GERMANY: In the end, it was not the West's technological or military might that punched a hole in the Iron Curtain. It was a sputtering, smoky army of Soviet-bloc runabouts which, 15 years ago today, carried thousands of East Germans across the Hungarian border in an unprecedented bid for freedom.
The exodus of Trabants, Wartburgs and Skodas, belching fumes as they crossed into Austria and chugged towards West Germany, showed the world that the Warsaw Pact was crumbling and a reformist Kremlin was unwilling or unable to save it.
Pictures beamed around the world showed East Germans singing and cheering as Hungarian border guards waved them through the frontier post at Hegyeshalom and into Austria where, barely believing their luck, many stopped to dance and share bottles of sparkling wine on Western soil.
Tremors had been running through the Eastern Bloc for months, as Poland and Hungary aired the need for change and Mikhail Gorbachev - the champion of "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (restructuring) reform in the Soviet Union - did nothing to deter them.
As the hardline leaders of Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and East Germany dug in their heels to resist, the ground gave way beneath them as Gorbachev made it clear that Moscow would not meddle in the affairs of its satellite states. It became known as his Sinatra Doctrine: a conviction that each country had to do it its own way.
Miklos Nemeth, then Hungarian prime minister, recalled recently how Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu stopped calling him "comrade" at a Warsaw Pact meeting in July 1989, sneeringly addressing him with the bourgeois "mister" instead.
Nemeth was already aware that thousands of East Germans were coming to Hungary on their summer holidays without any intention of going home again.
Many German families divided after the second World War used Hungary's Lake Balaton as an annual meeting place. But in 1989, every beach and field around the lake became a campsite, as thousands of East Germans displayed their determination to stay.
By early August, many more were making a temporary home in Budapest, camping in the grounds of the West German embassy, being given beds in student dormitories and receiving food parcels from the Red Cross.
Nemeth, who had earlier approved the dismantling of fortifications along Hungary's border with Austria, had to act as the pressure began to build on his country's resources and his supposed allies in East Germany became increasingly hostile.
He said in a recently published interview that he took heart from Gorbachev's pledge that there would not be any repeat of Moscow's bloody crackdown on liberal reform three decades earlier.
"As long as I remain in this seat, 1956 will not recur," Nemeth recalled the Soviet leader telling him.
East German leader Erich Honecker was outraged by what he saw as Hungary's treachery, but to gloss over the widening cracks in the Warsaw Pact he trained much of his anger on Bonn, which he accused of trying to destabilise his country.
Nevertheless, the East German media raged against Hungary, accusing it of "trading human lives for pieces of silver", suggesting that Budapest had swapped the refugees for the promise of much-needed West German deutschmarks.
Unmoved, Hungary suspended key paragraphs of a bilateral treaty with East Germany that banned the unauthorised passage of citizens of either state into third countries. At a stroke, that removed the last legal barrier to the West for thousands of weary but wildly hopeful East Germans, ready to strike camp and head for Austria at a moment's notice.
On September 10th, Hungarian state television broke into regular programming, and government minister Gyula Horn delivered a terse message: All East Germans in Hungary would be allowed to go West, as of midnight.
When midnight struck, the gates dividing Hegyeshalom and Nickelsdorf in Austria swung open, and the first Trabant and its jubilant occupants crossed into the West.
Some 6,000 of their countrymen followed on September 11th, 1989. In the following weeks, almost 150,000 more squeezed through this chink in the rusty armour of the Communist Bloc.
"We expected thousands of them, and we had been given guidelines on how to deal with them months earlier, because we knew that so many East Germans were staying in camps around Hungary," said Coll Joszef Cseri, who was an officer at the Hegyeshalom border 15 years ago.
"They knew we wouldn't send them home, and they were crying and singing and hugging us border guards, and saying 'danke, danke'," he told The Irish Times.
"We were going through our own changes at the time, but we received them in a very humane and orderly way. It was the right thing to do. There was a feeling of solidarity, and it was great to see how relieved people were when they crossed over."
Most immediately carried on across Austria towards West Germany, eager to be reunited with friends and relatives and take up the promise of a warm welcome, benefits and a West German passport.
Explaining his country's decision to abandon its formal obligations to East Germany and let the refugees move West, leading Hungarian reformer Imre Pozsgay said: "We took the step that embraced the higher of the principles involved, that of human rights." Mr Kohl, who fled to West Germany from his home in the east in 1952, was deeply moved by Budapest's bold move.
"I am very grateful for this decision," as the world tried to fathom its consequences. "It is a decision of humanity, a decision of European solidarity." Now Hegyeshalom is just another internal border post in the European Union, which Hungary joined in May. Traffic trundles through, moving east, moving west, across a former faultline in the continent. Nothing commemorates its place in history.
"The atmosphere there was simply euphoric," recalls Col Cseri. "And those who were present will never forget it."