East German official Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced the immediate opening of the inner German border, resulting in the fall of the Berlin Wall that night (border crossing pictured).

Günter Schabowski was a German politician who served as an official of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling party during most of the existence of East Germany. After climbing up the party ladder, he became the regime's unofficial spokesman. He gained worldwide fame in November 1989 when he improvised a slightly mistaken answer to a press conference question about the future of the Berlin Wall, that seemed to announce the Wall's immediate end and raised popular expectations much more rapidly than the government planned. Massive crowds gathered at the Wall the same night, which forced its opening after 28 years. Soon afterward, the entire inner German border was opened; not much later, East Germany ceased to exist.

The inner German border was the frontier between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1990. De jure not including the similar but physically separate Berlin Wall, the border was an irregular L-shaped line, 1,381 kilometres (858 mi) long. It ran south from the Baltic Sea and then east to the border of Czechoslovakia.

The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989 during the Peaceful Revolution, marking the beginning of the destruction of the figurative Iron Curtain, as East Berlin transit restrictions were overwhelmed and discarded. Sections of the wall were breached, and planned deconstruction began the following June. It was one of the series of events that started the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The fall of the inner German border took place shortly afterward. An end to the Cold War was declared at the Malta Summit in early December, and German reunification took place in October the following year.