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Chronicle 1989

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"The Wall … will still be standing in fifty and even a hundred years' time": that's what Erich Honecker is still saying at the end of January 1989. And the GDR does seem stable to most people at the time, even though the dilapidated condition of industrial plants, the old parts of cities and the roads, as well as the air and water pollution, all herald the imminent economic disaster. more
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    • 1 March

      1989

      Inter-German trade reached a volume of 14.3 hundred million units of account in 1988, which, according to the West German Economics Ministry, means that it has decreased for the third successive year.

    • 3 March

      1989

      Miklos Nemeth
      The Hungarian prime minister Miklós Németh, who came into office in November 1988 as a reformer, pays Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a first visit in Moscow. more

    • 8 March

      1989

      Winfried Freudenberg: born on Aug. 29, 1956, fatally injured on March 8, 1989 when the balloon he used to escape over the Berlin Wall crashed
      Winfried Freudenberg (Photo: BStU, Ast. Berlin, AU 5302/89, Bl. 164)
      While attempting to escape from the GDR in a home-made hot-air balloon, the 32-year-old Winfried Freudenberg crashes over West Berlin and is killed. RIAS report on the balloon crash, 8. March 1989 (in German) Winfried Freudenberg, born on August 29, 1956 fatally injured on March 8, 1989 in a hot-air balloon crash

    • 13 March

      1989

      Several hundred people demonstrate during the Leipzig Spring Fair following a prayer for peace in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, calling "We want out! We want out!" The Volkspolizei (People’s Police) steps in; arrests take place.

    • 16 March

      1989

      In West Berlin, an SPD-Green coalition replaces the CDU-led Senate under Eberhard Diepgen; Walter Momper becomes the Mayor of Berlin. more

    • 26 March

      1989

      The newspaper "Welt am Sonntag" reports that, according to information held by the West German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND), the GDR leadership believes that up to 1.5 million GDR citizens want to move to West Germany.

      Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of the synod of Berlin-Brandenburg, Consistorial President Manfred Stolpe says the Protestant (Evangelical) Church of the GDR estimates that there have been around 60,000 applications for some 150,000 people and that the BND’s figure has "one zero too many". less

    • March 1989

      In March, 5,671 GDR citizens manage to flee to the West, 4,487 are given permission to leave the GDR.
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