Citizens flocked to the border en masse sometime around pm and found that, after initial confusion, the border guards were indeed letting people cross. This was a crucial flashpoint in the history between the two sides, as the guards could have easily fired on the crowd. However, according to historian Mary Elise Sarotte in her book The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall , no one among the East German authorities wanted to take the personal authority of issuing orders leading to the use of lethal force.
By pm, Harald Jager, the commander of the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing, let the guards open the checkpoints, allowing people to pass without their identities checked.
To Jager, it was obvious that the five dozen men guarding the border were grossly outnumbered. He repeatedly attempted to contact his superior, Rudi Ziegenhorn, in order to ascertain how to handle the increasingly chaotic situation, as more and more people gathered at the gates. He was unable to get any clear guidance on how to proceed, but a superior in the background called Jager a coward for being unable to handle the situation. After 25 years of loyal service to the regime, according to Sarotte, Jager felt insulted and pushed to his limit.
Jager was instructed by his superiors to let the biggest troublemakers through on a one-way ticket. But many of these so-called troublemakers were students and other young individuals who briefly entered West Berlin and then returned to the checkpoint for re-entry into East Berlin.
However, the GDR was serious in its warnings that this was a one-way ticket. Their angry parents began to plead with officials not to keep them separated from their children, and by that point Jager was unwilling to argue on behalf of his superiors. After Jager made an exception for the parents, others demanded the same treatment as well.
Having gone that far, it was simply too late. It didn't happen that way. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. I couldn't even get that right. In one draft I wrote, "Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall," using "Herr" because I somehow thought that would please the President's German audience and "bring" because it was the only verb that came to mind.
In the next draft I swapped "bring" for "take," writing, "Herr Gorbachev, take down this wall," as if that were some sort of improvement. By the end of the week I'd produced nothing but a first draft even I considered banal. I can still hear the clomp-clomp-clomp of Tony Dolan's cowboy boots as he walked down the hallway from his office to mine to toss that draft onto my desk.
The following week I produced an acceptable draft. It needed work—the section on arms reductions, for instance, still had to be fleshed out—but it set out the main elements of the address, including the challenge to tear down the wall. On Friday, May 15, the speeches for the President's trip to Rome, Venice, and Berlin, including my draft, were forwarded to the President, and on Monday, May 18, the speechwriters joined him in the Oval Office. My speech was the last we discussed. Tom Griscom asked the President for his comments on my draft.
The President replied simply that he liked it. President," I said, "I learned on the advance trip that your speech will be heard not only in West Berlin but throughout East Germany. The President cocked his head and thought. That wall has to come down. That's what I'd like to say to them. I spent a couple of days attempting to improve the speech. I suppose I should admit that at one point I actually took "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" out, replacing it with the challenge, in German, to open the Brandenburg Gate, "Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie dieses Tor auf.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall" right back in. With three weeks to go before it was delivered, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council. Both attempted to squelch it.
The assistant secretary of state for Eastern European affairs challenged the speech by telephone. A senior member of the National Security Council staff protested the speech in memoranda. The ranking American diplomat in Berlin objected to the speech by cable. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts—my journal records that there were no fewer than seven—including one written by the diplomat in Berlin.
In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing. Now in principle, State and the NSC had no objection to a call for the destruction of the wall.
The draft the diplomat in Berlin submitted, for example, contained the line, "One day, this ugly wall will disappear. Then I looked at the diplomat's line once again. That the wall would just get up and slink off of its own accord? The wall would disappear only when the Soviets knocked it down or let somebody else knock it down for them, but "this ugly wall will disappear" ignored the question of human agency altogether. All Reagan said was that it was a good draft, Robinson recalled.
Robinson then stepped in. He told the president that people in East Berlin would be able to hear him speak. Depending on weather conditions, he might even be picked up in Moscow by radio. Robinson asked if there was anything Reagan wanted to convey to the people listening from the other side. That wall has to come down. For the next three weeks, the National Security Council and the State Department went back and forth with the White House communications team to change the speech.
Robinson said seven alternative drafts were submitted, each version missing the call to tear down the wall. But I was convinced. Only Reagan could have said those words because it was what he truly believed, Robinson said. He could imagine a post-Soviet world. For two years, the Franks and four other families hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends.
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