But it was no coincidence that in London Margaret Thatcher reacted to the scenes of jubilation at the Wall with horror. On 10 November, Sir Peter Wright, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote to Stephen Wall, private secretary to the Foreign Secretary, as follows: "I understand that the Prime Minister was frankly horrified by the sight of the Bundestag rising to sing "Deutschland über alles" when the news of developments on the Berlin Wall came in." There was nothing surprising about Mrs Thatcher's alarm at the prospect of imminent German reunification. Her anxiety about the reopening of such forgotten but still fraught questions as the Oder-Neisse line, Germany's disputed eastern border with Poland, was shared by François Mitterrand in Paris. Meanwhile in Moscow, Gorbachev reacted with what Condoleezza Rice called "barely disguised panic". After watching the scenes at the Berlin Wall, he wrote to President George H. W. Bush next day: "When statements are made in the Federal Republic of Germany designed to stir up emotions, in the spirit of implacable rejection of the postwar realities, that is, the existence of two German states, then such manifestations of political extremism can...bring about a destabilisation of the situation not only in Central Europe, but on a larger scale." Bush responded cautiously. He had already decided to leave the German people to determine their own future, just as Reagan had urged Gorbachev to do.

Helmut Kohl was dining with the new, post-communist Polish Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in Warsaw when his aide Horst Teltschik brought him the news that the Wall was open. At first he refused to believe it. That very night, however, he flew back to Germany — though not directly to Berlin, because the Four Power rules still in force did not permit German aircraft to fly from Poland to Berlin. Kohl was actually flown to Berlin in a United States Air Force plane, a reminder of the Berlin airlift. When he spoke to the crowds, he ignored Gorbachev's warning against any talk of reunification, exclaiming, "Long live a free German fatherland! Long live a free, united Europe!" Less than two weeks later, with the crowds in East Berlin no longer chanting "We are the people" but "We are one people", Kohl set out his Ten Point Plan for German unity. There was no turning back.

The fall of the Berlin Wall did not cancel out German responsibility for the Holocaust: nothing could ever do that, nor have decent Germans ever wanted to evade that responsibility. But there was something about the events that night that recalled the Biblical story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho: "When the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city." (Joshua, 6:20.) 

The East Germans, by recovering their freedom, had regained their self-respect and the respect of others. The fall of the Wall enabled Germans to write a new chapter in the story of liberty. They had earned the trust of erstwhile enemies and victims. Now that they had a future as a nation again, they no longer needed to live in the past.