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In 1975 alone, there were over 20,000 applications made by people wishing to leave the GDR and the numbers were increasing. The state security apparatus was purposefully expanded in order to reduce the number of people wishing to leave.

Under domestic pressure in 1984, the GDR government let 21,000 applicants leave the country and started a surge of arrests as a deterrent.The hope that this would solve the problem was not fulfilled. In view of the successful applications to leave the country, the number of applications rose sharply. Even when travel opportunities for GDR citizens to the West were further relaxed in 1986 and visits to relatives became possible to a greater extent, the desire to leave the country did not decrease, but increased again by leaps and bounds. The discontent amongst the population of the GDR had rapidly increased as a result of a worsening economic situation and daily indoctrination.

The domestic political crisis in the GDR reached its peak in 1989. The economy was in a disastrous state and the people were increasingly discontent. The GDR was facing bankruptcy. Since the mid-1980s, opposition groups had emerged and networked. This GDR opposition attempted to establish a counter-public sphere against the SED’s monopoly on opinion and strove to democratize society. GDR citizens looked with interest to the Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev, as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, had begun a reform process in 1985. His policy of “Glasnost” (openness) and “Perestroika” (transformation) allowed for a previously unthinkable discussion of political and social problems and aimed at increased personal responsibility to solve the serious economic difficulties. Although Gorbachev had opened up his planned economy, his real intention was to improve communism. As far as foreign policy was concerned, he abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine which had only allowed limited independence of states in the Warsaw Treaty and gave the Soviet Union the right to military intervention if the Socialist system was deemed to be endangered.