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Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, several initiatives are pursuing the creation of a European Green Belt nature preserve area along the Iron Curtain's former route. In fact, a long-distance cycling route along the length of the former border called the Iron Curtain Trail (ICT) exists as a project of the European Union and other associated ...
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 ...
Along with the separate and much longer inner German border, which demarcated the border between East and West Germany, it came to symbolize physically the Iron Curtain that separated the Western Bloc and Soviet satellite states of the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. [7]
The Iron Curtain and its physical manifestations in heavily guarded border fences and crossings, as seen in Czechoslovakia and in East Germany, were a dominant factor in the movement to unite Europe. Although some countries, such as East Germany, had a hard-line Communist power structure, others, such as Hungary, took a reform-oriented approach.
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 ...
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.
During the Cold War, the Fulda Gap offered one of the two obvious routes for a hypothetical Soviet tank attack on West Germany from Eastern Europe, especially from East Germany. The other route crossed the North German Plain. A third, less likely, route involved travelling up through the Danube River valley through neutral Austria.
The fall of the Iron Curtain was accompanied by a massive rise in European East-West migration. [131] Famous Eastern Bloc defectors included Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, who denounced Stalin after her 1967 defection. [133]