Germans with candles commemorate anti-communist protests (Roundup)

Oct 9, 2009, 19:36 GMT

Leipzig, Germany - Tens of thousands of Germans re-enacted at dusk Friday the demonstrations in Leipzig that peacefully brought down the communist East German police state 20 years ago.

   In the 'Miracle of Leipzig' on October 9, 1989, core demonstrators prayed in a Leipzig church, then marched in a throng that swelled to 70,000, demanding democracy, and watching police and army battalions do nothing to stop them. A month later, the Berlin Wall fell.

   The secret police are now nothing more than a scary memory, but many of the demonstrators from the old days came back to Leipzig, walking the same route again and carrying tiny lit candles.

   'That was a great and happy day in the history of Germany,' said German President Horst Koehler in the nearby Gewandhaus theatre, the home of orchestral music in the city. He told ex-protesters, 'You can be eternally proud of that day.'

   Kurt Masur, who headed the Gewandhaus Orchestra and urged non- violence in 1989, returned to his old conductor's dais for a performance as part of the commemorations.

Koehler aides said they would check out claims that the president's account of the day had mixed unconfirmed rumours with facts.

Koehler said tanks had been drawn up outside Leipzig by the communists, and blood plasma had been stockpiled in expectation of bloodshed, but historians said this had been a rumour spread in the city in 1989 that later turned out, after examination of the communist authorities' records, to be untrue.

As a monument to the demonstrations, Leipzig inaugurated an egg- shaped bell, symbolizing the start of new life, on a plaza close to the Nikolaikirche, the baroque inner-city church where Lutheran activists nursed the seeds of protest.