existence for the Communist states in Europe. Already in May 1989 Hungary had begun dismantling its border with Austria, creating the first gap in the so-called Iron Curtain, through which later several thousand East Germans quickly fled in hopes of reaching West Germany by way of Austria. But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 (which was based on an idea by Otto von Habsburg to test Gorbachev's reaction to the opening of the border), the subsequent hesitant behaviour of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany and the non-intervention of the Soviet Union opened the floodgates. Thus the united front of the Eastern Bloc was broken. The reaction to this from Erich Honecker in the Daily Mirror of August 19, 1989 was too late and showed the current loss of power: “Habsburg distributed leaflets far into Poland, on which the East German holidaymakers were invited to a picnic. When they came to the picnic, they were given gifts, food and Deutsche Mark, and then they were persuaded to come to the West.” Later, after his fall, Honecker said of Otto von Habsburg in connection with the summer of 1989: "That this Habsburg drove the nail into my coffin." Now tens of thousands of media-informed East Germans made their way to Hungary, which was no longer ready to keep its borders completely closed or to oblige its border troops to use force of arms. A 1969 treaty required the Hungarian government to send the East Germans back home; however, starting on 11 September 1989, the Hungarians let them pass into Austria, telling their outraged East German counterparts that they were refugees and that international treaties on refugees took precedence. At the time, Honecker was sidelined through illness, leaving his colleagues unable to act decisively. He had been taken ill with biliary colic during the Warsaw Pact summit. He was shortly afterwards flown home to East Berlin. After an initial stabilisation in his health, he underwent surgery on 18 August 1989 to remove his inflamed gallbladder and, due to a perforation, part of his colon. According to the urologist Peter Althaus, the surgeons left a suspected carcinogenic nodule in Honecker’s right kidney due to his weak condition, and also failed to inform the patient of the suspected cancer; other sources say the tumour was simply undetected. As a result of this operation, Honecker was away from his