.16 Ambassador Vyacheslav Kochemasov, looking back years later, still felt a great deal of “bitterness” about these events. In his memoirs, Kochemasov speculated not only on “what the leadership of the GDR should have done” but also on what he and his comrades might have done differently.17 The former ambassador was vague on what, exactly, could have been done differently, but presumably it involved a more aggressive response.
MAXIMYCHEV’S SUSPICIONS that the East Berlin Politburo might in fact still be willing to respond aggressively, or perhaps to use force, were not unfounded. On November 10, Krenz raised the alert status of the army. The People’s Army had been absent from the events of the night before, largely due to timing. Senior defense officials had scheduled a high-level meeting of commanders at a base in Strausberg, on the outskirts of East Berlin, for the night of the ninth. This meeting had been originally scheduled to start at 7:00 p.m., after the return of senior military officials from that day’s central committee meeting in the center of town. Their subordinates, who were not politically significant enough to have attended the downtown meeting, assembled as scheduled shortly before 7:00 p.m., in order to be present at the very moment their senior officers arrived, so not one of them was able to view the crucial final minutes of the Schabowski press conference. Senior officers, in the central committee meeting that was running hours late, also did not see the press conference. Manfred Grätz, a deputy defense minister waiting that night in Strausberg, sat in the conference room for hours with his colleagues until the minister for defense and other senior leaders finally arrived around 10:00 p.m. As Grätz would later put it, “We sat around a lot, we talked a lot, we talked uselessly, and time ran out.”
Once their superiors did arrive, the first order of business was not the situation on the streets, of which they were still unaware, but internal infighting. Grätz and a number of his colleagues, after sitting there for hours, found that the first item on the agenda was criticism of themselves. Reports of disturbances at border crossings trickled in around midnight, but as the checkpoints were in the first instance the responsibility of the Stasi, no one broke off the assembly, or even added a discussion of the events to the agenda. As Grätz would later conclude, “This was shameful.”18As the magnitude of what had happened became clear, however, Krenz convened a special command group of the National Defense Council early on November 10, and had troops trained in military operations in urban terrain begin preparations for deployment.19
Party leaders convened as well: the three-day central committee meeting resumed for its final session on November 10. Although this meeting would seem to be an ideal opportunity for strategizing, the session opened at 9:00 a.m. without a word from anyone, including Krenz, about the night before. It was an impressive act of denial. In the course of that morning, however, Kochemasov had begun calling Krenz and kept calling repeatedly, insisting that the leader of the SED provide not only the embassy but also Moscow with some immediate explanation about what had happened. By 10:00 a.m., perhaps because of this pressure from the Soviets, Krenz made a few references to the members of the central committee about the events at the border. However, the meeting broke up early, at 1:10 p.m. instead of 6:00 p.m., without having dealt in any serious way with the opening of the Wall. The power and relevance of the party were buckling and collapsing under the strain of events, caused by a combination of the party’s own incompetence and the peaceful revolutionaries’ willingness to seize the opening that the incompetence had provided.
After day dawned on November 10, the scene at the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate differed greatly from all other days since the Wall’s construction on August 13, 1961. Throughout Berlin, celebrants rejoiced in the opening of the barrier; here, thanks to the flat top at this location, they were able to stand on the Wall. (SBM, Photo 0022-09214; photo by Margret Nissen)
Krenz tried to mollify Moscow by sending a telegram directly to Gorbachev, in which he made the inaccurate statement that “as of 6:00 a.m. this morning” the situation at the border had been brought under control, and that only East Germans who had applied for and received a visa were being let out.20 In fact, individual checkpoints were still acting more or less on their own. One factor making a more coordinated response difficult was the rise of finger-pointing and anger about the night before. Some border guards could not suppress their rage at party leaders over what they had been forced to endure. On November 10, the Stasi compiled a long list of complaints. There were expressions of anguish, lamenting that “this short-notice regulation” had come as a “total surprise.” As one guard put it, “You cannot just give out information like that on the margins of a press conference.” There was concern that what had happened would lead to “an increasing loss of motivation” for the border authorities. A member of one of the border guard regiments spoke for many when he said, “I am asking myself whether the party is still able to lead the state.” Another said simply, “I do not understand the world anymore.” There were some positive comments: one man pointed out that he and his colleagues had received “more flowers and wine” the previous night than in all the years before. Complaints were much more numerous, however.
