00:00Welcome to Turning Points, World History. I am Hugo.
00:04And I am Clara. Tonight, the story of how the most famous wall in the world fell,
00:09not because anyone ordered it to fall, but because one tired official misread his notes
00:14on live television. It is the 9th of November, 1989, in East Berlin.
00:21To understand that night, you first have to understand the wall.
00:25It went up overnight in August 1961, when East German soldiers unrolled barbed wire across
00:32streets, squares, and even through living rooms. Over the following years, it became something
00:38far more terrible than a wall. Two parallel concrete barriers, a death strip in between,
00:45guard towers, dogs, floodlights, and orders to shoot anyone who tried to cross.
00:51For 28 years, that wall cut a city in half. Families were divided by a street. Grandparents
00:57on one side waved at grandchildren on the other and could not touch them. More than a hundred
01:02people died trying to cross it, shot, drowned, or killed by mines and traps. The wall was not
01:08just concrete. It was the physical shape of the Cold War, the line between East and West,
01:13drawn in a city.
01:14By the autumn of 1989, that line was under pressure from every direction. In the Soviet
01:21Union, Mikhail Gorbachev was talking about openness, glasnost, and restructuring, perestroika,
01:28and, crucially, he had signaled that Moscow would no longer send tanks to prop up its allies.
01:35In Poland, free elections had already brought a non-communist government to power. In Hungary,
01:41the border fence with Austria had been cut open in the summer, and thousands of East Germans were
01:47escaping to the west through Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And inside East Germany, something
01:52remarkable was happening. Every Monday evening, in Leipzig and then in other cities, tens of thousands
01:59of people gathered for peaceful protests. They carried candles, not weapons. They chanted,
02:05we are the people. By October, the crowds in Leipzig numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
02:11An regime, terrified of a bloodbath it could not control, did not shoot. The pressure kept
02:17building, week after week, and the government kept looking for a valve to let some of it out.
02:23That valve was supposed to be a new travel law. On the 7th and 8th of November, the entire East
02:29German cabinet resigned, and the ruling party replaced its leadership with supposed reformers.
02:34They drafted a modest, bureaucratic change. East Germans would be allowed to apply for visas to
02:40travel to the west, with approvals granted quickly. It was meant to calm the protests,
02:46not to open the border. And critically, it was meant to take effect the following day,
02:51after border guards had been briefed and paperwork prepared.
02:55But the man chosen to announce it to the world had not been at the meeting where those details were
02:59discussed. His name was Gunter Schabowski, a member of the ruling party's Politburo and its spokesman.
03:07On the evening of the 9th of November, he walked into a live televised press conference,
03:12and shortly before it began, someone handed him a note summarizing the new travel rules.
03:17He had barely glanced at it.
03:19For most of the press conference, nothing unusual happened. Then, near the end, an Italian journalist
03:25asked about the travel rules. Schabowski shuffled his papers, found the note, and read it aloud.
03:32Private travel abroad, he said, can be applied for without prerequisites, and permanent emigration
03:38can take place through all border crossings. Then came the question that changed history.
03:43A reporter asked, when does this take effect?
03:47Schabowski looked down at his notes, found nothing useful, and improvised. As far as I know,
03:52he said, it takes effect immediately, without delay. In German, sofort, unverzuglich. It was wrong.
04:00The rules were supposed to start the next day, and only after an application. But Schabowski had
04:05just told the world, live on television, that the border was open, right now.
04:10Within minutes, West German television broadcast the news, and East Berliners watching at home
04:16heard it too. They did not wait for paperwork. They did not pack bags. They walked, then ran,
04:24to the checkpoints. Thousands of them, ordinary people in coats and scarves, arrived at the crossings
04:31and demanded to be let through, shouting that Schabowski had said they could cross.
04:36The border guards had been given no information at all. Imagine their position. They were armed,
04:42they had orders to shoot escapers, and suddenly they faced a peaceful crowd of thousands growing
04:47by the minute, with television cameras arriving. Their commanders could not be reached, or would
04:53not give a clear order, because nobody in the leadership wanted to take responsibility for
04:57either opening the border or ordering a massacre on live television.
05:01The decisive moment came at the Bornholmerstrasse checkpoint, in the north of the city. The
05:07commander there was a lieutenant colonel named Harold Jaeger. For hours he held the crowd back,
05:13letting a few people through and stamping their passports in a way that was meant to exile them.
05:19But the crowd kept growing, and it kept chanting,
05:33Tens of thousands poured across. Other checkpoints followed. By midnight, the wall, the structure that
05:40had caged East Germans for twenty-eight years, had simply ceased to function before a single official
05:46demolition order was ever signed. On top of the wall near the Brandenburg Gate, strangers danced,
05:53popped champagne, and chipped at the concrete with hammers. West Berliners greeted East Berliners with
06:00flowers, hugs, and a small welcome payment, and families separated for decades embraced in the street.
06:07Now, a careful historian will tell you that Schabowski's mistake was not the whole story,
06:12and that is important. The wall fell because of all the things that came before it.
06:18Gorbachev's refusal to use force, the Monday protests, the Hungarians cutting their fence,
06:24the Polish elections, and twenty-eight years of ordinary East Germans refusing to accept that a
06:30wall across their city was normal. Schabowski's answer was the spark. The fuel had been gathering for
06:37months, and for years. It is also worth saying what did not happen that night. Nobody was killed
06:44at the checkpoints. The guards did not fire. That is almost miraculous, given how many times the Cold
06:49War nearly turned hot, and it is a tribute to the crowds, who stayed peaceful, and to commanders like
06:55Jaeger, who chose not to shoot. One wrong order that night, one panicked volley, and the story we tell
07:01today could have been a tragedy instead of a celebration. The consequences unfolded fast.
07:08Within weeks, the East German government collapsed. Within a year, on the 3rd of October 1990,
07:14Germany was reunified. A country divided since the end of the Second World War made whole again.
07:20And within two years, the Soviet Union itself dissolved. The Cold War, which had shaped the lives
07:26of everyone listening to this podcast who was alive then, was over. Not with a treaty signing,
07:32not with a battle, but with a confused spokesman, a piece of paper, and a crowd that refused to go
07:38home.
07:39And here is the detail that makes historians smile and shiver in equal measure.
07:44Gorbachev, the man history credits most with ending the Cold War, did not learn what had happened from a
07:50Politburo cable or a late-night phone call. He learned it the way millions of ordinary people did,
07:56from the television news, sitting in his own living room. At the single most dramatic moment
08:02of the collapse he had helped make possible, he was a spectator.
08:06So why does this night belong in a series called Turning Points? Because it proves that history is not
08:13only made by great plans. Sometimes, it is made by a small human error, landing on top of enormous
08:21human courage. Schabowski misread a memo. But the crowds were already there, the protesters had already
08:29marched, and the guards had already decided, in their hearts, that they would not shoot their own people.
08:36The wall did not fall because one man made a mistake. It fell because millions of people were ready for
08:42it
08:42to fall, and one mistake gave them their moment. Today, most of the wall is gone. A few stretches
08:49remain as memorials, covered in murals and graffiti, and there are brass lines in the pavement of Berlin
08:55marking where it once stood. If you walk that line today, you walk through neighborhoods, cafes,
09:01and parks, and it is almost impossible to believe that a concrete barrier with a death strip once ran
09:07right there. That impossibility is the point. Walls that look permanent rarely are.
09:12Thank you for listening to Turning Points World History. I am Hugo. And I am Clara. Join us next time
09:20for another moment when the world changed in a single day.
