"Whether Deng's example would now shake Gorbachev's authority remained to be seen. One European communist who hoped it might was Erich Honecker, the long-time hard-line ruler of East Germany. His most recent election, held in May, 1989, had produced an implausible 98.95 percent vote in favor of his government. After the Tiananmen massacre Honecker's secret police chief, Erich Mielke, commended the Chinese action to his subordinates as "resolute measures in suppression of . . . counterrevolutionary unrest." East German television repeatedly ran a Beijing-produced documentary praising "the heroic response of the Chinese army and police to the perfidious inhumanity of the student demonstrators." All of this seemed to suggest that Honecker had the German Democratic Republic under control—until the regime noticed that an unusually large number of its citizens were taking their summer vacations in Hungary. When the Hungarian authorities took down the barbed wire along the Austrian border, they had intended only to make it easier for their own citizens to get through. But the word spread, and soon thousands of East Germans were driving their tiny wheezing polluting Trabants through Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the border, abandoning them there, and walking across. Others crowded into the West German embassy in Budapest, demanding asylum. By September, there were 130,000 East Germans in Hungary and the government announced that, for "humanitarian" reasons, it would not try to stop their emigration to the West. Honecker and his associates were furious: "Hungary is betraying socialism," Mielke fumed. "We have to guard against being discouraged," another party official warned. "[B]ecause of developments in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Hungary . . . [m]ore and more people are asking how is socialism going to survive at all?" That was an excellent question, for soon some 3,000 East German asylum-seekers had climbed the fence surrounding West Germany's embassy in Prague and crammed themselves inside, with full television coverage."