Hundreds of people gathered in Sopron on the Austro-Hungarian border today to mark the historic event that led to the eventual fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.

On August 19, 1989, Hungarian opposition parties organised a peace demonstration called the Pan-European Picnic near the Hungarian border, and hundreds of East German nationals use the event to flee to the West. It was the largest exodus of the DDR citizens since the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

The organisers, including Imre Pozsgay and Otto von Habsburg, had planned a symbolic opening of the border for three hours, but people broke through before the official opening and some 600 people made it to the West. Less than one month after the picnic, on 11 September, Hungary formally opened its border with Austria and an estimated 60,000 East Germans had fled the country via Hungary by the time the Berlin Wall began to fall on 9 November 1989.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany's first chancellor from the former East, thanked the Hungarian people for their "courage and foresight," adding, "What Hungarians did here was very brave."

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said in a statement, "The picnic helped to change the course of European history and marked the beginning of the end of the division of Europe by the Cold War".