East German troops strung barbed wire across Berlin overnight in August 1961, and the wall that grew from it stood for twenty-eight years — until a spokesman fumbled a question about travel rules and a crowd took him at his word before he could correct it.

Günter Schabowski had been handed a note about twenty minutes before he read it out. What he had not been handed was an explanation of it.

That note, and the forty seconds he spent fumbling an answer about it on live television, is how the most heavily guarded border in Europe opened. But the wall had a beginning before it had that ending, and the beginning was just as sudden.

A city cut in half overnight

By the summer of 1961, East Germany was hemorrhaging people. Roughly 3.5 million had left for the West since 1949, most of them through the one gap in the Iron Curtain that still worked: a short train or subway ride across Berlin, a city jointly occupied by the four Allied powers and internally open. Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, had denied in June that anyone intended to build a wall. He was lying, or at least premature; the Politburo had already asked Moscow for permission.

The order went out for the night of 12–13 August, a Sunday, when border crossings were lightly staffed. East German soldiers and police began stringing barbed wire and digging up streets that crossed the sector boundary shortly after midnight. Berliners woke on the 13th to find the city split down the middle: subway lines cut and streets barricaded, families on one side of a fence that had not existed the evening before. The concrete came within days, and it kept being rebuilt and hardened for years afterward — four distinct generations of wall, the last a smooth-faced concrete slab that offered no handhold and a "death strip" of raked sand and floodlit tripwires behind it.

Twenty-eight years, one city, two systems

What resulted was not a single wall but a barrier system roughly 96 miles long, ringing West Berlin entirely rather than simply bisecting the city. Guard towers numbered in the hundreds. Border troops had standing shoot-to-kill orders, formalized in writing by the mid-1970s.

Families on either side went decades without seeing each other in person. Grandparents in the East watched grandchildren grow up in photographs mailed through the mail, when the mail was allowed at all. West Berlin became an enclave, reachable from West Germany proper only by defined air, road and rail corridors; East Berlin became the capital of a state that called itself the German Democratic Republic and answered, in practice, to Moscow.

At least 140 people died trying to cross, by the Berlin Wall Memorial's count, and researchers regard that as a floor rather than a ceiling, since East German records were incomplete and some deaths at the border were never classified as wall-related at all. Peter Fechter, eighteen, was shot in 1962 and left to bleed out in the death strip for nearly an hour while guards on both sides watched and did nothing; the image ran in newspapers worldwide. Others made it. Some families dug tunnels from basements on the western side, under the strip, into cellars in the east — one, nicknamed Tunnel 57 for the number of people it moved in October 1964, ran more than 400 feet.

What Schabowski actually said

By the autumn of 1989, the German Democratic Republic was coming apart at a pace its own government could not track. Hungary had opened its border to Austria in May, giving East Germans a back door west through a fellow Warsaw Pact country. Mass protests filled Leipzig every Monday. The Politburo, trying to relieve the pressure without abolishing the border outright, drafted new travel regulations that would let citizens apply for permission to leave.

Schabowski, the party's Berlin secretary, had not been in the room when the regulation was finalized on 9 November. He was handed a note before a press conference and told, apparently, to announce it near the end. Asked by an Italian journalist when the new rules would take effect, he shuffled his papers, found no effective date written down, and guessed: "As far as I know, effective immediately, without delay."

That was not quite what the Politburo intended. The plan had been an orderly rollout starting the following day, with passport stamps and paperwork at designated crossings. Schabowski's version, broadcast live and picked up within the hour by West German television, told an entire population the border was open now.

Crowds began gathering at checkpoints that same evening. At Bornholmer Strasse, the border guard commander, Harald Jäger, had received no instructions from above and could not reach anyone who would give him any; the phone lines to his superiors stayed silent while the crowd outside his gate grew into the thousands. Around 11:30 p.m., with no order to shoot and no order to hold, he told his men to stop checking papers and let people through. Other crossings followed within the hour. Nobody in a position of authority had decided the wall should open that night. It opened anyway, because the man holding the gate ran out of reasons to keep it shut.

The record's honest gap

Exactly what was on Schabowski's note, and whether he genuinely misread it or simply improvised past its meaning, has never been settled beyond his own account; he died in 2015, having spent his later years giving interviews about the moment repeatedly and not always identically. What is not in dispute is the effect: a bureaucratic announcement meant to loosen a border, garbled into a claim that it had already opened.

What is left of it

Demolition began within days of the crossing, first by hand with hammers and chisels (the "wall-peckers") and then by official crews through the following year. Most of it is gone. A 4,300-foot stretch along the Spree, covered in murals by more than a hundred artists after 1990, survives as the East Side Gallery, and a double row of cobblestones traces the old path through the modern city for anyone who cares to follow it. Germany reunified formally on 3 October 1990, less than a year after the gate at Bornholmer Strasse opened.

Berlin has spent the decades since building over the scar, and mostly succeeded; a visitor can cross where the wall stood without knowing it. Every 9 November, the date still gets marked anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with construction and everything to do with a man at a podium who did not know he was making history and a crowd that decided not to wait for him to figure it out.

Sources

• Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989 (2006)
• Berlin Wall Memorial (Stiftung Berliner Mauer), official visitor and research materials
• Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (2014)
• Hans-Hermann Hertle, "The Fall of the Wall: The Unintended Self-Dissolution of East Germany's Ruling Regime," Cold War International History Project