Sarah Paine

But all of a sudden, East Germany eases up on the travel regulations, and you might ask why?

And the answer would be money.

Just like the Poles, the East Germans were deep in an economic mess of their own making.

Would-be tank man Erich Honecker, who got the boot at the very end, well, his staying-in-power paradigm that he implements in 1971 is going to be, he's really going to live off debt.

He needs to make certain...

social benefits available and consumer benefits available for labor stability, not having labor unrest.

And the way he's going to do that is he's not going to do many domestic investments and he's going to do a lot of borrowing, particularly from West Germany.

Well, that's unsustainable long term.

So by the time you get to the end of the Cold War, if he's going to fix that and even out the accounts, it would be a 30% decline in East German standard of living.

So he really needs the pocket change from the tourists.

So what Kohl does is a brisk business of tourists and things.

What he does in return for the easing of travel restrictions, he pays...

East Germany several hundred million Deutschmarks extra to allow that to happen.

And then he gets the Hungarians to go along.

He gets the Hungarians to open up their Austrian border to let East Germans out that way.

And he gives them a half a billion Deutschmarks for that little favor.

And then when Kohl introduces his 10-point unification program, because now he's thinking he's going to get both Germanys together,

This is when he starts doling out big bucks to the Soviet Union, whose economy is unraveling.

And Gorbachev is going to be desperate for this cash as that's happening.

So West Germany provides $100 million in food, especially in meat, for the Soviet Union that doesn't have these things.