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00:03On November 9th, 1989, the world changed forever.
00:12The Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of communist oppression, fell after 28 years
00:18marked by violence and tragedy.
00:22They were shooting from a tower.
00:24I couldn't figure it out.
00:25I just turned around and screamed, run, run, run.
00:32The Stasi pulled me by my hair and pulled me down.
00:36And then I passed out.
00:42You could have gotten almost anything out of me.
00:49Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect.
00:55But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.
01:01Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
01:06In the end, it wasn't politicians who brought down the wall.
01:12It was ordinary Germans who risked their lives to stand against a repressive regime and make a revolution without a
01:21shot being fired.
01:23They would not be stopped. It felt like they were saying, it's now or never.
01:34As the wall came down, world leaders came together to seize the moment and create a new Europe.
01:41Bringing an end to 40 years of Cold War hostility.
01:46I think we got it right.
01:48I honestly believe we got it right.
01:53This is the story of how a thin ribbon of concrete rose.
01:59How it fell.
02:01And how it brought one-time enemies together to change the course of modern history.
02:18Major funding for The Wall, A World Divided, was provided by a grant from the Robert Bosch Stiftung,
02:25a foundation supporting international understanding, welfare, education, the arts and culture,
02:29and research and teaching in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
02:34With additional funding from the RIOS Berlin Commission,
02:37preserving and deepening the ideals of German-American friendship.
02:41The Ed Rochelle Foundation, benefiting charitable, scientific, literary, and educational initiatives.
02:48Forsenius Medical Care, providing products, services, education, and support for chronic kidney diseases.
02:54And the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a German political foundation promoting freedom, peace, and justice through educational programs.
03:16At the end of World War II, the city of Berlin lay in ruins.
03:22Germany's devastated capital represented the evil that had been Nazism.
03:29The winners of the war divided Germany and its capital, Berlin, among themselves.
03:35The Soviet Union would occupy and control East Germany,
03:39a brand new country that promised to show the world why socialism was the best political system.
03:47West Germany, called the Federal Republic, would be occupied by the Americans, British, and French,
03:53who would establish a new democratic government that stood in direct opposition to communism.
04:02But what to do with Berlin itself wasn't so simple.
04:07The city lay deep within Soviet-occupied East Germany.
04:12The US and Britain refused to give it up, so an awkward compromise was reached.
04:18Berlin would be divided among the victors.
04:22The eastern half of the city would be controlled by the Soviets.
04:27The western half, by the other allies.
04:31That left West Berlin, a non-communist island within a communist nation.
04:41Almost immediately, East Germans began to emigrate from their socialist nation to rebuild their lives in western Germany.
04:52And many of them did it simply by crossing the border within the city of Berlin, from the east to
04:58the west.
05:02By 1961, East Germany had lost millions of its citizens through West Berlin.
05:10And if you could get from East Germany into East Berlin, and then from East Berlin into West Berlin, you
05:16could be resettled.
05:17And this was an option that, between 1945 and 1961, about two and a half million East Germans took.
05:24They didn't like life under communism, they didn't like the lack of prospects, they didn't like the lack of political
05:29freedom.
05:30And they voted with their feet.
05:37This is Daniel Schor in West Berlin.
05:39This is a subway station.
05:41It is also an escape hatch.
05:44Daniel Schor was the CBS News correspondent in Germany.
05:48The number of people coming over was staggering.
05:51It was like a stampede in progress.
05:56One refugee out of East Germany every three minutes.
06:00And for all we know, you could be looking at one now.
06:06The continued loss of its labor force threatened East Germany's economic survival.
06:13Party Secretary Walter Ulbricht knew the hemorrhage of human talent had to be stopped.
06:19The question was, how?
06:22What he wanted was a wall, a fence, a barrier down the middle of Berlin, making it impossible for East
06:29Germans physically to cross.
06:31And that would solve his problem.
06:33They couldn't go anywhere.
06:36In public, Ulbricht denied he would ever seal the border.
06:45But in the summer of 1961, he secretly ordered a young, ambitious party official named Erich Honecker to head up
06:53a covert feat of engineering.
06:57Honecker commandeered barbed wire and concrete to be stashed in and around Berlin.
