Word: border
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unlike the thousands who had abandoned their Communist home land for the West in recent weeks, most people crossing on the weekend were just visiting, taking advantage of the freedom created by Thursday's opening of East Germany's borders. By last night, the border gridlock had eased, and West Berlin's streets were returning to normal...
Reflecting the new open-border policy, East German Defense Minister Heinz Kessler said yesterday that border guards who once shot at their fleeing countrymen, have been told not to use firearms any more in cases of border violations...
...pictures as defiant as a pair of young West Berliners, standing before a water cannon, ramming a post into the Wall, as inconceivable as hundreds of youths celebrating before the Brandenburg Gate, as simply staggering as a peak-capped East German border guard handing a flower to West German women seated atop the barrier, spread throughout the Western world...
Even if the Wall is stripped of political significance, it still serves a purpose by applying a brake to refugee traffic. An East German official predicts that once free travel wipes out border barriers, about 1.5 million of the country's 16.6 million citizens might head West. Without the Wall, West Berlin will bear the brunt of that great rush. But West Berlin's workers already resent the city's shortages of jobs and housing and the heavy concentration of alien guest workers from Turkey and ethnic Germans from the East bloc. Ironically, unless the burden of a new influx...
...minute the ban was lifted, they were on the move again. At midnight last Tuesday East Germans regained the right to travel to Czechoslovakia that had been taken from them a month ago. Within days more than 8,000 had crossed the border, and by the weekend Czechoslovakia flung open its Western border to let the growing flood pass unhindered into West Germany. Those who stayed behind stepped up the mass demonstrations for reform that have dogged President Egon Krenz from the moment he took office three weeks ago. Hundreds of thousands marched through East Berlin on Saturday calling...