Happy Unification Day

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DRM

Guru
Location
West Yorks
Quite a few years ago I worked with an ex Army officer who was the senior officer in charge for the British sector when the wall started to come down. It took them completely by surprise. He told me that they didn’t know what was coming over the wall so started to activate the plans for dealing with a Soviet invasion.

He was a very large, very scary, very assured gentleman but you could tell by the way he told the story that the event had rattled him.

If anyone wants a good read about the times just before, during and after the wall fell, The last Cold War mission, is a good book about the Brixmis Mission to tour the DDR, which also mentions how the whole collapse was monitored intently because nobody knew what on earth would happen next, despite the contrast of all the celebrations
 

Milkfloat

An Peanut
Location
Midlands
I used to work for the son of Egon Krenz, the last Leader of East Germany and the man in charge when the wall fell pretty my by accident. The son is a really nice guy.
 

Chislenko

Veteran
@Andy in Germany

Did you ever watch Deutschland 83 and the follow up 89?

I enjoyed it as a series but often wondered quite how true to life it was. The main character (East German) seemed to nip from East to West and back at will!
 
One thing that struck me on a caravan site in Potsdam, 2008 was that visitors from Western European Countries would at least say good morning, good evening and stop for a chat, the permanent sited caravans of the locals was where they would sit outside in family groups, but there was absolutely no interaction with their neighbours at all, which must stem from decades of not knowing who was a Stasi nark or not, so they still didn’t trust anyone else at all.

That's been observed in the older generations in Eastern Europe as well: younger people talk to strangers but the old habits of survival die hard.

It annoys me a bit when people in the US and similar call us "socialists" in west Germany: the country has seen socialism and wouldn't wish it on anyone.
 

DRM

Guru
Location
West Yorks
@Andy in Germany

Did you ever watch Deutschland 83 and the follow up 89?

I enjoyed it as a series but often wondered quite how true to life it was. The main character (East German) seemed to nip from East to West and back at will!

I think the reason for that was that the main character had been recruited by the Stasi to take the place of a murdered West German soldier in order to obtain information from the inside, the whole story having being written round the increasing tension around the time of the Able Archer ’83 military exercise, where the USSR & DDR had the belief that the US was planning a nuclear attack, the main character was working undercover in the West German Army as part of Operation RYaN, an intel gathering operation for the KGB & GRU, iirc they level of panic in the East rose as they believed the 1983 Able Archer Exercise was a cover for an actual attack, made worse by the Western Allies using a new radio system that automatically changed frequency for secrecy, the Soviets were monitoring radio traffic, that just suddenly stopped, they couldn’t understand why and believed an attack was imminent, the character in the series had to run back to the East at the last minute in order to prevent them pressing the button, there’s more detail in the link below,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
a lot of military exercises in both parts of Germany were monitored, in the East by the, mainly Brixmis, along with USMLM & the French mission, in West Germany the Soviet SOXMIS mission kept an eye on the 3 Western powers, each would be chased away, but all sides seemed happy that they all knew the standard round of training exercises were taking place, as this meant things were ticking along normally with no threats, thereby preventing a nuclear war.
Able Archer ‘83 is believed to be the closest we ever came to World War 3 breaking out
 

Smokin Joe

Legendary Member
I
Able Archer ‘83 is believed to be the closest we ever came to World War 3 breaking out

Yeltsin himself had his nuclear briefcase open in 1995 when a rocket fired from Norway and carrying a weather satellite was picked up on Soviet radar. They believed it to be an incoming missile as it was travelling at the same speed and trajectory as a US ICBM, despite having been informed some weeks previously by Norway about the launch. The message never got through to the military or the Kremlin. We were reckoned to be two minutes away from a full scale Russian "Counterstrike", the Nuclear submarines having been given the instruction to prepare to launch when somebody noticed that the rocket was heading out to sea instead of towards the mainland.

The near misses we know about are frightening enough, there have almost certainly been ones that we don't. Our luck can't hold forever.
 

pjd57

Veteran
Location
Glasgow
The wall has been down for longer than it was up.

Soon only " old people " will realise how much it changed people's lives
 
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