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"I didn't open the wall. The people who stood here, they did it," says the 71-year-old with a booming voice who was an East German lieutenant colonel in charge of passport control at Bornholmer Street. "Their will was so great, there was no other alternative but to open the border."
Those people had come to his crossing at Bornholmer Street after hearing Politburo member Guenther Schabowski say — mistakenly, as it turns out — at an evening news conference on Nov. 9, 1989, that East Germans would be allowed to cross into West Germany, effective immediately.
Harald Jaeger in uniform next to the flag of his East German border regiment in 1964.
Courtesy of Harald Jaeger
Schabowski was a member of the ruling Socialist Unity Party in East Germany who helped force East German leader Erich Honecker from power a month earlier because of mounting public pressure across the Soviet Bloc for reforms.
Jaeger recalls almost choking on his dinner when he heard Schabowski on his workplace cafeteria's TV set. He rushed to the office to get some clarification on what his border guards were supposed to do.
For East Berliners yearning to go to a part of their city that had been off-limits for 28 years, Schabowski's meaning couldn't have been clearer. He was a member of the ruling party, and what he said was law.
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