How 12 words helped bring down the Wall

In 1989, 4,500 East Germans fled to Prague in then-communist Czechoslovakia to find safety at the West German embassy.

The Czechoslovakian Government forbade them from entering West Germany due to travel restriction from communist East Germany, the GDR, so they camped out in the embassy grounds.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher was serving as foreign minister to West Germany and could sympathize with the refugees. He himself had fled East Germany in 1952.

He decided to reach out to Russian and GDR officials to negotiate a deal to allow them to cross into the West.