07:03Then, on a summer Saturday night, while Berliners were on vacation, he sprang the trap.
07:15On August 13, 1961, Berliners woke up to a city cut in two.
07:22And by six o'clock in the morning, it was all done.
07:35On the Bernauerstrasse, in the north of Berlin, the border closure created an odd situation.
07:43The front doors of apartment houses opened onto West Berlin.
07:47But the people who lived inside the buildings were East Berliners.
07:51And now, they would no longer be allowed to use their front doors.
07:56Elke Rosin was a 16-year-old East Berliner who lived in an apartment on Bernauerstrasse.
08:04Four days after the border was sealed, Elke's father gathered the family together.
08:11It was in a late afternoon.
08:14My father and my parents told us about one hour earlier that we wanted to escape.
08:23And so we had to find some things to take with us.
08:27We put it in boxes and some bags.
08:32And that's me when I was running.
08:36For Elke and her family, escape meant dashing out the front door of their building
08:40and crossing the street to safety before the East German police could snatch them back.
08:47While her father locked the apartment door to keep the police from following,
08:51then leapt from the window.
08:54They were lucky they left when they did.
08:57And lucky they lived on the first floor.
09:00The border guards soon caught on.
09:02And others on Bernauerstrasse had a much harder time.
09:17Yeah, many people lost their life, you know, because of this strange situation.
09:27Within weeks, all the windows and doors on the street were bricked over.
09:34Something I had never seen before, and very few people have seen before,
09:38is to see a city cut through a center.
09:46It is really awful.
09:56In mid-October 1961, two months after the border closure,
10:01the Americans in West Berlin decided to test the resolve of the East Germans and their Soviet masters.
10:07An American official from West Berlin challenged the East German border guards by refusing to show his papers at the
10:14crossing.
10:15And a dangerous standoff began.
10:20Very soon, tanks appeared on the other side.
10:24Soviet tanks.
10:25And then for a while, at Checkpoint Charlie, you could see American and Soviet tanks head-to-head.
10:37I went and stood between the tanks.
10:43Looking at my camera, I said,
10:45Look at this picture.
10:47This could be a picture of the way World War III starts.
10:52The whole world watched Berlin for a tense 48 hours.
11:00Then, after delicate negotiations between Moscow and Washington, both sides backed down.
11:09The standoff at Checkpoint Charlie was the last time U.S. forces openly opposed the Soviets over the Berlin Wall.
11:19It took Berliners months to absorb the reality of living in this divided city.
11:25But no one dreamed it would take 28 years to knock that barrier down.
11:37As the reality of the wall sank in, Berliners on both sides made their accommodations.
11:44In West Berlin, platforms were built alongside the wall so divided families could at least see one another.
11:53One of those waving from the west was a young father named Rudolf Mueller.
11:58He had been working in West Berlin the day the border was closed.
12:02His wife and two boys were stuck in the east.
12:09So, after considering the options, at some point we decided to dig a tunnel to get my family over here.
12:18Mueller knew there was an idle construction site in West Berlin, right next to the wall.
12:24With the help of his brothers and some friends, he began a small tunnel that would end in the basement
12:29of an apartment house across the street in East Berlin.
12:36The tunnel itself began over here, behind that construction fence, went down two meters and then right across, right here.
12:51Here, where you see that indentation in the ground, there's that tunnel underneath.
12:57It was never secured.
13:02And we heard the border patrols on the sidewalk.
13:06So we had to be incredibly quiet.
13:10They dug every night for three weeks and finally broke through into the apartment house basement on the east side
13:17of the wall.
13:19Mueller climbed out to get his family and another couple he had promised to help and bring them back to
13:23the tunnel.
13:27It all should have gone smoothly.
13:29But almost immediately, one of the east German border guards challenged them.
13:37Right here is where the guard was standing.
13:40He saw us coming.
13:41And he yelled, stop, where are you trying to go?
13:46Only years later did Mueller figure out that he may have been betrayed.
13:51That the other couple he was helping escape were in fact agents of the east German secret police.
14:01But the guards didn't know. Mueller was armed.
14:09He raised his weapons slightly. I was watching him. I couldn't keep my eyes off of him.
