Raw Footage of East Berlin the Day Before the Wall Fell (1989)

On 8 November 1989, ITN filmed East German officials coming and going from the SED Central Committee building, the headquarters of East Germany's Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; SED), in East Berlin. Party officials were meeting to decide how to respond to the increasing number of East German refugees leaving the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik; DDR) for West Germany via Czechoslovakia and Hungary. A day after this footage was filmed, a garbled statement by GDR spokesperson Günter Schabowski would result in thousands of East Germans descending on the Berlin Wall, setting about its destruction, and crossing over into West Berlin. This eerily calm footage of East German state officials going about their business just a day before the fall of the Berlin Wall ("der Mauerfall") demonstrates just how suddenly events unfolded on 9 November 1989.

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