What was the fall of the Berlin Wall?

The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 marked the collapse of communist control in East Germany and is widely remembered as the symbolic end of the Cold War in Europe. The wall had been built in August 1961 by the German Democratic Republic to prevent the mass emigration of East Germans to West Berlin and the rest of West Germany. By 1989, decades of economic stagnation, censorship, and surveillance by the Stasi secret police had produced widespread resentment in East Germany.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms of glasnost and perestroika after 1985, and his explicit refusal in a December 1988 speech at the United Nations to use force to prop up Eastern European regimes, removed the Soviet military threat that had crushed earlier reform movements in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Hungary opened its border with Austria in May 1989, and tens of thousands of East Germans fled west through Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Inside East Germany, peaceful Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, Dresden, and other cities grew through the autumn, with crowds chanting we are the people.

Long-time East German leader Erich Honecker resigned on October 18, 1989, replaced by Egon Krenz. The actual fall of the wall came almost by accident. On the evening of November 9, 1989, government spokesman Gunter Schabowski held a routine press conference and read new travel regulations he had not fully studied. When asked when the rules took effect, he answered immediately. East German television broadcast his words. Within hours, thousands of East Berliners gathered at checkpoints demanding passage. Confused border guards lacking orders eventually opened the gates. Crowds from both sides poured through, climbed atop the wall, and chipped pieces away with hammers and chisels in scenes broadcast around the world.

The wall was formally dismantled in 1990. East and West Germany were reunified on October 3, 1990 under West German law, with Berlin again the capital. The peaceful collapse spread quickly across Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution in November 1989 ended communist rule. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in December. By the end of 1989, every Warsaw Pact country except the Soviet Union had non-communist governments. The Soviet Union itself dissolved two years later on December 26, 1991.