www.tagesschau.de/inland/innen...
yep

So we're doing Tätersteine now? (not sure where, just remember reading something - cannot provide footnote)

It's also been done at the Foreign Office I believe as part of their Aufarbeitung.

You can feel how tired and out of steam he is at that press conference. Just totally done.

I completely understand! something I’m always trying to keep in mind while writing is that I’m coming to this as an outsider who didn’t experience it at all.

If you want to read more about the opening of the Berlin Wall, you can check out my new book - The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State www.bloomsbury.com/uk/german-de...

What looks like a single proximate cause is the end point of numerous structural problems all coming together to put maximum strain on an increasingly brittle and weakened political edifice. Once it began to crack, everything rapidly fell apart exposing the years of rot in the political order.

By late 1989, all of these trends intersected as mass demonstrations erupted demanding pluralism, personal freedom, and human rights and thousands fled the country. By the time of Schabowski's press conference, the SED had lost control of the streets and could no longer suppress mass demos.

Pluralism was opening up from below and internationally, the SED was under pressure to liberalize from the Soviet Union, which was implementing its own economic and political reform programs under Mikhail Gorbachev. The SED responded by censoring Soviet publications.

By its final decade, the SED had lost the capacity to absorb and assimilate international cultural trends and began importing Western culture wholesale for profit (the biggest film in the GDR in that era was Dirty Dancing) while also selectively hammering certain subcultures (esp punks).

By the mid-1980s, grassroots dissident groups were sprouting up around country in spite of Stasi infiltration and beginning in 1984 an ever growing number of citizens formally requested to emigrate permanently.

Economic difficulties aggravated the chronic problem of the political legitimacy of the SED, which was only able to maintain power through the guarantee of Soviet force and the check on out-migration that was the militarized border, most notably the Berlin Wall.

The rapid collapse of East Germany at the end of 1989 came at the confluence of a number of longer-term trends: the first was the long-standing crisis of the GDR economy. Even with massive spiraling debts to the West, it could not keep up with needs of industrial investment nor consumer demand.

The collapse of East Germany's draconian border regime and the subsequent end of state socialist dictatorship cannot, however, all be blamed on Schabowski's one bad press appearance, even if it set off a chain of decisive events #otd 36 years ago that led to crowds opening the Berlin Wall.

He was also lucky to speak fluent English so he could do better in the interrogations

Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal covered much of the same ground as Nuremberg but plenty left unaddressed for sure.

Same as Von Papen who helped bring Hitler to power.

One of the few people acquitted at Nuremberg was the first Nazi Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht - whose full name was implausibly Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht because his parents were fans of the American abolitionist.