First of all:
There were never at any time more then 200.000 people on the area, also the crowd in which ppl died wasn´t that huge (maybe 2000 max). The 1.4 million people were spread of over the whole city. Still the festival area was way to small, but that was not the cause for the desaster
The problem was, that there was only one entrance and exit at the same place. Means that the people who are coming and the people who are going needed to go exactly the same way, with no kind fence between them. This would have helped a lot.
When the police saw, that the festival area will get too crowed they closed it. Now the people who are at the beginning of the 100m tunnel which lead to the entrance didn´t knew about that still pushed forward. Together with the people which were still going out of the area it came to the desaster
Here a picture from the entrance:
You are looking from the festival entrace to the two tunnels from which the people were coming. In this area the desaster took place. To the left you can see some masts for lights. In the middle you see some kind of container and to the right you see some stairs directly a the right tunnel entrance.
These three things were the most used way to get out of the crowd once you couldn´t get forth an back. Because the people were seeing this as their only way to get out everybody wanted to get there, which lets to the pressure around this cokepoints. Finally because of stupidness, being drunk, stoned, whatever some people fell down those exits into the crowd. This let to the panik and even more pressure to everybody.
See those picture for what I mean:
This leads to the conclusion that there were three main mistakes, besides from the mistakes in the pre-planing, made during the event:
1. Closing the area. It was not even full, and even then you wouldn´t have had such a close crowd like in the tunnel
2. Let the people leave the area into the crowd.
3. Don´t inform the people on the way to the festival that the area is closed. There were announcements, but they were too late. Also why not closing the tunnels instead of the entrance itself.
4. Don´t close the exits the people used. If the people wouldn´t have used the stairs, container or mast to get out there wouldn´t have been such a panic. Because there would have been nobody falling down on them. This sounds very controversal, but eliminating these ways would have reduced the pressure from for example the beginning of the stairs to the whole entrance area. 70% of all deads were infront of the stairs (look at the picute above). To proof this I´ve got this picture whch was taken shortly after the desaster. You can clearly see the people going crazy for the only exit out of that crowd, in their eyes, leaving large areas uncrowed.