14:15And he yelled loudly, stop. Where are you trying to go?
14:21I was shocked. My hair was standing on end. I was so afraid.
14:29I turned around and said to my wife, you keep going. Don't stop. Don't stop.
14:34My brothers are on the other side of the wall and they're waiting for you.
14:39So I turned around.
14:44Right around here and over there, where that line is in the asphalt.
14:48That's where the border guard was.
14:53He looked at me. I'll never forget.
14:55His face was all white from the excitement.
15:01Where are you trying to go? Show your papers.
15:05And because my wife and my children kept going, he felt provoked or whatever.
15:12He raised his machine gun and screamed this time.
15:16Your wife and children have to stop or I'll shoot.
15:22I tried to block his view, but when I saw the barrel of his machine gun, I had a gun
15:29myself.
15:31That's when it happened. I thought, you have to shoot or he shoots your family.
15:40He was standing there with his weapon up. And I shot him.
15:53The guard died. Whether for Mueller's one shot or the hail of bullets let loose by other guards, no one
16:01knows.
16:05It was a long time ago, but every time I talk about it, I still get chills up and down
16:10my spine.
16:13I never expected anything like this. It was horrible. Horrible that a young person had to die.
16:24Desperate escape attempts became commonplace and many succeeded.
16:36In Berlin, escaping East Germans punched holes in the wall of shame with homemade bombs and trucks.
16:47Others did not.
16:49About one year after the wall went up, 18-year-old Peter Fechter and a friend made a run at
16:55the fence near Checkpoint Charlie.
16:58Fechter's friend made it over, but the guard's automatic weapon fire caught Peter in the leg as he scaled the
17:04fence,
17:04and he slipped back to the ground.
17:09The bullet had severed an artery.
17:14West Berliners hear his cries, but are helpless.
17:18Communist, who can help, wait until Peter Fechter bleeds to death.
17:22Then carry him away.
17:26The GDR authorities issued new orders that anyone wounded while attempting to escape be removed from public view immediately.
17:36And they beefed up the wall, making it higher, broader, longer,
17:43until it extended 96 miles surrounding West Berlin.
17:49And in most places, it was 12 feet tall.
17:53But that was how it looked from the west, the free side.
18:00East Berliners saw it differently.
18:04If you were in East Berlin, and you walked towards the border with West Berlin,
18:09if you were in a park or a street, whatever, you would come up against a wall right in the
18:15middle of the street,
18:15and a warning sign, often nothing much more than that.
18:28If you then climbed that wall, went over and dropped down, you would find yourself between 60 and 90 yards
18:40from West Berlin.
18:42And not just that, immediately in front of you was what they called the security border fence.
18:51This was a wired fence about eight feet high, strengthened at the bottom so you couldn't crawl underneath.
18:59You had to climb it.
19:00And when you climbed it, you set off an alarm.
19:04You might, if it were night in certain parts of the border, also set off an automatic searchlight that would
19:08start sweeping the area.
19:14Watchtowers stood every few hundred meters, manned by heavily armed soldiers.
19:22They would know that there was somebody trying to cross the security fence.
19:26You're over the security fence, sirens have started to go, the guards have probably started shouting out warnings,
19:34and are preparing five necessary.
19:37The next obstacle to freedom was the Death Strip, a no-man's land with carefully raked sand designed to show
19:45footprints,
19:45and dogs on long leashes that would catch up with even the fastest runner.
19:52Some of it was covered by automatic machine guns rigged to trip wires.
19:58Only then, only, only after you had managed to get across the Death Strip,
20:05without being shot, savaged by a dog, did you reach what they called, not the wall at all,
20:12not what tourists in West Berlin would call the wall, but what they called the border marker.
20:19Finally, ninety yards from the first innocuous fence,
20:23this was the twelve-foot-high concrete barrier the Westerners saw,
20:28topped with a cylinder of smooth cement that made it nearly impossible to grip.
20:34And if you managed to get over that by some miraculous method, then you were in West Berlin.
20:40How many people managed that? The answer is hardly anybody.
