The Berlin Wall had separated East from West Berlin since 13 August 1961. By autumn 1989 the East German regime under Erich Honecker was under accumulating pressure — from the Hungarian government’s opening of its border with Austria in May 1989 (which had allowed East Germans to escape westward via Hungary), from weekly Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, and from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s unwillingness to intervene militarily.
Honecker was deposed by his own Politburo on 18 October 1989. His successor Egon Krenz attempted a limited reform programme. The Krenz government drafted new travel regulations on 9 November 1989 that would permit East Germans to travel abroad with 30-day approved exit visas.
The new regulations were scheduled to take effect on the morning of 10 November 1989, with administrative implementation guidelines to be published the same day.
The press conference
The Politburo member Günter Schabowski conducted the routine evening press conference on 9 November 1989 at the East German press centre at 6:00 p.m. He had been handed the travel-regulations memo a few minutes before the conference and had not read it carefully.
He announced the new regulations at approximately 6:53 p.m. The Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman of Italian press agency ANSA asked: “Ab wann tritt das in Kraft?” — “When does this take effect?”
Schabowski looked at the memo. He could not find the implementation date. He shrugged and said: “Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis… ist das sofort, unverzüglich.” (“As far as I know, this is… it’s immediately, without delay.”)
The press conference was being broadcast live on East German television. The West German broadcaster ARD picked up the broadcast and aired the statement on its 8 p.m. news as the lead story with the headline “The Wall is open.”
The Berliners on both sides of the wall began walking toward the wall checkpoints within minutes.
What the checkpoints did
The border guards at the Berlin Wall checkpoints had not been informed of the new regulations. The telephone calls from the guards to superior officers produced contradictory instructions across the evening. The Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint commander Harald Jäger had been calling his superiors repeatedly for instructions across 9:00-10:30 p.m. as the crowd in front of his checkpoint grew to approximately 20,000 people.
At approximately 10:45 p.m. on 9 November 1989 Jäger decided on his own authority to open the Bornholmer Strasse gate. The first East Berliners crossed into the West at approximately 10:50 p.m.
The other Berlin Wall checkpoints followed within hours. By midnight the entire Berlin Wall was open.
What followed
The East German regime collapsed across subsequent weeks. The Krenz government fell on 6 December 1989. A roundtable government negotiated the reunification of Germany across January-September 1990. The formal reunification took place on 3 October 1990 — 327 days after the wall opening.
The Soviet Union collapsed two years later on 26 December 1991. The Cold War ended.
Schabowski died on 1 November 2015, aged 86. He had become a active reform-Communist intellectual in the 1990s and repeatedly expressed regret for the role he had played in the East German regime. He considered the 9 November 1989 press-conference moment one of the luckiest accidents of the 20th century.
The 9 November date is a complicated one in German national memory — it was also the date of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938, and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic in 1918. The German national holiday is not 9 November but rather the 3 October reunification anniversary, partly to avoid the Kristallnacht association.