Opening the Hungarian border with Austria was essential to this effort. Hungary was at that time a popular tourist destination for East Germans;[159] West Germany had secretly offered a much-needed hard currency loan of DM 500 million ($250 million) in return for allowing citizens of the GDR to freely emigrate.[160] Pictures of the barbed-wire fences being taken down were transmitted into East Germany by West German television stations.[161] This prompted a mass exodus by hundreds of thousands of East Germans, which began in earnest in September 1989.