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Originally Posted by Neal Stevens
They only climbed on the wall after it was clear to them the Soviets under Gorbachov would not mind so much.
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Wrong in that the protests and mass escapes already had began several weeks earlier - when it was not clear at all to anybody that the Soviets would not start shooting and would not tell the VoPo and Volksarmee to shoot as well. Just days earlier people crossing the border in Hungary still felt to still run for their lives. Their are some very dramatic videos and the despair to be seen in the faces, and the tension, was real.
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The real heroes of the Berlin Wall were the Polish shipyard workers of Solidarity, They did all the heavy lifting 10 years earlier.
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Yes, they were not the first, but the first to be successful. The first were those rebellions that had been put down by Soviet tanks.