20:45People got through on trucks, they dug tunnels, they flew over it, they went round it, they used false papers,
20:51but very, very few people in the 1970s and 80s managed to get through,
20:57not the Berlin Wall, but the multiplicity of walls that made up the Berlin Wall between East and West Berlin.
21:09Officially, the East German regime claimed the border was fortified to keep anti-socialist influences out.
21:17But most East Germans knew it made their homeland into a prison.
21:30Though in many ways the German Democratic Republic resembled the West,
21:35the political realities made daily life very different.
21:39Travel outside of communist countries was usually forbidden,
21:43and free speech severely limited.
21:51Young people were required to join state youth groups,
21:55and the state could be a stern master.
22:01Dieter Wenlund grew up near East Berlin.
22:04Like many teenagers in the 1960s and 70s, he embraced pop culture, rock and roll,
22:09and sharing smuggled Beatles records.
22:12It all seemed harmless enough.
22:16But when he put up posters of the Woodstock Rock Festival on his bedroom wall,
22:20it turned out he'd gone too far.
22:24The Woodstock posters and things like that were a symbol of a kind of freedom we didn't know.
22:32We each made what we wanted from them.
22:35They represented boundless opportunities.
22:37We each made the world's beliefs.
22:39Dieter had older brothers who lived in West Berlin,
22:42so his family was already on an official watch list.
22:48His flirtation with the corrupt influences of capitalist culture drew the attention of the state security force known as the
22:56Stasi,
22:57the secret police.
23:06After the wall came down, like many East Germans, Dieter applied to see his Stasi-file.
23:12A secret record of his private life.
23:27I had heard about them entering people's intimate and personal lives before, that they destroyed marriages.
23:38Where they went to get information on it, colleagues, acquaintances, complete strangers.
23:51We knew we were being watched.
23:53That it went that far did shock.
24:00The Stasi was headquartered here.
24:02A complex of anonymous buildings in a nondescript East Berlin neighborhood.
24:08From this third floor office, the Stasi's long-time head, Erich Milke, controlled his web of 90,000 agents and
24:17nearly 200,000 informants.
24:22By the 1980s, the Stasi had collected information on one-third of the country's population.
24:2981 miles worth of files.
24:38Dieter Wenlin's file was nearly 300 pages and included a carefully detailed plan the Stasi had designed to sabotage his
24:47adult life.
24:53There is a passage in here that says, I should be prevented from going to any university.
25:00And they had a specific plan about how to infiltrate my intimate life.
25:08And that astonished me.
25:11I just thought that was particularly insidious.
25:22The Stasi didn't just spy on the people of East Germany.
25:29Thousands were arrested and imprisoned.
25:35Matthias Melster spent five months here in his Stasi prison in East Berlin for attempting to escape to the west.
25:44Isolated, sleep-deprived, interrogated for hours every day, he was led to believe his family and closest friends had turned
25:54against him.
25:58There were days when they would ask the same question over and over.
26:05And days when the officers were silent.
26:08And I tried not to speak, not to betray any friends.
26:13They'd bring me in this room and they'd ignore me for eight hours.
26:18At some point, I became a nervous wreck.
26:29The thing that finally broke me, one of the officers looked and acted just like my father.
26:40That's how they cracked me.
26:41They succeeded in getting me to reveal things I never meant to.
26:46You could have gotten almost anything out of me.
27:01By 1980, East Germany had developed its own distinct culture.
27:08But every part of life was controlled by the ruling Socialist Unity Party and its head, Irish Honecker.
27:15The state claimed that socialist East Germany had a standard of living every bit as high as the West.
27:28But the reality was quite different.
27:33Everyday items were often in short supply.
27:37The wait for the coveted Trabant automobile could be seven years.
27:44Most citizens simply lived their lives quietly.
27:51The wine was a drink of wine.
27:51For happy people that enjoyed each other.
27:56The wine was a drink of wine like nature in the world.
28:12In the early 1980s, in the East German University City of Leipzig, something began to happen in an unexpected place.
28:24The Protestant Churches.
28:29Erich, Honecker and the East German regime had decided to allow organized religion a degree of freedom.
28:39Honecker's intention was to show that the churches would dry up and disappear,
28:43no longer needed in a modern socialist society.
