State · 1989
Fall of the Berlin Wall
Brandenburg Gate, Berlin
Amid the revolutions sweeping the Eastern Bloc in 1989, an East German press conference on 9 November prematurely announced that East Germans could travel freely; crowds gathered at Berlin's crossings, and that night puzzled border guards let them through as the world watched on live television. Communist governments fell across Central and Eastern Europe that year, and Germany was reunified on 3 October 1990.
Why it mattered
The fall of the Wall became a symbol of the collapse of communist rule in Europe and the end of the Cold War.
Related
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