The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

66 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL among local staff that thousands of East Germans had gone on vacation and weren’t coming back, and that hundreds had sought asylum at West German embassies in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw. Because local U.S. and TCN embassy employees were accred- ited by the GDR Foreign Ministry as technical and administrative staff, we were free to travel through most of East Germany. On Oct. 4, my wife and I were on vacation for a few days in Dresden, staying at a hotel across from the Hauptbahnhof railroad station. On our way back from dinner at the Ratskeller restaurant at City Hall, we started hearing crowd noise and sirens that increased in volume as we got closer to the hotel. Some 5,000 people were storming the station and trying to board a train carrying hundreds of their countrymen, who were now brand-new citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. Having sought refuge at the West German embassy in Prague, they had been issued passports and were on their way to the West. The dem- onstrators dug cobblestones out of the Bahnhofsplatz and were smashing the windows of the station. The police responded with batons, tear gas and water cannons, but never opened fire. When some noticed that we were from the West, they asked us to please let people back home know what was happening. As soon as we returned to our room, I immediately called Post 1 at the embassy and reported the events in real time to Political Counselor Jonathan Greenwald. Our embassy, led by Ambassador Richard Barkley and Deputy Chief of Mission J.D. Bindenagel, kept the U.S. govern- ment informed right up to the night of Nov. 9. During the weeks that followed, we supported an endless series of congressional delegations and VIP visits, as well as reported and maintained critical contacts during the transition to a reunited Berlin and Germany. Before closing on Oct. 3, 1990, the U.S. embassy to the GDR received an all-hands Superior Honor Award from the Department of State. Jeff Biron was a local U.S. hire at the embassy in East Berlin when the wall fell. Afterward, he continued to work at Embassy Berlin, and in 2000 he joined the U.S. Foreign Service as a general services officer. He resides in Unity, New Hampshire. Commuting to East Berlin Jeff Biron East Berlin, German Democratic Republic I was a driver and mail clerk for the U.S. embassy in East Ber- lin when the Berlin Wall came down. During the late 1980s, the embassy hired both local Americans and third-country national (TCN) employees for administrative positions to both enhance and offset East German staff assigned by the govern- ment of the German Democratic Republic. Local U.S. and TCN employees had to be legal residents of West Berlin, speak German and qualify for a security clearance and limited diplomatic status. Every workday we would get up in the morning in lively, color- ful West Berlin, go to work through an Allied checkpoint to gray, smoky East Berlin, and then after work, return home to the West. On Nov. 9, when the announcement was broad- cast on German TV that East Germans were being permitted to travel to the West, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. After all, they could always limit the number of permits allowing GDR citizens to leave. East Berliners began lining up by the thousands at border crossings to apply for their travel permits. When my family and I went to bed, they were still obediently standing in line, but as of the next morning, nothing would ever be the same. We awoke to the sound of cheering and the smell of East German Trabant and Wartburg cars in the street below our apartment in the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin. My family and I joined the celebration that wild weekend. Despite the open gates from East to West Berlin, the East German border guards continued issuing daily visas to visit East Berlin. At least for a while, the roles were reversed, and the Westerners had to stand in line. Nov. 9 surprised every Berliner, but some signs of change had already been there. In the previous months, when I drove embassy officers to meetings at GDR ministries they com- mented on the low morale. One economic officer even com- pared the GDR government to a “house of cards.” East Germans were becoming bolder about listening to AFN (American Forces Network) or RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), or even watching West German TV stations. It was common knowledge Some 5,000 people were storming the station and trying to board a train carrying hundreds of their countrymen, who were now brand-new citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. –Jeff Biron