The Fall of the Berlin Wall

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was the sudden opening of the barrier that had divided communist East Berlin from democratic West Berlin since 1961, after East German officials, overwhelmed by weeks of mass protest and confused by a mistimed announcement of new travel rules, allowed crowds to cross freely for the first time in nearly three decades. Within days, Berliners on both sides were dismantling sections of the wall themselves, and the event quickly became the defining symbol of the collapse of Soviet controlled communism across Eastern Europe, which had already begun with reform movements in Poland and Hungary earlier that year. East and West Germany formally reunified less than a year later, in October 1990, and the fall of the wall is widely treated by historians as the symbolic end of the Cold War, though the Soviet Union itself did not formally dissolve until December 1991.