On November 10, 1989, crowds swarmed the Berlin Wall in numbers even larger than the chaotic opening night before, hacking off chunks of concrete as souvenirs while East German border guards, overwhelmed and undirected, largely let them pass. Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl addressed cheering crowds near the Reichstag. The scenes, broadcast worldwide, became the defining images of the Cold War's end, a year before formal German reunification.
The night before, an East German press officer named Günter Schabowski had fumbled an announcement about relaxed travel rules, triggering a spontaneous rush to checkpoints that no one, least of all the guards, had been prepared for. By the morning of November 10, what began as confusion had turned into a citywide festival. Families who had been separated for 28 years embraced at checkpoints that overnight had become meaningless lines on pavement.
West Berliners climbed atop the Wall near the Brandenburg Gate, dangling legs over a barrier that East German soldiers had shot people trying to cross for decades. Vendors sold pieces of concrete, real and fake, within hours. Mayor Walter Momper and Chancellor Willy Brandt spoke to enormous crowds, and demolition equipment, initially brought in by the state, began official dismantling within days, though most of the actual destruction was done by hand, by ordinary Berliners with hammers and chisels who became known as Mauerspechte, wall peckers.
The East German government, caught entirely off guard by the scale of the exodus and celebration, essentially lost control of the narrative and, soon after, the state itself. Within a year, Germany would be formally reunified, and within two, the Soviet Union would cease to exist.