In 1962, the following joke was circulating in East Germany: ‘Did you know that Adam and Eve were actually East Germans? They had no clothes, they had to share one apple and they were convinced they were living in paradise.” And because many East Germans had had enough of this paradise, between 1950 and 1961 some 2.8 million of them fled to West German territory. Many of them were trained professionals and most of them fled to the West via Berlin. Although East German soldiers strictly controlled their borders, Berlin was a porous city. Later it was divided between the two occupying forces, with different political and economic systems in each part, but at that time it was still one city with a common telephone, rail and bus system. Nearly 60,000 East Germans – teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, technicians and students – came to work or study in the western part of the city every day with official permits. Many of them did not return home.
This “bone in the throat”, as Nikita Khrushchev put it, gave Moscow a headache. West Berlin was officially administered by the three occupying powers (America, Germany and France), while East Berlin was administered by the Soviet Union, which constantly threatened to sign a peace treaty with East Germany. This would also have given West Berlin all land links with West Germany. Of course, this was easier said than done. But one decision was taken.
On 7 August 1961, the Politburo of the East German Party suddenly met, and its First Secretary Walter Ulbricht told the astonished assembled “Comrade Khrushchev’s decision” to close the border between the two Berlins on the night of 12-13 August 1961. Wire barriers would be erected between the two sectors and construction of the wall would only begin when it became clear that the Western Allies would not intervene militarily. Shortly after midnight, public transport between the two sectors was stopped and Berlin was finally divided.
Western intelligence services were surprised. When construction materials started piling up on the eastern side, they were convinced that the barracks would be rebuilt. Only ten people in the East German political top knew about the plan. Thousands of Soviet troops were on maximum alert, and in the Berlin area all young men between the ages of 18 and 25 were conscripted, as it was these young men who were most likely to flee to the West. The Western forces, with their 6 500 soldiers in Berlin, were indecisive, the West, as usual, did not intervene, and a solid wall was built out of wire barriers. Its erection was a great tactical victory for East Germany, as it largely stemmed the flow of young labour to the West.
The people of East Berlin were shocked. Thousands have now lost their jobs in West Berlin, many have been unable to continue their studies or even visit friends. The East and West Berlin underground trains were ending their journeys at border stations and passengers had to get off.
Before the real wall was built, those East Berliners who decided to continue their lives in the West jumped out of the windows of the buildings in East Berlin that formed the border along the Bernauerstrasse. Sometimes West Berlin firemen would line up underneath them with their rescue nets and catch the defectors in them. Just a few days after 13 August, the first fatality occurred. Ida Siekmann threw a mattress over the border from the third floor of her apartment on Bernauerstrasse and jumped. Unfortunately, she missed it and fell to the hard ground. She died while being transported to hospital.
Shortly afterwards, East German workers boarded up all the windows of the buildings bordering the border. Just a few days later, Günter Litfin, a tailor, was shot in the head as he tried to flee to the West through a river port. Thereafter, the escapes and shootings continued. People fled through the sewers, in cars, crashing into the wall and trying to break it down, taking trains that refused to stop at the border.
Harry Seidel was also one of those who did not accept the border in the middle of Berlin. He was a great cyclist, one of the best in the country, and if he had joined the party, he could have competed in the Olympics. But he didn’t, and so he was just a famous sportsman, riding his bicycle madly through the streets of East Berlin. He knew all the streets, parks and courtyards through which it was possible to escape to the West.
First, he escaped alone. South of the city centre, he noticed that the wire fence was low, and when the guards looked away, he simply threw his bike over the wire and jumped in after it himself. He knew that he could return to East Berlin unhindered via Checkpoint Charlie, because at that time there was no one blocking his re-entry into East Germany.
The next time he crossed to the West, he wrapped his passport in a plastic bag and swam across the River Spree. Now he was thinking about how to smuggle his wife and young child into West Berlin. He discovered that the safest place to do this was somewhere along Kiefholzstrasse, where one of the biggest parks in Berlin was nearby. On 3 September 1961, the three of them crossed the border, hiding among the low bushes. It ended badly for the wife’s brothers, who were arrested by the police and accused of knowing about the escape.
Then Harry Siedel decided to help others across the border. As long as he could, he still used the wire crossing at Kiefholzstrasse to escape his friends. But now it was no longer easy, as the wire had been replaced by a solid wall in most places. People managed to escape here and there through the drainage canal system known among the refugees as Route 4711 (after the name of the famous Cologne water), but this soon became too dangerous, and they started to scrutinise forged West German passports at the border. Some tried to scale the wall with ladders, but mostly unsuccessfully. Police fired shots and bodies began to pile up in front of the wall. East German Stasi agents were present on both sides of the border and it was dangerous to talk about escape with someone you did not fully trust.
Seidel, who was now working in West Berlin as a newspaper deliveryman, one day met Fritz Wagner, a fat butcher, and they became friends. Wagner, who knew about Seidel’s escapes, wanted to bring some of his friends to the West and maybe make a little money. They started to make arrangements to dig a tunnel to East Berlin. They were not the first to think of this. Erwin Becker, a chauffeur in the East German Parliament, and his two brothers dug a shaft from the basement of the family house in East Berlin. They spent nine days digging in the sandy soil and one night in January, 10 men and 18 women crawled through the tunnel to freedom.
But Seidel and Wagner decided to dig the road to freedom for others in the opposite direction; from West to East Berlin. For their project they chose Heidelbergerstrasse, a narrow street in the Treptow district, where a concrete wall divided the street and separated friends physically and politically. The tunnel, just under 25 metres long, had an entrance in the West and a basement exit in the East.
