Vladimir Lenin famously joked that if German revolutionaries were to storm a railway station they would first queue up for a platform ticket.

Thousands of desperate East Germans proved the old Bolshevik wrong when, on October 3, 1989, they stampeded into Dresden station in an attempt to jump on to trains taking their fellow countrymen to the West. Now, October 3, also the day in 1990 that the East German state was finally dissolved, ranks as German Unity Day, a sedate holiday in which flowers are laid and speeches are made.

Then, though, it was a very unGerman chaos that presaged the collapse of the Berlin Wall, sending ripples of panic through the communist leadership. East Germans were angry, so unhappy with their regime that they were willing to abandon their hard-earned Trabants and fly the coop. “We hadn’t seen anything like this since the worker riots of 1953,” said Horst Klopfleisch, a local historian, as we walk up and down the platform. “Word spread that the regime was closing the East German-Czech border — that meant we couldn’t head south towards Hungary and cross into the West any more.”

In September 1989 the liberalising Hungarian communists had torn down the barbed wire dividing their country from Austria, opening up an escape route for East Germans. While that East-West border stayed tantalisingly open the internal borders within Eastern Europe started to slam shut.

“The people here felt that they had been completely cut off from the world,” says Mr Klopfleisch. “They thronged into the station, on to the rail tracks, blocking the trains. There was this feeling that East Germany had briefly opened up and was about to close down again.”

The police, backed by the National People’s Army, moved in and the demonstrators responded with a hail of cobblestones gathered up from a building site and broken bottles. “Police cars on fire — we had never seen that before,” recalls Mr Klopfleisch, shaking his head.

For weeks trains had been travelling through Dresden on the way to Prague and Budapest: an extraordinary exodus. Then, the would-be defectors found that they could not cross from Czechoslovakia into Hungary and stayed in Prague, camping out on the grounds of the West German Embassy. More than 5,000 pitched up there; diplomats’ offices were converted into bunk-bed dormitories; tea was handed out by the ambassador.

It dawned on the world that there was a serious East-West crisis under way. Hans Dietrich Genscher, the West German Foreign Minister, still recuperating from a heart attack, flew to New York with his cardiologist and tried to work out a deal with Oskar Fischer, his East German counterpart, and Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Minister. East Germany was due to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its republic; leaders from across the Soviet bloc were due to visit. So it gave ground: it would let all the East Germans holed up in Prague travel to the West, provided that they took the train back through East Germany.

That was supposed to save the face of the communists, to demonstrate that emigration was an act of generosity by the regime rather than caving in to popular pressure. For Hans Dietrich Genscher, now 82, and an active adviser to the new German Government, it was the beginning of the end of the Berlin Wall.

“The Wall was built in 1961 because the East German leadership had lost the competition between the two systems. People were leaving in droves. So they decided to lock them up,” Mr Genscher told The Times, “and now even that didn’t work”.

So the trains rolled back through East Germany. The protests gathered strength around the statue of Lenin, demanding freedom of expression.

That was when the regime realised that the game was up. There was no way to accommodate their demands and preserve a communist Germany. Within a few weeks an emigration movement had become an uprising.

And in all that time not a single platform ticket was sold.

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