Alois Mock, Austrian Who Helped Tear Down Iron Curtain (Literally), Dies at 82<br />By ALISON SMALEJUNE 6, 2017<br />Alois Mock, the longtime Austrian foreign minister who snipped open the Iron Curtain<br />with a wire cutter months before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, died on Thursday.<br />That summer, East Germans began escaping the bloc through Hungary<br />and into Austria, while thousands more massed in Hungary, many at the West German Embassy in Budapest.<br />They were eventually allowed across into Austria in early September, paving the way for similar scenes in what<br />was then Czechoslovakia before the East Germans themselves brought down the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989.<br />After graduating in law from the University of Vienna, he rose in the conservative Austrian People’s Party, which,<br />along with the Socialists (later the Social Democrats), dominated politics in the country for decades.<br />Although Mr. Mock’s stance was shared by the powerful German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich<br />Genscher, who died in 2016, Serbia saw their actions as unjustified interference.
