For a select group of West Berlin officials, the fall of the Berlin Wall was neither sudden nor unexpected - By Johannes Gernert

Before Nov. 9, 1989, West Berlin civil servants worked to ensure that the opening of the East Berlin border would not lead to chaos. They even gave their colleagues in the East some advice.

It took a moment in the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, before the correspondents in the press center understood exactly what the East German Politburo member had just announced: East Germany was granting its citizens the right to travel. Starting when? "Immediately, right away," replied Günter Schabowski. "To the best of my knowledge," he added.

It was the day the Berlin Wall fell. Schabowski was the man who brought it down - suddenly and unexpectedly - with an ad hoc announcement read from a scrap of paper. At least, that is how it seems looking back 20 years later. But the Berlin Wall actually fell much more gently than many think today. In fact, West Berlin was even prepared for it.

On Oct. 29, Schabowski, Walter Momper - the governing mayor of West Berlin - a few East German church representatives and the mayor of East Berlin sat around a table at the Rose Salon of the Palace Hotel in East Berlin. Schabowski was a recent addition to the leading body of East Germany's ruling Communist party, the SED.

He told the Westerners about the changes going on in the party since the departure of Erich Honecker, the long-term East German head of state. And then he made a statement that sounded like a revolution: "We are going to create a travel regulation worthy of the name." Dieter Schröder was also at the table when this announcement was made. Thousands will throng into West Berlin, the civil servant thought immediately. But how many exactly?

If politicians like Schabowski and Momper became the public face of those days of change, Schröder and his ilk were the brains behind them.

In the 1970s he was working in Berlin as governmental director for Allied affairs. Toward the end of the 1980s, Mayor Momper appointed him as his chief of staff. He was the perfect man for the job waiting for him on that Sunday after the lunch in the Rose Salon. He prepared West Berlin for the fall of the wall.

It was the final days of East Germany. Since September, masses of East German citizens had fled to West Germany through Hungary and Czechoslovakia. At the beginning of October, 8,000 people gathered on the streets of Leipzig to call for freedom for the first time.

The leadership of the all-powerful communist SED party was anxious. The comrades overthrew their leader, the veteran communist Erich Honecker. Egon Krenz, the new general secretary, spoke of a change. Shortly after Honecker's downfall, Krenz met with Protestant church leaders in a hunting lodge on Werbellin Lake, an hour northeast of East Berlin.

The new East German strongman announced plans for electoral reform and said that the economy must be made more efficient. His most important announcement, however, was that the majority of citizens would be allowed to travel, without great formalities and without any complicated procedures. Everything was to be in place by Christmas.

Manfred Stolpe was surprised. At the time Stolpe - who would later head the government of the new federal state of Brandenburg in the unified Germany - was consistorial president of the Protestant church in Berlin-Brandenburg. As such, he was a key mediator between church and state and between East and West.

Stolpe decided that Schröder in West Berlin would want to know about the impending relaxation of travel rules and got a message to him. In his reply, Schröder asked if information about the planned changes could be received in a more official form.

He got his wish on Oct. 29 in the Palace Hotel. Stolpe had arranged a meeting with Schabowski, who outlined the planned relaxation of travel restrictions over lunch in the Rose Salon. Schröder quickly did the math.

He estimated that up to half a million people could flock from East Germany to West Berlin. Would they all have to use the Friedrichsstrasse border crossing, the only one with a connection to the public transportation network? That would mean hours of waiting. To the West Berlin administrator, it all seemed more than a little dilettantish.

How could a state leadership simply plan such a regulation without thinking about the most important consequences? Schröder leaned toward Schabowski and asked: "Do you have any idea what it will look like on your side of the border? How do you expect the people to get through?" He recommended opening several additional border crossings: Alexanderplatz, which would double the subway capacity, as well as Rosenthaler Platz and Potsdamer Platz. Schabowski replied that he had not thought about that aspect at all.