28:51His plan backfired.
28:57In 1981, here in the Nicolai Church, I started holding peace prayers with 130 young people
29:04to raise awareness about justice and peace.
29:09Pastor Christian Fuehrer invited young people into his church to pray for peace.
29:15A similar gathering anyplace else would have been shut down.
29:19But he took advantage of the church's special status.
29:24The church was the only protected place in the GDR, where the police and army would never come inside.
29:32The idea caught on.
29:34Slowly, East German churches became magnets for groups of people who weren't necessarily interested in Christianity, but in reform.
29:44One of the earliest movements was environmentalism.
29:49By the 1970s, East Germans were coming to realize that their country was one of the most polluted in Europe.
29:57And this ecological movement grew in East Germany because places were becoming nightmarish.
30:04People were dying of the kind of diseases of pollution that hadn't really been a serious problem since Victorian times.
30:15Other causes began to emerge alongside environmentalism.
30:19Peace organizations, feminist groups, and anti-nuclear missile movement.
30:25So the church, because it was one of the few places where you could safely express free opinion, became a
30:32really attractive place to be.
30:36The Stasi infiltrated the church-based groups, but could do little to stop them.
30:41With the thin and uncertain umbrella of church protection over their heads, an opposition movement began to form.
30:49But it would take events outside of East Germany to spark a revolution.
31:00In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, a little-known 55-year-old Soviet Party official, was named General Secretary of the USSR.
31:10And everything began to change.
31:15Vice President George Bush attended the funeral of Gorbachev's predecessor and met the new leader of the Soviet Union.
31:23I was the first American to make contact with Gorbachev.
31:27And I wrote out, in a yellow pad, I wrote out a cable to send back to Reagan saying this
31:32man is very different.
31:34West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl also sensed that Gorbachev was a new kind of Soviet leader.
31:40The first time the two met, they discovered a shared political vision.
31:49It was a personal and honest conversation.
31:52We spoke about what we both wanted.
31:55And it was totally clear that we both wanted a new relationship between the Federal Republic and the Soviet Union.
32:05But at the White House, the reaction was different.
32:09President Ronald Reagan was wary of the charismatic Gorbachev.
32:13He believed in keeping up the pressure against the Soviets despite promises of reform.
32:21Then, in 1987, Reagan became the first U.S. President in more than two decades to come to Berlin and
32:29directly confront the Russians over the wall.
32:33Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
32:39The reaction was electric. Reagan's challenge reminded the West that the Berlin Wall still divided the city.
32:49But in Moscow, the reaction was muted.
32:55I get asked this often. What was your impression of this remark by President Reagan?
33:02And I say both I and the Soviet leadership were not at all impressed.
33:08We never forgot that President Reagan's first profession was as an actor.
33:15When Vice President George Bush became President two years later, everyone wondered what his policy toward Gorbachev would be.
33:25Eastern Europe was changing quickly, pushed along by Gorbachev's reforms.
33:33Already in Poland, dock worker Lech Walesa led a movement that would open the door to democratic elections.
33:40Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States and Mrs. Bush.
33:44George Bush saw the changes firsthand during a European trip in the summer of 1989.
33:51And in a speech delivered in Mainz, Western Germany, near the hometown of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Bush voiced U.S.
33:59support for the reform movements.
34:02The world has waited long enough. The time is right. Let Europe be whole and free.
34:15To the German audience, whole and free could mean only one thing, a call to reunify the nation that had
34:23been divided after World War II.
34:25Though the former President says it was a far more general message.
34:30Well, Europe, whole and free, I think it related more to the overall treatment of nuclear weapons and reduction of
34:38conventional weapons and all of that than it did specifically German unification.
34:44Now, German unification was a wonderful objective, but when I first started, I didn't say, now what we're going to
34:53do is plan how we're going to unify Germany in the next couple of months.
34:57I mean, it just didn't work that way.
34:59In fact, Bush was coming under heavy criticism for not being more active in his Eastern Europe policy.
35:05After six months in office, he hadn't even spoken with Gorbachev.
35:10Once he saw how fast reform was coming, he knew that must change.
35:16It was just the President and Brent and myself.
