Hungarian leader admits he feared deaths after lifting Iron Curtain

On August 19 1989, Hungary's prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, symbolically lifted the Iron Curtain by briefly opening the border with Austria at the Hungarian village of Sopronkohida.

Hundreds of East Germans who had taken refuge in the country cheered and cried as they poured out to start new lives in the West. It was the moment which set off the chain of events that would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But on the 20th anniversary of that moment, Mr Nemeth has admitted he feared a bloodbath could follow as he had only a verbal promise that Soviet troops would not move in.

His decision to trust a personal promise from Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, that there would be no repeat of the brutal and bloody military suppression of Hungary's 1956 uprising sounded the death knell for Communism.

"This was a test to see whether what Gorbachev had told me held true, or whether the Soviet Union would respond by ordering several of its battalions stationed in Hungary to intervene," he said.

Two decades ago, Hungarians and Austrians organised the now famous Sopron pan-European picnic to mark the dismantling of a notorious fortified border between Hungary, in the Soviet bloc and Austria, in the free West. Mr Nemeth knew the opening of the border gates for a few hours, would mean thousands of East Germans would make break for freedom.

A crowd of more than 600 East Germans crashed through the border in the first mass exodus to the West since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, an event that set the pattern for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Without any instructions from Mr Nemeth or the authorities Hungarian border guards spontaneously countermanded their standing orders and refrained from shooting.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who lived in East Germany, yesterday (WEDS) visited the border crossing, just outside the Hungarian city of Sopron, to mark the 20th anniversary of events there.

Hungary's western border eventually opened for good on September 11, just weeks after the events at Spron. Up to 50,000 East German refugees flooded through Hungary until October 7 without any Soviet intervention. Two months later on November 9, the Berlin Wall fell.