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The nations to the east of the Iron Curtain were Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, [b] and the USSR; however, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR have since ceased to exist.
The fall of the Berlin Wall (German: Mauerfall, pronounced [ˈmaʊ̯ɐˌfal] ⓘ) on 9 November 1989, during the Peaceful Revolution, marked the beginning of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the figurative Iron Curtain, as East Berlin transit restrictions were overwhelmed and discarded. Sections of the wall were breached, and planned ...
Occurrences such as the autumn 1989 drama at the West German embassy in Prague, where thousands of East Germans were hiding, wore down the patience of the Czechoslovak authorities, who eventually gave in and allowed all East Germans to travel directly to West Germany from 3 November 1989, thus breaking the Iron Curtain.
By the end of the Cold War, as many as 300 United States citizens were thought to have defected across the Iron Curtain for a variety of reasons [24] – whether to escape criminal charges, for political reasons, or because (as the St. Petersburg Times put it) "girl-hungry GIs [were tempted] with seductive sirens, who usually desert the love ...
In 1989, a series of revolutions in nearby Eastern Bloc countries (Poland and Hungary in particular) and the events of the "Pan-European Picnic" set in motion a peaceful development during which the Iron Curtain largely broke, rulers in the East came under public pressure to cease their repressive policies.
By the end of the Cold War, as many as 300 United States citizens were thought to have defected across the Iron Curtain for a variety of reasons [140] – whether to escape criminal charges, for political reasons or because (as the St. Petersburg Times put it) "girl-hungry GI's [were tempted] with seductive sirens, who usually desert the love ...
The initially inconspicuous opening of a border gate of the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary in August 1989 then triggered a chain reaction, at the end of which the GDR no longer existed and the Eastern Bloc had disintegrated. It was the largest escape movement from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.
The dismantling of the electric fence along Hungary's 240 kilometres (149 mi) long border with Austria was the first fissure in the "Iron Curtain" that had divided Europe for more than 40 years, since the end of World War II. Then the Pan-European Picnic caused a chain reaction in East Germany that ultimately resulted in the demise of the ...