Perhaps the clearest statement of the fury felt by border guards was addressed to Krenz personally. A group of party members in Border Regiment 36 wrote directly to him, saying that “we regard the events of November 9–10, 1989,” as “pure and simple betrayal and scorn for the performance of the protective and security forces.” They had, “without being informed,” found themselves “forced to abandon all military and party principles.” The signers of the letter demanded “that the responsible comrades be held accountable” for this betrayal.21
AS THE EAST GERMAN regime and their Soviet allies failed to find some effective way to respond to the accidental opening of the Wall, observers on the other side of the Iron Curtain tried to understand the events of November 9–10 and how they had missed predicting them. The West Berlin police were baffled. The Stasi, still spying on them even after the Wall opened, found that West Berlin police were skeptical that there had been a “decision” to open the Wall at all. In their view, East Germans had been attempting “to maintain the possibility of total control over GDR citizens under somewhat different circumstances.”22
At the elite political level in West Germany, Kohl’s senior foreign policy advisor, Horst Teltschik, and another chancellery official, Dieter Kastrup, recalled that their “intelligence services completely missed everything.” Had Kohl’s senior advisors heard from their intelligence operatives, or from those of any of the Western countries who were their partners, that the Wall might possibly open, the chancellor and nearly his entire staff would not have headed to Warsaw that day.23 Later, intelligence chiefs would face criticism for not providing advance word on the “order” to open the Wall.
The intelligence services of the Western occupying powers, along with their leaders, were also surprised by events and assumed that they were intentional. Due to the time difference, that very same day President George H. W. Bush was able, in his own words, to “welcome the decision by the East German leadership to open the borders to those wishing to emigrate or travel.”24 Other world leaders did the same in the following days. The British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, issued a press release welcoming the regime’s “decision to lift travel restrictions.”25 Meanwhile, in West Berlin, members of the British Military Government provided blankets, tents, and space for emergency housing. They also sent food trucks to the border to provide for the masses of visitors.26Privately, Thatcher expressed worry about what was happening—not because it seemed unplanned, but because it might inspire a resurgence of German nationalism. As one of her aides put it, “The Prime Minister was frankly horrified by the sight of the Bundestag [the West German parliament] rising to sing Deutschland über alles when the news of the developments on the Berlin Wall came in.” She apparently did not know that West Germany had substituted the words from the third, less objectionable verse of the anthem for those of the first in 1952, although the music, by Joseph Haydn, had remained the same.27
Thatcher’s Foreign Office guessed correctly that Gorbachev had been surprised by events. On Saturday, November 11, the British ambassador to Moscow wrote his superiors that “Gorbachev’s policy in Eastern Europe is being overrun by events. . . . Gorbachev’s problem now is to control the forces that he has unleashed. I do not think the Russians know how to do this. Hence their public silence.”28 The West German ambassador to Moscow also noted in a telegram to Bonn that there was “no official or media reaction” to November 9.29
The Soviet silence did, in fact, conceal the confusion that Gorbachev and his most significant foreign policy advisors, such as Anatoly Chernyaev, were experiencing. They were certain of one aspect of the story: if there had been a decision to open the Wall, they and their embassy in East Berlin had not been part of it. Now they were unsure about how to respond in public. Chernyaev confided his initial reactions to his diary. He was rueful overall, but generous toward Gorbachev. When “the Berlin Wall fell,” it meant that “a whole era of the socialist system ended.” As a result, “now only our ‘best friends’ Castro, Ceausescu, Kim Il-Sung are left. They hate us passionately.” But, Chernyaev concluded, “the Berlin Wall, that is the main thing,” because its passing represented “the end of Yalta, the finale for the Stalinist legacy,” and the “overcoming of Hitler’s Germany.” In the Wall’s surprising opening, Chernyaev saw a kind of unexpected victory for Gorbachev: “He has proven himself to be truly great, because he sensed the path of history and helped it to follow its natural path.”30
Gorbachev was worried enough about the path of history to have a spoken message passed to Helmut Kohl on November 10, once the chancellor arrived in West Berlin. Earlier that day, Kohl had informed Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the unhappy Polish prime minister, that he needed to interrupt his visit to Poland in order to return briefly to divided Germany.31 Kohl and his entourage then flew to Hamburg, where, as occupation air travel rules still required, they switched to a US aircraft to fly to West Berlin. The chancellor had wanted to go directly to Bonn, but the announcement of a large public event in front of the Schöneberg Town Hall prompted him to make a stop in West Berlin first.32
