Gyula Horn

From the longer Wikipedia page

Gyula Horn (5 July 1932 – 19 June 2013)[1] was a Hungarian politician who served as the third Prime Minister of the Republic of Hungary from 1994 to 1998.

Horn is remembered as the last Communist Foreign Minister of Hungary who played a major role in the demolishing of the "Iron Curtain" for East Germans in 1989, contributing to the later unification of Germany, and for the Bokros package, the biggest fiscal austerity programme in post-communist Hungary, launched under his premiership, in 1995.

In 1954 Horn joined the Hungarian communist party, then called the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP). In November 1956, he helped reorganize the MDP into the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP), which under the leadership of János Kádár crushed the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet occupation and communist rule.

Horn worked in the Ministry of Finance from 1954 to 1959. He got a job in the Foreign Ministry in 1959, first as an official in the independent Soviet department. In the 1960s he was a diplomat in the Hungarian embassies in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

As a minister he was in charge of foreign affairs when Hungary decided to open the western border (the "Iron Curtain") to East Germans wishing to emigrate to West Germany. He is often credited with having a major part in the decision and, consequently, a role in German unification.

He and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock posed for cameras on 27 June 1989 to cut through a barbed wire frontier fence, in a largely symbolic act of rapprochement which had been planned months before. As foreign minister he ordered the border to be opened to allow East Germans gathered in Hungary by the thousands to cross into Austria, and from there to West Germany. With this act he greatly contributed to the later unification of Germany. Within weeks tens of thousands of East Germans, who travelled to Hungary with "tourist" visas, headed straight for the unfortified border and walked into the West. Horn outraged his East German counterparts when he told them that international treaties on refugees took precedence over a 1969 agreement between Budapest and East Berlin limiting freedom of movement. The fall of East German communism and the process of German unification had been launched. With dizzying speed, communist governments in the region succumbed to popular uprisings and sheer fatigue. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself had evaporated.