The Wall – Live in Berlin council meeting, and felt they needed some kind of an event to focus attention on it… So I agreed to have a meeting with Leonard Cheshire. And I was very impressed, and said I would do what I could, although I thought it was very unlikely that it would come off… Then, in November [1989], when the wall started coming down, we started negotiating." The show had a sell-out crowd of over 350,000 people. Right before the performance started the gates were opened which enabled at least another 100,000 people to watch. While this broke records for a paid-entry concert,
Fall of the inner German border the press conference, Schabowski told the NBC reporter Tom Brokaw that "it is no question of tourism. It is a permission of leaving the GDR [permanently]." Within hours, thousands of people gathered at the Berlin Wall demanding that the border guards open the gates. The guards were unable to contact their superiors for instructions and, fearing a stampede, opened the gates. The iconic scenes that followed – people pouring into West Berlin, standing on the Wall and attacking it with pickaxes – were broadcast worldwide. While the eyes of the world were on Berlin, watching the "Mauerfall" (fall of the