December 1989
December 1: Sitting of the GDR Volkskammer (East German Parliament). With the votes from the parliamentary party of the SED, the members of parliament delete the leading role of the SED from the GDR constitution. They discuss the corruption among the SED leadership and ask what role the department of "Commercial Coordination" (Germ: Kommerzielle Koordinierung) plays in it. The ministers who are directly asked for information, Gerhard Beil (Foreign Trade) and Gerhard Schürer (State Planning Commission), pretend ignorance of Schalck’s activities; neither Egon Krenz nor Hans Modrow shield him.
December 2: The start of a two-day summit between US President Bush and USSR state and Communist Party leader Gorbachev in Malta. The German question becomes the main topic.
December 3: Members of the old SED leadership (Harry Tisch, Günter Mittag, Gerhard Müller and Hans Albrecht) are taken into custody in the morning. – Last meeting of the SED Central Committee: in order to dissociate themselves from the old party leadership and in the hope of rescuing their own position, the newly elected First SED District Secretaries, who have no longer been appointed from the top, force the Politburo and Central Committee to resign – along with Egon Krenz as SED General Secretary. At the start of the meeting, Hans Modrow announces the early retirement of a Central Committee member, saying that Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski had left the GDR the night before, destination unknown.
Schalck, who has flown to West Berlin and gives himself up to the West Berlin judiciary on December 6, leaves a farewell letter, the contents of which are not revealed to the Central Committee. In the letter, Schalck says that he has organised for an account of the GDR assets that he has invested, some of them abroad, to be shown to the Chairman of the Council of Ministers. He says they are "the last reserve when the state becomes insolvent, which in my opinion will happen at the end of this year or the beginning of next year (…)"
Before the start of the Central Committee meeting, several First SED District Secretaries have demanded the annulment of the rigged local election of May 1989 to allow a clean, new start. Egon Krenz rejects this demand at the Central Committee meeting.
The 86-year-old veteran communist Bernhard Quandt causes the dramatic climax of the final meeting of the SED Central Committee. Weeping, he goes to the microphone and demands that accounts be settled with the "gang of criminals in the old Politburo" and that all those "who had brought our party into such disgrace that the whole world is faced with a scandal the likes of which it has never seen" be summarily executed.
At the end of the meeting, a working committee is formed to prepare an extraordinary party conference. The committee includes among its members Gregor Gysi, the Mayor of Dresden, Wolfgang Berghofer, and the former Stasi general and spy chief Markus Wolf.
December 4: Mikhail Gorbachev rejects the Ten-Point Programme, telling foreign minister Genscher it is a "diktat". – The end of the State Security (Stasi) is brought closer by the occupation of the buildings used by the district administrations of the Ministry of Security in Erfurt, Suhl and Leipzig.
December 5: The chief public prosecutor of the GDR starts a judicial enquiry against Erich Honecker on charges of "abuse of confidence" and "embezzlement to the serious disadvantage of socialist property." On August 8 1990, further charges are brought: "suspicion of multiple murder" and "deliberate bodily harm in several cases." The enquiry is transferred to the chief public prosecutor at the Berlin Court of Appeal in October 1990. The SED Betriebskampfgruppen (Eng: combat groups) are disbanded and their weapons taken over by the Volkspolizei (People’s Police).
December 5: After negotiations with the West German government, the GDR announces that visa requirements and obligatory currency exchange for Western visitors are to be abolished from January 1, 1990.
December 6: Egon Krenz resigns as Chairman of the State Council and the National Defence Council. A session of the National Defence Council called at short notice can no longer take place; this committee, which is in charge of operations at district and regional level and can take over all executive and legislative authority in a state of emergency, is no longer able to negotiate. Egon Krenz was its last member with a state function; all its other members have resigned from their posts, with some of them being held in custody. The top military security organ of the GDR has no one left but its secretary, Colonel General Fritz Streletz.
The head of the Office of National Security (Ger: Amt für Nationale Sicherheit or AfNS), Wolfgang Schwanitz, who was originally invited as a guest, has put together a few notes on the situation in a preparatory paper. It says that state security is "limited or no longer guaranteed in certain areas. This is the case with the state border of the GDR to the FRG, parts of the armed bodies and the Kampfgruppen in particular. State authorities, particularly at district and regional level, increasingly unable to act, some in a state of self-dissolution. There are growing tendencies towards anarchy and chaos. (…) Content and nature of recent demonstrations increasingly aggressive; the danger of a slide into uncontrollable violence is growing daily; organisers are sometimes no longer in control of the situation."
December 7: The first meeting of the central "Round Table" in East Berlin, attended by the SED, the party bloc, mass organisations and the opposition, calls for new elections, a new constitution and the disbandment of the Ministry of State Security, renamed "Amt für Nationale Sicherheit (AfNS)". – At a meeting of the AfNS leadership on the same day, it is noted that the "disintegration" and "serious signs of dissolution" of the armed forces are continuing, and that power is now no longer merely shared: "The counter-revolution is taking shape."
December 8/9: Start of a two-day extraordinary party conference of the SED. A proposed motion to dissolve the SED does not gain a majority. Gregor Gysi becomes the new SED chairman.
December 9: At an EC summit in Strasbourg, the right of the Germans to state unity is recognised – but there is still tension in the air: not all of Germany’s neighbours like the prospect of a united Germany.
December 11: Once more, there are a large number of so-called "Monday demonstrations" across the entire GDR. The calls for German reunification are stronger in the south than in the north.
December 12: The first prisoners are freed as part of the amnesty decided upon by the State Council. The amnesty does not apply in cases of serious crime.
December 14: The Modrow government decides to recall Mielke’s successor, Schwanitz, from the cabinet and to dissolve the AfNS owing to continuing protests against the State Security.
December 16: Start of the second part of the extraordinary SED party conference. The party rechristens itself SED-PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism; Ger: Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus).
December 19: West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl is welcomed enthusiastically by the people during a meeting with prime minister Hans Modrow. Modrow asks Kohl for an "equalisation of burdens" to the tune of 15 hundred thousand marks for the GDR; Kohl refuses, but says he is ready to negotiate on a "contractual community" between the two German states. During a public rally with the West German chancellor, hundreds of thousands of people display their desire for German reunification.
At the same time, a rally of the SED-PDS is taking place in East Berlin. Speaking at Academy Square, Gregor Gysi calls for the independence of the GDR and speaks out against reunification.
December 20: Pieces of the Wall become worldwide top sellers in the run-up to Christmas.
December 21: GDR defence minister Theodor Hoffmann finally and officially abolishes the order to shoot in his Command 101/89 for the GDR border troops. The command states: "The use of firearms, with the exception of repelling attacks on the lives of the family members of the border troops or other citizens of the GDR, is to be reliably ruled out."
December 22: Prime Minister Hans Modrow and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl open a border crossing directly at the Brandenburg Gate.
December 24: Early start of visa-free travel for West German citizens and West Berliners to the GDR and to East Berlin. – Since the signing of the visiting agreement of 1974, 44 million visits by West Berliner in East Berlin and the GDR have been registered.
December 31: The first joint German-German New Year’s Eve party at the Brandenburg gate. After the Wall was built in 1961 up to the end of 1989, around 500,000 GDR citizens moved to the FRG with permission, 15,287 were "ransomed" by the West German government, and 460,000 fled
In December, 43,221 GDR citizens manage to flee to the West.
