The record
An original segment at the Kreisau meeting centre, unveiled twenty years to the month after Kohl and Mazowiecki held their reconciliation mass on the same estate.
An original segment and a commemorative plaque were unveiled at the International Youth Meeting Centre at Krzyżowa on 11 December 2009, in the presence of the president of the German Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, and Bronisław Komorowski, then Marshal of the Sejm and later president of Poland. The segment stands on a small open space between the manor house and the farm buildings that belong to the Kreisau Foundation.
Twenty years earlier, almost to the day, the estate had been the setting for one of the sharpest coincidences of 1989. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was on a state visit to Poland when the border opened in Berlin on 9 November; moved by what was happening, he and the Polish prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki decided on the spot to hold a mass of reconciliation here on 12 November.
Krzyżowa was already a place where German resistance to dictatorship is remembered. As Kreisau it was the Moltke family estate, where the group around Helmuth James von Moltke and Peter Yorck von Wartenburg met three times in 1942 and 1943 to plan a democratic Germany after National Socialism. Many of them, Moltke included, were executed for it. The permanent exhibition in the manor house sets that resistance alongside opposition to the other twentieth-century dictatorships, and the wall segment belongs to the second half of that argument. Six months before it arrived, a piece of the Gdańsk shipyard wall had been unveiled on the north-east side of the Reichstag in Berlin — the same exchange running the other way.
How did it get here?
Unveiled on 11 December 2009 at the Krzyżowa meeting centre, twenty years after the reconciliation mass of 12 November 1989.
Sources & verification
Berlin Wall Archive ↗
The source lists this place as a Berlin Wall location. Coordinates, where supplied, are source-reported and may represent a general area. This is not independent verification of authenticity, current presence, or public access.
Source accessed 2026-09-17 · Source record 206
Source-reported segments: 1. This is not a separately verified count.
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide, site entry ↗
The unveiling of the segment and plaque on 11 December 2009 with Norbert Lammert and Bronisław Komorowski, its siting between the manor house and the farm buildings, the 12 November 1989 reconciliation mass, the history of the Kreisau Circle, and the Gdańsk shipyard wall piece unveiled at the Reichstag on 17 June 2009.
Source accessed 2026-09-17
MAU-774 Mauerelement im Park von Schloss Kreisau — MAUERSPUREN, Stiftung Berliner Mauer ↗
An element in the park in front of the manor house at Kreisau/Krzyżowa, in memory of the reconciliation mass of 12 November 1989 attended by Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Helmut Kohl; catalogued as MAU-774.
Source accessed 2026-09-17
Last verified: Not yet verified
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