Austria–Czechia border
A quiet line of forests, hills and river meadows that for forty years was part of the Iron Curtain. Communist Czechoslovakia electrified its fences with Austria and West Germany, and hundreds of people died trying to cross. In December 1989 the two foreign ministers cut the wire together.
Written from cited sourcesLast checked 30 September 2026Suggest a correction
See it on the globe:Austria →Czechia →
The Iron Curtain
During the four decades Czechoslovakia was behind the Iron Curtain, many people tried to escape across its western borders. A 2004 report for the Czech Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism counted 282 confirmed killings on the borders, with up to 40 more probable: 145 people were shot and almost 100 electrocuted, and others drowned.[1]
An electric fence ran along the borders with West Germany and Austria, about 900 km in total, though its existence was officially secret. The guards were mostly conscripts of 18 or 19, trained to see escapees as armed intruders and rewarded for stopping them. Among those killed were tourists from France and Morocco who had come too close to look at the border from the Austrian or German side.[1]
“They were perfectly politically and psychologically primed to shoot at would be escapees.”[1]
Cutting the wire
In June 1989 Austria’s foreign minister Alois Mock and Hungary’s Gyula Horn had cut the Iron Curtain wire near Sopron. After Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, Mock did the same with the new Czechoslovak foreign minister Jiří Dienstbier on the Austro-Czechoslovak border on 17 December 1989.[2]
Timeline
More borders
Sources
- [1]Killings on Czechoslovak border during Communist era examined in new report · Radio Prague International · 10 December 2004
- [2]1989 – Annus Mirabilis: The Iron Curtain Falls · Austria 1989 – Year of Miracles
Map geometry from Natural Earth via world-atlas. See credits.