The leaders of the two German states at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall were:West Germany: Helmut Kohl East Germany: Erich Honneker (ironically the man responsible for overseeing its construction in the first place)

The fall of the Berlin Wall had begun with the building of the Wall in 1961. However it took about three decades until the Wall was torn down. Several times people in the Communist countries rised up against the Communist system but they failed. The victims of the uprisings against the Communist dictatorship in Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956 or Prague 1968 will never been forgotten. In 1989 the first free labor union was founded in the communist Poland. The end of the communist system had begun. The Soviet Union could control their satellites yet but with the new leader Gorbatshov their politics changed in 1984. Gorbatshov's reforms, Perestroika and Glasnost should renew the stalinistic system in the Soviet Union but not replace the communist system. The reforms in the Soviet Union also had its effects on the other communist countries, especially in Poland and Hungary. On August 23, 1989 Hungary opened the iron curtain to Austria. Months before East German tourists used their chance to escape to Austria from Hungary and in September 1989 more than 13 000 East German escaped via Hungary within three days. It was the first mass exodus of East Germans after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Mass demonstrations against the government and the system in East Germany begun at the end of September and took until November 1989.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who was born on April 15 1894 and died on September 11, 1971, led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953 – 1964) and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. He was mainly responsible for the de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union, the early Soviet space program and several liberal reforms of domestic policy.