Border guard’s snap decision ensured joyful end to Wall

Border guard’s snap decision ensured joyful end to Wall:

One man’s quick thinking helped make the fall of the wall, 25 years ago, a peaceful event

Harald Jäger has spent the last quarter century denying that he was the man who toppled the Berlin Wall.
He has no plans to change his story now, ahead of German celebrations tomorrow to mark the hated structure’s end 25 years ago.

“It wasn’t me who opened the wall, it was the East German people gathered there that evening,” says Jäger.
Despite the border guard’s modesty, it was his snap decision, late on the evening of November 9th, 1989, to throw caution to the wind that ensured the Berlin Wall fell peacefully, joyfully. 

Jäger was at work at 6pm at the border crossing at Berlin’s Bornholmer Strasse, eating a bread roll in the canteen and watching one of the most famous press conferences in history.