Budapest, Aug 18 (DPA) Twenty years ago, thousands gathered in a field near Sopron, on Hungary's border with Austria, for a 'Pan-European Picnic' to protest the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe for four decades. As Hungarian border guards turned a blind eye, Aug 19, 1989, over 600 citizens of East Germany seized the opportunity to flee from the Communist East to the capitalist West.

However, the exodus of East Germans, which became a defining moment on the road to the eventual reunification of Germany and Europe, was not part of the original plan. The picnic had been intended as an expression of pro-European spirit by citizens of one of the Soviet bloc's most liberal countries.

'The event was not intended to be a mass movement of East Germans over the border,' says Walburga Habsburg Douglas, then secretary general of the Pan-European Union, a pro-European integration movement.

Now a member of the Swedish parliament, Habsburg Douglas told DPA how she came to be one of the keynote speakers on the day.

On June 20, 1989, a week after being re-elected as a West German member of the European Parliament, Otto von Habsburg - president of the Pan-European Union and Habsurg Douglas' father, as well as head of the Habsburg dynasty that once ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire - spoke in the eastern Hungarian city of Debrecen.

An activist with the opposition Hungarian Democratic Forum, Ferenc Meszaros, then had the idea of holding a protest picnic, with Austrians and Hungarians on either side of the border.

Von Habsburg and Imre Pozsgay, a reformist member of Hungary's Politburo, were appointed patrons of the event, but they did not attend.

'It was clear that people would have come to see my father, but we wanted to focus on the European question,' says Habsburg Douglas, who was asked to stand in on the day. 'I was living in Budapest trying to learn Hungarian, and I was general secretary of the Pan-European Union at the time,' she says.

'When I arrived, I was surprised that everyone around me was speaking German, and their Trabant cars filled the roads to the border,' she says.

East Germans used to flock each summer to Lake Balaton in Hungary, where they could meet relatives and friends from the West.

'But that summer the East Germans came in far greater numbers, with no intention of returning,' recalls Father Imre Kozma, then the head of the recently established Hungarian Maltese Charity Service.

Kozma, now 69 and still head of the charitable organisation, said how he found himself looking after these refugees in 1989.

'By the beginning of August there were about 30,000 refugees in Budapest alone. They pitched their tents in parks, or slept in their cars, which lined the streets,' he says.