Egon Krenz took over from long-term communist leader Erich Honecker on October 18, 1989, as the regime vainly sought to regain control of a country engulfed in a peaceful revolution that brought down the hated Berlin Wall just three weeks later.

In the months leading up to the fall of the Wall and during the 11 months thereafter leading up to German reunification, the Protestant Church played a key role in pushing for democratic pluralism.

The infamous East German car is about to be revamped in 21st century green.

Capping a weekend of events, Latvian President Valdis Zatlers ran the last stretch of a 31-hour, 678-kilometre relay along the original route of the human chain that became known as the Baltic Way.

Marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain, a few East Germans remember their perilous fight to freedom.

On August 19, 1989, a PanEuropean Picnic was organised near the Austro-Hungarian border to celebrate the dismantling of the fence that had for over two decades divided the West from the Communist bloc.

Angela Merkel, who spent most of her childhood and studied in communist East Germany, spoke at a commemoration near the Austro-Hungarian border area where East German refugees had been waiting for the moment to run to freedom on August 19, 1989.

On August 19, 1989, a few hundred East Germans fled the communist bloc to Austria after breaking through a closed border gate near Sopronkohida in western Hungary.

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Former Hungarian premier Miklos Nemeth said that at the time he did not know whether to believe a promise from then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that there would be no repeat of the bloody suppression of Hungary's 1956 uprising.

On August 14, 1989, after a call for help from the West German embassy, Father Kozma, now 69, opened the first humanitarian camp for East German refugees waiting to flee to Austria, on the grounds of his church.

In June 1962, 10 months after the communist East German regime built the despised Wall, one West German pair risked their lives to try to reunite with their wives and children in East Berlin with a bold plan to burrow their way through a makeshift tunnel.

As Germany gears up to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the hated Berlin Wall, some are remembering the day the painful divider went up.

The so-called "kitchen debate" erupted on July 24, 1959, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and American Vice President Richard Nixon got into an impromptu argument about the merits of their countries' economic systems.

The heads of state and government of a dozen European nations gathered in the Hungarian capital to mark the event that preceded the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

In the summer of 1989, the Austro-Hungarian border was opened for three hours, allowing 600 East Germans to escape to the West. It was an act that, for many, signalled the end of the Iron Curtain.