35:21And it was the President who said, you know, I really think we ought to think about a meeting with
35:29Gorbachev.
35:30He said, I worry that so much time has passed and I want to get to know Gorbachev.
35:38I'm afraid something might happen.
35:40I'm not sure that both of them were ready at that moment for it, but I think, you know, the
35:46President had decided.
35:48And they were wonderful in support of me when I'd make decisions whether they liked them or not.
35:53And I don't think there was any great disagreement on that one.
35:56Just be ready, do our homework.
35:59And it was the right thing to do.
36:02Later on, I got the feeling from Gorbachev he was very glad that we had said we would do this.
36:08The White House sent word to Moscow that President Bush would like to arrange a low-key meeting with Gorbachev
36:14the following December.
36:17Neither man knew that by then the world would be an entirely different place.
36:26In May of 1989, the reformist government in Hungary ripped the first hole in the Iron Curtain, literally cutting the
36:34fence that separated it from Austria to the West.
36:38Within weeks, thousands of East Germans were flooding to Hungary to take advantage of the open borders.
36:45Thousands more made their traditional holiday trips to Hungary into one-way journeys to the West.
36:54That summer, East Germans began to lose faith that they could have a life in East Germany.
37:00They had to leave.
37:02But they couldn't leave because East Germany had a very restrictive travel regime.
37:07You couldn't just simply move to another country.
37:11You had to have the permission of East Germany.
37:13So they were forced to flee.
37:16To flee, to abandon their families, abandon their property, abandon everything that they had, and to try to get to
37:22the West.
37:41Other East Germans took refuge in the West German embassy in Prague, hoping for asylum.
37:49West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl quietly encouraged this first wave of East German refugees.
37:56But at the same time, he wondered how many more they might have to accommodate.
38:04It was clear that enormous changes and dramatic shifts could be starting.
38:14And it was also clear that the developments in Hungary were basically signaling an end.
38:27That end was nearer than anyone knew.
38:31In October of 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev came to visit East Berlin.
38:39It was the 40th anniversary of the GDR.
38:43And Honaker had planned a big celebration in the old Soviet tradition.
38:53During a torchlight parade meant to show off East German youth, the young people began to chant.
39:01Gorby! Gorby!
39:03Gorby!
39:08People knew something important was happening.
39:12Hundreds of thousands of them were rallying to express their demands.
39:16They would not be stopped.
39:20It felt like they were saying, it's now or never.
39:28Speaking informally the next day, Gorbachev voiced a warning to the East German regime.
39:37He made this statement, which was repeated over and over again and refined, of those who come too late will
39:44be punished, punished by history.
39:45That we took to mean it was time for Mr. Honaker to go.
39:50After the ceremony, Gorbachev immediately left.
39:55And then the things began to happen.
40:02At the Nikolai Church in Leipzig, the small Monday night prayer meetings of the early 1980s were turning into a
40:09mass movement.
40:14Katrin Hottenhauer was a 20-year-old theology student who had become swept up in the opposition.
40:25I volunteered for an environmental group at the church.
40:33I had no idea that this turned me into an enemy of the state.
40:42As the opposition movement gained momentum, Katrin and her friends took ever greater risks.
40:49Including providing a safe haven for a weapon that could have easily landed them in prison.
40:54A mimeograph machine.
41:02For us the mimeograph was very important.
41:05You were not allowed to have one in the GDR.
41:08It's not like today where you can duplicate anything you want.
41:12The state had a monopoly on the distribution of information.
41:15Nobody knew we had one.
41:17Nobody knew we had one.
41:23Thanks in part to the underground printing presses, by September, the Monday prayer meetings at the Nikolai Church had become
41:31so large, the church could no longer contain them.
41:37Katrin and a friend decided to take yet another step and carry a banner calling for freedom.
41:49It didn't take long for plain-clothes Stasi agents to enforce the ban on free speech.
42:06Two days later, Katrin was arrested.
42:16I have to say I only remember parts because the Stasi pulled me by my hair and pulled me down
42:24and then I passed out.
42:30Despite arrests, the opposition movement was growing bolder.
42:34In Leipzig they called on citizens to make Monday, October 9, 1989 the biggest protest yet.
