The department did, however, collate and maintain the statistics on citizens leaving the country, including a subset of those seeking to visit "the west". At the start of 1989 Party General Secretary (i.e. leader of the government) Erich Honecker made a public pronouncement that the Berlin Wall would still be in place "in fifty years and indeed in a hundred years". This triggered an immediate increase in the number of people wishing to leave the country, not merely for a foreign trip, but permanently. The development came in the wider context of an intensifying surge through 1989 in anti-government streets protests. In the past government security services might have "cracked down" on citizen street protests, using whatever level of savagery was necessary, and supported as necessary by Soviet troops and tanks. That had happened in 1953. But in 1989, with the winds of Glasnost blowing across from (of all places) Moscow, and with Erich Honecker seriously unwell, the politburo became paralysed with indecision. That would create a vacuum which officials lower down in the hierarchy of power would sometimes find themselves called upon to fill. Meanwhile, Gerhard Lauter's formidable mental abilities, coupled with his work in the department that controlled the relevant statistics, made him one of the best informed people in East Germany about emigration applications and emigration figures. During the first six months of 1989 almost 22,000 East Germans applied for permission to emigrate. That compared with just 30,000 emigration applications processed during the entire twelve months if the previous year. "That was a clear signal that people were voting with their feet", in Lauter's judgement.