East Germans Had Three Hours. Two Days Later Somebody Got Shot.

A meadow, a wooden gate in a wire fence, and three hours. That was the entire permission. On the nineteenth of August 1989, two Hungarian opposition groups were allowed to open a disused border crossing into Austria for one afternoon, walk a delegation through it, grill bacon over a fire, and shut it again. Six hundred East Germans used those three hours to leave the country. Nobody fired at them. What survives of that day is a cheerful story: a garden party that tore a hole in the Iron Curtain by accident. Almost every part of that is wrong. The event was not a surprise. Hungarian state security had it on paper from the tenth of July, five weeks ahead, and passed it to counter-intelligence at the end of that month. A delegation from the East German Ministry for State Security walked the ground in late July, and that only came out ten years afterwards. What nobody arranged was the crowd. Somebody printed thousands of leaflets and had them distributed across the campsites of western Hungary, as far as Lake Balaton, which that August was full of East Germans who had no intention of going home. The leaflets announced a one-time crossing at a place where the fence had recently come down. No organisation was named on them. The organisers say they did not make them. The Hungarian authorities had no reason to advertise an illegal exit route to thousands of foreigners. To this day there is no name attached to those leaflets, and they are the single load-bearing element of the whole day. There is one more thing the anniversary coverage never puts in the same paragraph as the rest. Two days later, on the same stretch of border, an architect from Weimar died in a struggle over a soldier's rifle, in front of his small son. 00:00 Intro 00:56 The Deliberate Opening 04:29 The Picnic Credit Dispute 13:55 The Border Was Still Lethal 18:11 Road To Kohida Prison Most of what is remembered about the end of the Iron Curtain has been tidied up until it fits on a plaque. This channel goes back to what was actually written down at the time. Subscribe. Sources: Chronik der Mauer (Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung / ZZF Potsdam) · Bundesarchiv documentation on the Pan-European Picnic · Hungarian State Security files as published after 1999 · Laszlo Nagy, statements on the origin and organisation of the event · Stiftung Berliner Mauer and the Chronik der Mauer entry on Kurt-Werner Schulz · contemporary reporting from August 1989. Where the sources disagree — whose idea it was, how many people actually crossed, who printed the leaflets — this film says so instead of picking the tidier version. The narration is generated. The archive files are not. #ForgottenEurope