E. Germany Opens Borders : Citizens Can Emigrate to West Freely

East Germany’s embattled Communist leaders, facing the worst political crisis since the nation’s founding 40 years ago, said today that they will throw open their borders and let citizens emigrate directly to West Germany, including through the Berlin Wall to West Berlin.

Communist Party media chief Guenter Schabowski, who made the stunning announcement, said the new ruling is effective immediately. He said people will still need exit visas but police stations have been told to issue them without delay.

The new ruling, decided after a more restrictive draft travel law met with widespread rejection earlier this week, was a major concession in a country that once tried to pen its citizens in with the Berlin Wall, barbed wire and automatic rifles set to fire on fleeing refugees.

The move could leave the wall--a symbol of the differences between East and West--as a mere monument to the Cold War.

East Germany opened a legal route to the West through Czechoslovakia last Friday, leading to a weeklong renewed exodus from the country that reached over 50,000 by today.

“Today, the decision was taken that makes it possible for all citizens to leave the country through East German border crossing points,” Schabowski said.

Schabowski said the new ruling applies to all border crossings through the Berlin Wall to West Berlin and through the “Iron Curtain” frontier to West Germany.

West German officials estimate that between 1.2 million and 1.4 million frustrated East Germans have applied to leave their Communist homeland.

Over 200,000 have left so far this year, about half of them legally.

According to Schabowski’s statement, later carried by the official ADN news agency, private tourists intending to return also would be free to take any border crossing out of the country.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III called the announcement a “very positive development.”

“We’ve been talking a long time about freedom of travel being a basic human right. We’ve been talking a long time about open borders. We’ve been talking a long time about the importance of seeing the wall come down,” he said.

East Germany’s mass migration westward started this summer as its frustrated citizens began sneaking through the gap in the “Iron Curtain” provided by reformist Hungary.

It escalated in September when Budapest threw open the frontier, letting out a flood of emigrants on “freedom trains” and their own sputtering little Trabant cars.

Thousands of East Germans packed Bonn’s embassy in Prague to overflowing three times in the last two months, forcing East Berlin to allow three more waves of “freedom trains” to leave before it finally gave up.

Since last Friday, East Germans have been able to take a legal exit route through Czechoslovakia.

Earlier today, East Germany’s Communist elite called an emergency party conference and a parliamentary session to tackle the country’s deepest crisis.

The decision-making Central Committee, still in special session after voting in a new ruling Politburo Wednesday, scheduled the conference for Dec. 15-17, and Shabowski said it might purge a large part of the present Central Committee.