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In spring 1989, Hungary began dismantling its
fortified border with Austria. A few months later, the first crack in
the Iron Curtain opened when hundreds of East Germans fled across the
Austrian-Hungarian border. Now new details about the quiet heroes of
that historic event are coming to light.
When the Iron Curtain was torn open for the first time, on June 27,
1989, an image made its way around the world. It showed two men dressed
in suits, using bolt cutters to nip holes in a barbed wire fence.
The men, then-Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock and his Hungarian
counterpart Gyula Horn, had traveled to the Austrian-Hungarian border
that day to send a signal that the division of postwar Europe was
coming to an end. Shoulder-to-shoulder, wielding the bulky bolt cutters
against the wire fence, they seemed to be conveying the good news that
the fence was finally coming down.
In reality, as then-Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth says
today, speaking in a coffee shop close to his home on the north shore
of Lake Balaton, the removal of the border fence had already been
underway for several weeks at the time. When Foreign Minister Horn
proposed the fence-cutting ceremony along the border, Nemeth replied:
"Gyula, do it, but hurry up - there isn't much barbed wire left."
There had been signs of Hungary's quiet departure from the camp of the
Warsaw Pact states for years; but neither Hungary's allies nor the NATO
countries took these signals seriously. Even in the summer of 1989,
there still seemed to be too many factors standing in the way of a
change in the postwar order. For one thing, Russian troops were still
stationed in Hungary. The rest of the world was not truly convinced of
the changes until August 19, 1989, when hundreds of East Germans, more
or less unobstructed, slipped into the West through a rickety wooden
gate near Sopron. It was the beginning of the end of East Germany.
Roughly three weeks later, more than 10,000 East German citizens
traveled to West Germany through Austria - legally, by this time.
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