On August 25, 1989, the day after Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Poland’s prime minister, Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth secretly flew to the West German capital of Bonn to meet with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Nemeth did not waste time with pleasantries. “'We have decided to allow the GDR citizens to leave freely, mainly on humanitarian grounds,” he informed Kohl. “It seems you may have to deal with 100,000 or even 150,000 new citizens arriving very quickly.”