Then came the moment where Schröder noticed that it was all for real. What had seemed unimaginable for decades was now within reach. "Could you write that down for me?" Schabowski asked. "And it's best not to send it through official channels, there might be some official skepticism. Best to send it through Stolpe."

That was the last thing Schröder expected: One of East Germany's most influential men requesting that he smuggle important information past the state apparatus. At the top of this thoroughly bureaucratized regime they were suddenly acting completely unbureaucratically. They mean business, thought Schröder.

He had an idea of how West Berlin could best prepare for the onslaught of East German citizens. He wanted them to go through the office of tourism, not the social policy office. Jörg Rommerskirchen, the undersecretary for Berlin's commerce senator, was responsible for tourism.

Before coming to Berlin in 1989 to work for the Social Democrat commerce senator, Rommerskirchen was director of the port and transport authority in Hamburg, a key transit route for trade with East Germany. He had often traveled to Warnemünde, Rostock, Wismar, Leipzig, Dresden and East Berlin. "I knew a lot about East Germany," he said.

On Oct. 31, the West Berlin government decided to appoint a task force "to prepare for a large increase in visitors and tourism from East Berlin and East Germany." Rommerskirchen was put in charge. There was a lot of work to do.

West Berlin's Transit Authority had to be prepared, to ensure that the subway system and local transport network would not collapse due to overcrowding. The Easterners would need proper maps, since their own showed West Berlin only as a blank white space. They would have to be informed that they could use public transportation free of charge. West Berlin needed to be ready to make extra accommodations.

For months, the city had already been full of East German refugees. Avoiding tensions between Westerners and Easterners would be a priority. The press office drew up a plan on ways to promote "positive awareness" among West Berliners. Mayor Momper would write an open letter to the city's residents.

Schröder did send a list of additional border crossings to Schabowski via Stolpe. In Schröder's office in those days, the radio was always playing quietly in the background. It could happen at any time.

On Nov. 6, the SED party newspaper Neues Deutschland published a two-page spread detailing the planned new travel regulations. It did not read like freedom to travel but instead seemed like a mass of restrictions. East Germans took to the streets in protest against it. The SED leadership realized that they would have to revise the draft or the masses would not be calmed.

In the meantime, West Berlin newspapers were reporting on the city's preparations. A headline in taz, the left-wing daily, read: "As if the Berlin Wall is nothing more than history." Beneath the headline "Please leave your Trabis at home," Germany's largest tabloid Bild invited East Germans to leave their cars parked behind the border.

On Nov. 9, the conservative daily Berliner Morgenpost wrote that West Berlin's transport senator was considering shutting down Ku'damm - the city's most famous boulevard - when the East Germans came. At midday, Mayor Momper was chairing a meeting on employment in the Reichstag building. Rommers­kirchen had brought a suitcase full of work and was leafing through stacks of documents on the sidelines.

An usher asked him to come to the telephone. It was a Bild reporter with the news that Krenz's people were talking about freedom of travel and that it looked as if things were about to come to a head. Rommerskirchen went to Momper and whispered in his ear: "Walter, some very serious things are going to happen today."

That evening, Schabowski read out the new travel regulation on East German television. At 7:30 p.m., Momper appeared on Berlin's regional television station. He called it a day of joy: "Every East German citizen can come to us and visit." Lines of Trabant cars were already forming at the border crossings.

Both Berlins were prepared, if not well then at least adequately. The next day, Schabowski sent Schröder the approved list of new border crossings. Schröder made a copy of it for Mayor Momper, who then gave it to Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who then read it aloud in front of West Berlin's City Hall. The crowd went wild.

On the night of Nov. 10, they printed brochures. The subways and city trains ran, completely overfilled but without interruption. On the first weekend the Wall was open, more than two million people flooded into West Berlin - four times the initial estimate of 500,000. Berlin's civil servants had guessed wrong.