The Man Who Brought Down the Berlin Wall

Gunter Schabowski was an official of the Social Unity Party in communist East Germany. He was famous for accidentally beginning the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

On November 9th, 1989, Schabowski famously announced in a live-broadcast international press conference that (effectively) all rules for travelling abroad were lifted, in effect "immediately". However, the misunderstanding was only with regards to the date; the plan had been to lift the rules, found unsustainable after the mass defections via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, on the next morning.


Tens of thousands of people immediately went to the Berlin Wall where the vastly outnumbered border guards were forced to open access points and allow them through, which proved to be the end of the Wall regime. During the following purges of the "old guard", Schabowski was quickly thrown out of the SED, which now morphed into the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), even though earlier in 1989 he had been awarded the party's prestigious "Karl Marx" medal.

After the German Reunification, Schabowski became highly critical of his own actions in the GDR and those of his fellow Politburo members, as well as of Leninist-style socialism in general. As of 2004, he remains the only really high-ranking GDR official that has renounced that state as fatally flawed. He worked again as a journalist and editor for a small local paper between 1992 and 1999. His campaign help for the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) has caused some of his former allies to call him a Wryneck.