Only a few sections, including the famous East Side Gallery in central Berlin, remained intact.
Bormann knew that if he had publicly revealed his discovery in 1999, it probably would have been torn down.
"But now, 20 years on, people realise how significant this discovery really is," he said.
Bormann initially faced scrutiny by authorities and the media over his claim that the 80m stretch of the wall - publicised on his blog in mid-January - was once part of the first Berlin Wall, hastily erected in 1961 after East Germans were barred from leaving their country.
When East Germany later decided to make the barrier more permanent, it expanded provisional brick walls into massive concrete barriers with watchtowers and mines.
Many of the initial parts of the wall were destroyed in the process, but one appears to have survived in Pankow.
Bormann's discovery is now drawing tourists and locals alike, even though the area has since been fenced off for preservation work.
Discovering forgotten parts of the Berlin Wall has become a difficult but not impossible task. Confirmation of Bormann's find came only weeks after construction workers discovered a hidden tunnel once used by East Germans to flee to West Berlin.
More than 100,000 East Germans tried to do so between 1961 and 1989, when it came down. At least 270 of them died trying to cross the border - East German soldiers were instructed to fire at any of their compatriots who attempted to escape the politically repressive and economically bankrupt system.
Yet many former East Germans - born in a country that no longer exists - still have mainly positive memories of that era.
Along with strict political control and pervasive surveillance, they also recall a country in which women received the same pay and had the same responsibilities as their male co-workers, and in which - at least according to official statistics - unemployment was nonexistent.
Those multifaceted memories usually reemerge most vividly in Berlin, where East and West Germans lived separate lives for decades - and where reminders of the separation are still all around.
A photo of the city taken by Dutch astronaut André Kuipers from the International Space Station in 2012 showed one such reminder: The yellow-tinged lights mark the former East Berlin, while the whiter fluorescent lights favoured by the West Berlin government show the other half of the city.
Somewhere along that dividing line of light, in the upper part of the photo, 260 forgotten feet of the Berlin Wall were still standing when the photo was taken. It took six more years and an amateur historian for Berlin's hidden wall to reemerge.