42:43Hanukkah responded by ordering tanks and armed troops to surround Leipzig.
42:52In everybody's mind was the horrifying memory of what had happened just a few months earlier in another communist country.
43:03Tiananmen Square, Beijing.
43:06Hundreds of young Chinese had been shot down for demonstrating against their government.
43:14The East German leaders had commended the Chinese for their decisive actions.
43:21So no one was surprised when the police in Leipzig told every hospital to prepare for casualties.
43:31October 9th would be a showdown and the authorities were clearly planning for what was now being called the China
43:39option.
43:45On October 9th, we fit about 8,000 people in the local churches.
43:53And after our peace prayer here, we wanted to leave the church and join the demonstration.
43:59But we opened the door and the whole square was just packed with people.
44:04Later we found out that about 70,000 people had shown up.
44:08The largest voluntary demonstration in the GDR history ever.
44:14As the demonstrators moved to Leipzig's main public square, armed police waited for the order to charge.
44:24Hanukkah had banned all news media from Leipzig earlier that week.
44:28But two young East Germans smuggled in a video camera.
44:34From high in a church steeple, they shot the only footage of a turning point moment in German history.
44:46On October 9th, I was in my prison cell and we heard all these noises.
44:54We thought these could be tanks or trucks or who knows what.
45:00Later, we found out it was the fate of 70,000 people who were marching for our freedom.
45:11In the end, there was no violent crackdown.
45:15Local church and party leaders joined by the internationally renowned conductor Kurt Masur made a public statement calling on the
45:22regime not to attack the protesters.
45:26While in East Berlin, Egon Krems, Hanukkah's chief aide, declined to pass on the party chief's orders to send in
45:35the police.
45:37East Germans, 70,000 of them, had been allowed to criticize their government in public.
45:45It was such a relief that no shots were fired. That evening, the GDR was not the same as it
45:52was in the morning. And we knew it.
45:54They were not the same as it was yesterday.
45:56We are not the same as it was yesterday.
45:59Within a week, Erich Hanukkah was ousted, replaced by Krems.
46:05Now, that was the good news.
46:07The bad news for the Communists was Egon Krenz, who took over,
46:12kept half of the Politburo, losing his credibility immediately.
46:16So although there was a change, it was half-heartedly not well executed,
46:21and the people were not reassured.
46:28In early November, at a massive demonstration in Berlin,
46:31the new face of the regime promised to reform the government
46:34and even open the borders.
46:39The East German government announced a relaxed travel law.
46:44It didn't work.
46:46It was too little, too late.
46:54I never booed so loud in my life.
46:59It was like a slap in the face to be addressed by these leaders.
47:04We knew where they were coming from.
47:07The old regime was saying they could save the GDR.
47:13But it was too late.
47:15I wanted it to stop existing.
47:19It was a dictatorship that would never become a democracy.
47:25Why?
47:31But still, no one was talking about taking down the Berlin Wall.
47:36That would come about purely by accident.
47:42On the evening of November 9th, 1989,
47:46East German Politburo spokesman Gunther Schabaski was giving a press conference.
47:52Schabaski read a long document announcing yet another incremental step in the lifting of travel restrictions.
47:59At the end, one newsman yelled out a simple question.
48:04When does it take effect?
48:11Immediately, he said, uncertainly, searching the document.
48:17It was not the answer the regime meant him to give.
48:20But it was too late.
48:22Within hours, American newscaster Tom Brokaw was announcing that the East Germans had opened the Wall.
48:30Good evening, live from the Berlin Wall on the most historic night in this Wall's history.
48:35What you see behind me is a celebration of this new policy announced today by the East German government
48:41that now, for the first time since the Wall was erected in 1961, people will be able to move through
48:47freely.
48:48West German TV, which East Berliners watched, reported the same thing.
48:54By 10 p.m., a crowd had gathered at the Bornholmer Bridge in northern Berlin, a major crossing point.
49:01The guards had no orders.
49:04They soon opened the gates and 28 years of imprisonment came crashing down.
49:11At the Bornholmer Bridge, there were so many people.
49:40The 9th of November was the craziest day in our lives.
49:53Everyone assumed it would be a trickle.
