Twenty years after it collapsed, a former Communist bureaucrat has admitted that he inadvertently brought down the Berlin Wall, after blurting out that travel restrictions on East Germans had been lifted.

In 1989, Günter Schabowski, the spokesman for the country’s ruling Politburo, speaking on live television, declared that travel restrictions had been removed and the Berlin Wall would be opened to allow the citizens of the GDR to leave. To the one word question “when?” he answered: “immediately”. Within hours, the tide of people waiting to cross the border was unstoppable, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The confusion and euphoria was toxic for the Communist regime and it disintegrated in weeks. Though he was factually wrong, Schabowski, 80, has no regrets. “I wouldn’t say I was a hero who opened the border — truth be told, I acted to try to save the GDR. On November 9, I was still a committed communist. The opening of the Wall wasn’t a humanitarian, but a tactical decision taken because of popular pressure,” the newspaper quoted him as telling the BBC News.

Schabowski, a propagandist, was expelled from the party early in 1990 for bringing down the wall, and then sentenced in 1997 for his earlier complicity in shoot-to-kill policy enforced by border guards against those trying to flee to the West. He was pardoned in 2000.