On 9 October 1989, in the dying days of the Cold War and exactly one month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, ITN's cameras in West Berlin recorded footage of West Berliners protesting at Checkpoint Charlie, the border crossing between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; known in German as the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or BRD) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR; Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR). While recording the protests, the crew also captured some atmospheric footage of residents living in apartment blocks on the GDR side of the border, including people watching from the windows as the East German police were making arrests.
On the same day this footage was filmed, residents in the East German city of Leipzig staged a peaceful mass protest calling for freedom and democracy. Between 70,000 and 100,000 people congregated in central Leipzig to protest against the governing communist regime. At the time, there had not been any large-scale protests in East Germany in decades, and anti-regime protests were illegal. Despite this, and against all expectations, the state security forces did not intervene. The precendent set by the mass protests in Leipzig on 9 October gave rise to many more similar demonstrations across the country, and set in motion a chain of events that would end with the smashing of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and the reunification of Germany.
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