49:56It was a huge flood.
49:58Not one shot was fired.
50:03In Washington, administration officials tried to nail down the details.
50:08We didn't know whether the wall was opening, whether these demonstrators were going to
50:14get shot when they crossed, so it was a very confused period, but in the middle of it, Marlon
50:22Fitzwater, the press secretary, came in and said, Mr. President, you have to make a statement
50:26of some kind, so that's when he called people into his office and they stood around the desk
50:33and he answered a few questions.
50:48I remember one of the reporters said, what's your emotion, don't you have any emotion in
50:53this great time?
50:54In what you just said, this is a sort of great victory for our side in the big east-west
51:00battle, but you don't seem elated, and I'm wondering if you're thinking of the problem.
51:05I'm elated.
51:05I'm just not an emotional kind of a guy.
51:07President Bush was pestered pretty strongly by news organizations for being so restrained
51:15in his receipt of that news.
51:16After all, this was the end of the cold.
51:19We'd been fighting for this for 40 years, here it is, why aren't you showing more emotion?
51:24But he was smarter than that, because he knew that we had unfinished business.
51:29For us to overreact and look like we won and you guys lost would have been stupid, and it's
51:36much clearer to me now, a lot of things aren't clear to me now, but this one is.
51:39He said, this is a German moment, and that was a brilliant insight, because it was a German
51:46moment.
51:47And it allowed the United States to play an active diplomatic role in a way that did not
51:53embarrass the Soviet Union, and that recognized that Germany was about to become sovereign.
52:02For West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the timing couldn't have been more complicated.
52:08On November 9th, he was on an important diplomatic mission to Warsaw, Poland, with no easy way
52:14to get back to Germany.
52:19Finally, after delegate negotiations with his Polish hosts, he flew to Berlin and arrived exhausted,
52:27but also energized by the possibilities of a new Germany.
52:34There are situations in life where you say, I have to get through this no matter how tired
52:41I am.
52:42That's how we felt.
52:45We felt it was the fulfillment of a dream.
52:52Germans on both sides of the wall were jubilant, but at the same time, political leaders feared
52:59that an unstable East Germany could lead to violence.
53:08After the wall fell, there was this eerie feeling that everything was changing, and we didn't
53:14know where we were headed.
53:16Something dramatic had just occurred, and it was in the hands of others, not in the hands
53:22of governments.
53:25The question was, well, we have to shape this development.
53:31And the first interest at that time was not unification.
53:36The first interest was, how can we stabilize the situation in the GDR to keep the development
53:44under political control?
53:51Within a few days, it was clear the wall would remain open, and there would be no violent
53:56reaction from the East German regime.
53:59But what would come next?
54:03The next morning, I think we started thinking about the consequences of what we'd just seen.
54:09And as the principal Soviet specialist, it was suddenly my job to figure out what that
54:14meant, and not to figure it out in a kind of academic sense, but in a very real policy sense.
54:21And the clock was ticking.
54:24President Bush and General Secretary Gorbachev were scheduled for their first meeting in less
54:28than a month.
54:30Helmut Kohl was hoping to seize this unexpected moment to reunify Germany.
54:37Everyone knew this was a new Europe.
54:40The Berlin Wall had fallen after 28 years.
54:46Now the work would begin to decide what would rise in its place.
54:56To learn more about this program, please visit The Wall website at pbs.org.
55:02To obtain your DVD copy of The Wall, A World Divided, call 1-800-PLAY-PBS or visit shoppbs.org.
55:16www.pbs.org.au
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55:28www.hortys.org
55:33www.hortys.org
55:57Major funding for The Wall, A World Divided, was provided by a grant from the Robert Bosch Stiftung,
56:04a foundation supporting international understanding, welfare, education, the arts and culture,
56:09and research and teaching in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences,
56:13with additional funding from the Rios Berlin Commission, preserving and deepening the ideals of German-American friendship,
56:21the Ed Rochelle Foundation, benefiting charitable, scientific, literary, and educational initiatives,
56:27Fresenius Medical Care, providing products, services, education, and support for chronic kidney diseases,
56:33and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a German political foundation promoting freedom, peace, and justice through educational programs.
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