Posted on 11/08/2009 5:31:47 AM PST by nuconvert
BERLIN — Harald Jaeger was a loyal East German border guard — respected and trusted to command a crossing point to the west on Berlin's Bornholmer Strasse.
So when his checkpoint was swarmed on the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, as East Germany announced the border was being opened after 28 years, Jaeger felt ashamed as he let the thousands pass through.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
So this is AP’s piece on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down? “Guard laments”?
“my own colleagues did not stand behind me”
“colleague” became a semi-euphemism for “comrade” in the early 90’s.
The downside of the fall of the wall was muslims flooding into western europe. The cold war largely kep them in the middle east. We thought the communists lost. Boy were we wrong.
I watched the history channel show about the wall last night and it was pretty interesting.
They interviewd the policeman who discovered the balloon that was a failed first attempt of a family to escape. He found the balloon while hunting mushrooms and didn’t report it because the communists were so paranoid that he feared they would suspect him.
I also noticed that the pro socialists still refuse to credit Reagan with the fall of the wall. One credited Gorby for refusing to send troops to crush the growing rebellion. In my opinion Gorbachev’s decision was purely ecconomic. The soviets simply couldn’t afford to maintain east germany any longer and that was a direct result of Reagan’s ecconomic pressure.
Too bad, Harald....couldn’t shoot enough people trying to flee your paradise. Oh well, you now got LOTS of buddies in the Green Movement. Maybe you can make a new wall out of those Plants from Little House of Horrors.
I suspect that a lot more would have escaped by air if the east german people had realized the chain of command involved with shooting an airborne target.
Basically the lowly border gaurd had to call his superior, who had to call his superior, and so on all the way to Moscow. Getting permission to shoot an airborne target might take hours.
The Muslims and Africans had been flooding Europe (and its daughters) for decades by 1989.
The “Rivers of Blood” speech by Enoch Powell in the British Parliament, about a coming race conflict between the West Indians, Pakistanis and Africans and the British, and future discrimination against the British in favor of the immigrants was given in 1968.
The book “Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail, about the literal invasion of France by Pakistanis, Indians, and North Africans was published 1973.
The “White Australia” policy was overthrown by 1972, Rhodesia was abandoned by the West in 1965, South Africa began to abandon Aprtheid by 1977. And of course, in the US, we loosened national origin immigration in 1965.
It was already over long before 1989.
The western peoples frittered away their birthright of stable existence in their European homeland during the needless 45 year Cold War conflict, and as a demographic result of restricting their reporduction by birth control after 1958, with the introduction of the Pill.
WoW! It’s been 20 years already. I was at FLTCE (Foreign Language Training Center-Europe)in Munich when it happened.
By that time the Soviet army was in no shape to intervene. Just a year later, in 1990, Soviet troops in East Germany were selling their weapons to buy food!
I know of a case where a Soviet Colonel sold extremely sensitive equipment to a U.S. Army officer for only enough to feed his regiment on their trip back to Russia.
Muslims in Western Europe have been around a lot longer than that. Immigration of cheap labor from Turkey began after WWII while West Germany was trying to rebuild her economy.
I was at a briefing by people in Air Force intelligence where they half-jokingly talked about the "good old days" of making estimates of Soviet military equipment's capability from blurry photographs and sketches made by spies rather than just sending money to the rump East German government to buy some anti-aircraft missiles and tearing them apart.
In fact, the Iron Curtain prevented Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. from having a lot of Muslim immigrants. So it was a silver lining for those countries as they don’t have to deal with the Muslim problem like France and Germany.
All I can say is that the Germans must be very forgiving. I think if it were me and somebody had killed my family member thirty years ago, I would have as a primary mission in life providing that person a dish 'best served cold'; and the last one he'd ever have.
Hang him.
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