#throwbackthursday

Trigger Warning! This is a series of posts about my personal experiences. It has nothing to do with self-defense, hand guns, or Personal Protection.

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall started to be torn down. It is sometimes called Fall of the Wall Day. The tearing down of the Wall was one of the most momentous days in human history. Those who didn’t live through the Cold War can’t imagine the emotional impact it had on those of us who did.

The Wall wasn’t demolished by governments. People broke through en masse and then started to tear it down. Even the border guards, who had killed over 140 escapees over the years, were no longer willing to enforce the rules against crossing.

The German experience of the event was different from ours here in the United States. East German people wanted freedom; they no longer believed in their government. It could almost be said that the Communist governments no longer believed in themselves.

A young woman was driven across the border the next day. Then, “she opened the door, stuck her leg out, and touched the floor with her foot. Then she smiled triumphantly.

‘It was like the moon landing,’ recalled [the man who drove her], ‘a kind of Neil Armstrong moment.’

Later, back in the East, she had called her parents and said, ‘Guess what, I was in the West.’ ”

To Americans it was somewhat different. I remember it as if it was yesterday. I was standing next to a friend’s cube while he was listening to the radio. When the broadcast said the Wall was being torn down, my knees got weak. If there hadn’t been a short wall for me to support myself on, I would have fallen down.

The Wall was the most visible symbol of the Cold War. Tearing it down meant the Cold War was over. The Sword of Damocles of thermonuclear annihilation was no longer hanging over our heads. Thermonuclear effects  Soldiers didn’t have to wonder about dying in the Fulda Gap Memories of the Fulda Gap or undertaking one-way missions into Soviet occupied territory. The feeling was stupendous.

A series of events led to the Wall’s destruction. People who had lived under Communism for their entire lives realized it didn’t work.

https://blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/2019/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-berlin-wall/

“It was on 9 November 1989, five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest, that the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany crumbled.”