At the stroke of midnight, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist and its territory joined the Federal Republic of Germany, completing a reunification process set in motion by the fall of the Berlin Wall eleven months earlier. Crowds gathered at the Reichstag in Berlin as fireworks lit the sky and the black-red-gold flag was raised. The event closed the final chapter of the Cold War's division of Europe.
Just under a year after East Germans breached the Berlin Wall with hammers and bare hands, the two German states dissolved into one. The legal mechanism was almost anticlimactic: East Germany simply acceded to the West German constitution under Article 23, a bureaucratic sentence ending a nation of 16 million people. Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had staked his political career on rapid unification, stood before hundreds of thousands at the Reichstag as the black-red-gold flag rose and church bells rang across the country.
Not everyone celebrated unreservedly. Many East Germans, called "Ossis," felt swallowed rather than reunited, their factories shuttered and currency devalued almost overnight by monetary union earlier that summer. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed to withdraw troops in exchange for economic aid, a decision that stunned hardliners in Moscow and arguably hastened the USSR's own collapse a year later.
The date, October 3, was chosen deliberately to precede the anniversary of East Germany's 1949 founding. It remains Germany's national holiday, Tag der Deutschen Einheit, a quieter commemoration than the wall's fall but the one that made reunification legally real.