Rome Newsroom, 09 November, 2024 / 7:55 pm (ACI Africa).
As Germany marks the 35th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall this year, key witnesses are highlighting the crucial role played by St. John Paul II in bringing about the peaceful revolution that transformed Europe.
“I am absolutely convinced that without Pope John Paul II, German reunification would not have been possible,” Martin Rothweiler, director of EWTN Germany, told CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner.
Rothweiler was in Rome on the historic night of Nov. 9, 1989, when East German citizens began crossing freely through the Berlin Wall for the first time in nearly three decades.
“It seemed surreal,” Rothweiler recalled. “Watching people climb over the wall, seeing masses streaming from East to West Berlin — it was simply incredible. We had grown up accepting the division as unchangeable: the Eastern Bloc, the West, the Warsaw Pact on one side, NATO on the other. It all seemed set in concrete — literally.”
The late Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne, who died in 2017 and was a close friend of John Paul II, offered similar testimony in a 2016 EWTN interview: “Without him, there would have been no Solidarity movement in Poland. I seriously doubt whether communism would have fallen without John Paul II. His contribution to communism’s collapse cannot be overestimated.”