The Soviet ambassador to West Germany, Yuli Kvitsinsky, tracked down Kohl and Teltschik by phone after they arrived in West Berlin. Teltschik received the call in a local government office, and the Stasi managed to conduct surveillance of it. Such problems were part of the reason Kohl wanted to hurry back to Bonn, where he had more secure means of communication. Teltschik asked Kvitsinsky, “Mr. Ambassador, how is it going?” The ambassador replied, “Ach, okay. A little hectic.” Teltschik agreed: “You can say that again.” Then the ambassador got right to the reason for his call: “Do you have a pencil?” Teltschik said yes, and Kvitsinsky read the message from Gorbachev for Kohl, which expressed Gorbachev’s worry about the unexpected events in divided Berlin and asked for Kohl’s help in ensuring that developments “not be allowed to get out of hand.”33
When he had the full message, Teltschik said goodbye to the Soviet ambassador and returned to Kohl’s side, repeating the message to Kohl just as the chancellor was preparing to speak at the Schöneberg rally. It was clear that dealing with Gorbachev and his anxieties would be a high priority, but that could be done only from Bonn. Kohl and Teltschik would make it back to their capital city that night, but not until they had put in an appearance at a second rally in West Berlin aimed at CDU supporters and paid a brief visit to Checkpoint Charlie to see the ongoing celebrations with their own eyes.34 The intense time pressure meant that they could not linger, however. They had promised to return to Poland as soon as possible but had to get to Bonn first to make a number of pressing calls, not least to Gorbachev, from the chancellery’s secure phone lines. Copies of Gorbachev’s message had also gone out to the three Western powers in Berlin, so the chancellor urgently needed to coordinate a response with them as well.35 When Kohl finally made it back to Bonn late that night, he would spend much of the night on the phone.36
The next day Kohl also spoke with Krenz and congratulated him on “the important decision on the opening,” but soon after, a report arrived in Kohl’s office detailing the utter chaos of that opening. The chancellor learned of the total confusion of East German border officials: that they had had no clear orders, that their responses to the press conference had varied widely, that even as Bornholmer Street officials had opened their main barrier gate, Invaliden Street had refused to let people through. The confidential analysis came to the conclusion that the freedom at the borders “might not be lasting.”37
Although this report to the chancellor did not note it, West Berlin’s mayor had unknowingly escaped a risky situation at Invaliden Street. Momper had spent most of the night on television but left the studio to open an emergency meeting of the Berlin senate at 10:00 p.m., which, like his on-air remarks, focused on practical issues such as transport. He also made contact with the Western occupying powers. Fortunately for Momper, most of them were all at the same fiftieth-birthday party as the British commander, so he could talk to them, one after another, on the same phone call.38
Momper ended up back in a television studio and was on air when he received a note saying that there was a large exodus of people leaving Bornholmer Street. He decided that he had to go to the Wall, and headed for the crossing that he himself used most frequently, Invaliden Street, because he thought he might recognize some of the guards there.39 After trying and failing to find someone on the East German side who could tell him what was going on, Momper decided to address the crowd personally. At 1:35 a.m., Momper used a megaphone to urge the crowds at the checkpoint to remain calm and to allow passage through the border crossing.40
According to the Stasi, there were more than twenty thousand people in the area at the time, many of them drinking. Apparently seeing the mayor of West Berlin speaking at their border crossing so incensed some of the checkpoint officials at Invaliden Street that they considered forcibly wrestling him into one of the on-site detention units. Hearing this later, Momper thought it fortunate that cooler heads had prevailed, because there was a chance that the West Berliners would have tried to intervene, and violence could have ensued.41
Crowds took advantage of a new path across the former death strip to cross from one side of Berlin to the other after the opening of the Wall. (SBM, Photo 0008-12158; photo by Lothar Scholz)
The French ambassador to East Berlin, in a telegram to Paris, questioned whether the term “‘opening’ of the Wall” was accurate and reported that the East German regime was still trying to enforce the requirement for applications. GDR media were also making pointed announcements that the relevant offices would open for passport and visa applications at 8:00 a.m. on November 10.42 And at 2:00 a.m. on November 10, a radio announcement by an East German broadcaster said that border controls would, in fact, be fully reinstated six hours later, at 8:00 a.m.43
Decades of arbitrary repression left many East Germans willing to believe that this reinstatement would happen. Tom Sello, the Environmental Library activist who had worked together with the Gethsemane Church to publicize the crimes of the regime, had not gone to the Wall at all by the morning of November 10. Instead, he had been in the library most of the night, using the time between his day-job shifts to print copies of an underground newspaper with a mimeograph machine. He felt that he could not stop. The newspaper was relatively new and an important source of uncensored updates for East Germans, so Sello wanted to ensure that it would be ready to distribute on time.44
When his wife heard at 7:15 a.m. that there would be a border reclosure in forty-five minutes, however, she told him, and they both believed it. They dropped everything and took their children to the nearby Invaliden Street border crossing. The Sello family made it there on foot at ten minutes before eight, only to find the pedestrian approach overwhelmed with a massive crowd. It was clear that they would not reach the front of the line by 8:00 a.m.
