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It was the largest escape movement from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. The patrons of the picnic, Otto Habsburg and the Hungarian Minister of State Imre Pozsgay, who were not present at the event, saw the planned event as an opportunity to test Mikhail Gorbachev's reaction to an opening of the border on the Iron Curtain ...
A preserved fence with watchtower near Čížov (2009). The protection of borders between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR) and several of the capitalist countries of Western Europe, namely with Germany and Austria, in the Cold War era and especially after 1951, was provided by special troops of the Pohraniční Stráž (English: the Border Guard) and a system of engineer equipment ...
Unlike the Iron Curtain installations, most of the installations were unmanned and unarmed and were to be manned only in the case of war, by the regular army, although some of the light pillboxes could be used also by Border guard. Only the large fortresses were permanently crewed, by a specially trained heavy fortification company.
The GDR side of the Inner German Border had by far a more complex system of fortifications and border controls than the Federal Republic of Germany (). 1,393 kilometers (866 miles) long and between 50 and 200 kilometers wide, the German portion ran from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia with the entire "Iron Curtain" extending from the Arctic to the Black Sea.
A preserved section of the former inner German border at the Borderland Museum Eichsfeld. The inner German border was a complex system of interlocking fortifications and security zones 1,381 kilometres (858 mi) long and several kilometres deep, running from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia.
The border posts, forts and barriers between the (Panama Canal Zone) United States and Panama in operation between November 18, 1903, until October 1, 1979, partially and totally the July 1, 1999. The former Soviet Union had a security barrier (see С-175 "curtain" ) along its entire border from Norway and Finland to North Korea and China .
The Allied zones of occupation in post-war Germany, highlighting the Soviet zone (red), the inner German border (heavy black line) and the zone from which British and American troops withdrew in July 1945 (purple). The provincial boundaries are those of pre-Nazi Weimar Germany, before the present Länder (federal states) were established.
The border was still closely guarded and the Hungarian security forces tried to hold back refugees. The dismantling of the electric fence along Hungary's 240 kilometres (149 mi) long border with Austria was the first fissure in the "Iron Curtain" that had divided Europe for more than 40 years, since the end of World War II.