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. It was in Hungary where “the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall,” then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl reminded his fellow Germans when he spoke in Berlin on Oct. 4, 1990, the day after German reunification. And Hungary is still home today to the secret facilitators and quiet heroes who probably gave the regime of East German leader Erich Honecker the decisive push by opening the gates to the West for tens of thousands of East German refugees. The names of the communist reformers and civil rights activists, border patrol officers and pastors who helped to write history in front of a barbed wire-topped wooden gate in the border region near Lake Neusiedl were soon on everyone’s lips.
What inspired them to act, on the other hand, is only slowly coming to light now.