The night the Wall met the people’s will
THE East German border guard who gave the order to open the Berlin Wall 25 years ago today has spoken about his momentous decision.
Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger told how, after several hours of a tense standoff with a crowd of 20 000 protesters demanding to be let through, at 11.30pm on November 9 1989, he ordered 46 armed guards to open the barrier.
It was the moment the Berlin Wall fell.
The other border crossings followed Jäger’s lead, and thousands of jubilant East Germans poured into West Berlin, among them the future chancellor, Angela Merkel.
Some even began to climb over the wall. Its years of dividing the city were over.
As the crowds rushed through his checkpoint, Jäger wept — from a combination of relief that the confrontation had ended without violence, and despair that the communist ideal he had served had failed.
“My world was collapsing and I felt like I was left alone by my party and my military commanders,” he said.
The 71-year-old rejected any suggestion that he was a hero that night. “The heroes were the other side,” he told Mitteldeutsche Zeitung newspaper, referring to the civilian masses. “I was so on the safe side.”
But if Jäger had not given the order for the wall to be opened, the night could have ended in bloodshed.
The standoff began after the East German regime, reeling from weeks of protests and a flood of refugees fleeing to the West through Hungary and what was then Czechoslovakia, decided to open the borders and allow East Germans to travel freely.
But the flustered apparatchik charged with announcing the decision mistakenly said it would take effect immediately, and tens of thousands of East Germans began streaming to the wall, demanding to be allowed across.
“When I saw him say that on TV, I thought: ‘What a load of total c**p,’ ” Jäger told Reuters. “He should have known East Germans would head straight for the exits . . . But they didn’t inform us at all. We were kept in the dark.”
As the crowds massed outside the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing he commanded, Jäger made a desperate call to his superiors, asking how to proceed. One told him to send the East Germans home unless they had official travel authorisation. But outside, Jäger could see that the crowd was getting angry.
When he called again and told his superiors he had to do something, he was told to let a few of the most agitated people in the crowd through, in the hope that it would calm the others.
But this just made the crowd more restive. Jäger began to fear a stampede.
“There were fears that they
My world was collapsing and I felt like I was left alone by my party and my military commanders
could get their hands on our weapons,” he said. “My border guards were urging me to do something, but they didn’t know what. They knew their necks would be on the line, so they wanted me to make the decision.” At 11.30pm, he let everybody through. “When I saw the masses of East German citizens there, I knew they were in the right,” he said. “When no one from above would give any orders, I was practically forced to take action.”
When he told his sister the next day that he was the one who had opened the wall, she said: “You did well.”
“It wasn’t me who opened the wall. It was the East German citizens who gathered that evening,” he told The Local website. “The only thing I can be credited with is that it happened without any blood being spilt.” GETTING OUT: A woman is lowered from a window in Bernauer Strasse to escape intoWest Berlin on September 10 1961 after the Cold War division of the city