Sello noticed, however, that cars were moving through the crossing. Such was the mood of the day, and so great his belief that the border would, in fact, be resealed, that Sello intentionally leapt in front of a moving vehicle, waving his arms. The car stopped, and Sello begged the driver for a ride, explaining that he “wanted his children to see where their grandmother lived” in the West. Sello’s mother would come to them, but the children had never been able to visit her, and Sello wanted it to happen “at least once in their lives.” Indicating the mob of people waiting at the pedestrian exit, Sello convinced the driver that the only way his family could get out before the reclosure of the border would be in the stranger’s vehicle. The driver agreed, and took them through the checkpoint to a pay phone in the West so that they could call Sello’s mother and have her come find them.45
Sello need not have thrown himself in front of a moving car. The idea of reinstating border controls by 8:00 a.m. proved to be impossible. The tide of people was simply too large and the collapse of the regime’s authority too complete.
As Sello was standing at a West Berlin pay phone and dialing his mother, across town Tom Brokaw’s right-hand man, Marc Kusnetz, was heading back to his hotel room. He had helped to conduct hours of interviews through the night, mostly near the base of the Wall. Above his head, people had begun to use chisels, hammers, and even their bare hands to chip away souvenir pieces of the Wall, generating clouds of grayish dust. When he got into his hotel bathroom, he could see in the mirror that his face was completely covered in a thick layer of chalky powder. He hunched over the sink, splashing water on his face and replaying the unbelievable events of the night in his mind. As he watched the “gray, gritty stuff” come off his face and swirl downward, he suddenly realized that he was watching the Berlin Wall go down the drain.46
WITHIN THE NEXT three days, it is possible that as many as three million GDR citizens visited West Berlin and West Germany.47 Of all the checkpoints, Bornholmer not only opened first but also saw the most people leave. Officially, Jäger and his subordinates reported to Stasi headquarters that on the night of November 9–10, about twenty thousand pedestrians and a thousand drivers had left for the West via their checkpoint. The actual numbers were almost certainly higher. Optimistically, someone at Bornholmer also recorded that every single one of those twenty thousand pedestrians had returned and that about six hundred of the vehicles had as well.48
The numbers reported for the next day were higher: an estimated 120,000 pedestrians and nearly five thousand cars headed for West Berlin via Bornholmer Street alone, out of an estimated total of over five hundred thousand exits by foot and more than twenty-six thousand by vehicle.49Other border crossings reported thousands of pedestrians and drivers exiting as well.50 An internal Stasi report estimated that many of those exiting failed to return, resulting in a net population loss.51
Still trying to the last to maintain control over the movement of its people, the regime kept insisting for days that travelers needed to apply for visas. Over five million were reportedly granted by November 15, although it is hard to know whether East German officials put out an inflated number in order to make compliance seem more widespread than it actually was.52 The West Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel reported that the GDR offices responsible for visa distribution were “overrun” and could not distribute visas fast enough, however, so clearly many East Germans believed that their regime still held power over them.53
Military units stayed on alert status until November 11, at which point the regime finally had them stand down, and ended the requirement for all Stasi employees to remain on duty.54 Only on November 14 did the GDR finally and definitively bring all ambiguity about gunfire at the border to an end by halting the practice. The dog runs survived until December 1989, when state authorities finally began to break them down as well. What happened to the miserable animals thereafter is unclear, but if it was consistent with their previous treatment by border soldiers, it was as depraved and inhumane as the Wall itself had been.55