Germany, Soviet Union OK Nonaggression Pact

As Germans celebrated the first anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed a historic nonaggression treaty with Chancellor Helmut Kohl today and got a hero’s welcome for letting the wall and the Iron Curtain collapse.

Both Kohl and Gorbachev stressed the importance of the historical changes that have allowed closer ties as they signed the broad agreement that is to serve as the foundation of future relations.

“Having signed this document one could hardly . . . think about until recently, we have officially ended a whole historical process and opened a deep perspective for ourselves,” Gorbachev said.

In the treaty, both nations pledge not to attack the other and to honor the borders of all European nations.

The upper house of Parliament, the Bundesrat, met in Berlin for the first time since 1959 to commemorate the opening of the wall that signaled the collapse of East Germany’s Communist Party system and the triumph of democracy movements across Eastern Europe.

But there was a commemoration of a somber sort, too, as the date is the same as the anniversary of a 1938 Nazi pogrom in which Germans set fire to synagogues and wrecked Jewish-owned shops, a foretaste of the Holocaust.

“In our history, Nov. 9 is an ambivalent date--a day of joy, a day of horror and of shame,” Bundesrat President Henning Voscherau said. But, “A year ago, on Nov. 9, 1989, the people overthrew a dictatorship in Germany for the first time in our history,” he continued. “Since then, Nov. 9 has become a shining light in our history as well.”

At a ceremony commemorating “Kristallnacht” (The Night of Broken Glass), German Jewish leader Heinz Galinski indirectly criticized the government’s recent decision to halt Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union after a wave of applications for asylum.

“To allow Jewish life in this country to wither away would mean bowing once again to the will of the Nazi state,” he said.

Berlin artist Ben Wagin laid the foundation stone outside the Reichstag building for a memorial to more than 190 Germans killed trying to cross the East-West German border, 80 of them at the Berlin Wall.

The wood and stone memorial will stand in the former “death strip” beside the wall, once a deadly obstacle course of dog runs, tripwires, searchlights and guard towers manned by troops with orders to shoot would-be escapees.

Only a few sections of the 107-mile wall still stand. And those sections have been chipped away by souvenir hunters.