Wagner bought digging tools, paid compensation to the owners of the premises in the West and East and hired some workers. Digging the tunnel was like digging a grave, but horizontally, day after day in the freezing cold, damp and mud. No one could dig for more than an hour continuously, because they were running out of air. When they got far enough, they could hear footsteps and the mutterings of armed police overhead.
At the end of March, Seidel reached the basement wall on the east side. In the first few days, twelve fugitives escaped through the tunnel. But in the last days of March 1962, Seidel’s luck ran out. The tenant who lived in the house where the tunnel on the east side ended in the cellar was Stasi informant Horst Brieger. Seidel carelessly asked him to lend him the key to the cellar so that the fugitives could enter the tunnel unhindered. Brieger promised him the key, but now Stasi knew what was afoot.
During the next escape, Heinz Jercha, one of Seidel’s best diggers, was the first to enter the tunnel and climb out on the east side. Seidel granted his request and Jercha started crawling down the tunnel, followed by Seidel. Jercha exited the tunnel, climbed to the first floor and rang Berger to ask for the key to the cellar. The door opened and policemen rushed out. Jercha jumped up in an instant and rushed down the stairs towards the tunnel. Shots rang out. Although wounded in the chest, Jercha managed to squeeze into the tunnel and crawl back with Seidel. On the way, he fainted and asked Seidel to help him. Jericho struggled to pull him out of the tunnel and called for rescuers. Jercha died on the way to hospital.
The world’s newspapers have covered this tragic event. A week later, Horst Brieger started driving the new Skoda car he had received as payment for his betrayal.
No one is allowed to cross the border alive
Two American broadcasters, sensing that good stories were on the horizon, got deeply involved in the whole thing. Even before this event, Piers Anderton, NBC’s permanent correspondent in Berlin, had already taken an interest in the “tunnelers”, as he called them. There were a number of English-speaking journalists in Berlin, but NBC was the only one with a permanent office there. But Anderton was not the only American journalist who wanted to exploit and cash in on the news of the East German defections. His biggest competitor, Daniel Schorr, worked for CBS. Both of them had to arrange for short documentary reports on the West Berlin escapes, as these were at the top of the ratings in America at the time.
Meanwhile, attempts to escape over the wall continued and the death toll rose, as border guards were instructed not to allow any fugitive “to cross the border alive”. The instructions said that ‘no one will be punished if he shoots at West Berlin, if he so much as hits a fugitive, or if the West Berliners try to cut the wire barrier’. … But it is not allowed to shoot at children and pregnant women. … You can use tear gas, but you must not throw it into West Berlin.”
So the instructions were very clear. The Stasi then picked up the dead fugitives and took them away for autopsies. They wanted to prevent the people of East Berlin or the Western media from finding out about these events in any way they could. Family members were told that a missing compatriot had “drowned” or simply “disappeared”, or, less frequently, that an accident had occurred when provoked by a “border incident”. The body was almost always cremated and the ashes buried or given to the relatives. The work of the border guards was not easy and many had already jumped the border and fled westwards.
Particularly outrageous on both sides was the escape of 14-year-old Wilfried Tews, who, no longer wanting to distribute propaganda leaflets from the Communist Youth Organisation, decided to flee through the old Invaliden Friedhof cemetery. As he approached the cemetery wall, the guards had already opened fire. Nevertheless, he scaled it, started to descend the slope, jumped into the 15-metre-wide Humboldt Canal and started to swim to the other bank. Bullets whizzed around him, one hitting him in the lung, another in the leg. He managed to climb onto the platform on the opposite west side, but was hit by another bullet.
He tried to stand up, but the bullets were still whizzing around his head. West Berlin police officers tried to reach him and pull him out, and opened fire on the opposite side. One of them shouted, “Don’t shoot! You’re German too, aren’t you?” Then Peter Göring, a 21-year-old East German policeman, came out of hiding to shoot at Tews from a more advantageous position. Three bullets hit him and he collapsed.
Tews survived, Göring died. East Berlin gave him a state funeral and named several streets after him, and the party newspaper Neues Deutschland ran a front-page photograph of him dead, looking up at the sky with glassy eyes. Accusations flew from both sides. “A German shoots a German”, wrote both. Four days later, another young German tried to flee to the West, but was killed by a shot to the head by a policeman in a watchtower, and the West Berlin police fired back. The body of the dead man lay in the bushes for 45 minutes before he was taken away.
Then, in March 1962, Der Spiegel magazine published a report about a student group that had successfully helped hundreds of East Berliners to escape to the other side, by various means; fake passports, through drainage canals and by digging tunnels. It was called Girrmann, and it was led by students of the West Berlin Free University who had fled East Germany years before. The group operated in secret, as it did not want to attract attention. Now, because of the East German backlash, the group was forced to go public, as rescuing defectors was not cheap and the group’s debts were mounting, and the university authorities were giving them a hard time.
One day, Siegfried Ushe, who worked as a hairdresser in an American military base, approached Bod Kohler, one of the founders of the Girrmann group, and told him that he wanted to take part in the breakthroughs because he wanted to get his mother and a friend to the West. But Ushe was an associate of Stasi, spying for him in the homosexual circles of West Berlin. Bodo Kohler got him a new passport – Ushe himself had fled East Germany years before – so he could work as a courier for the Girrmann group. Ushe was in contact with his liaison at Stasi, a Lehmann, all this time.
Students from all over Europe and America, full of idealism, increasingly gathered in Berlin and joined the Girrmann group, eager to help the escape from East Germany. Thus, two Italian students from Gorizia, Sesta and Spina, together with a German, Schmidt, decided to dig a tunnel to the east side of Berlin. In one of the border houses, they started digging a tunnel in a cellar under the Bernauerstrasse, first vertically to a depth of one and a half metres, then horizontally towards the wall. By the end of May 1962, they had almost reached the wall, but they had run out of money to continue.
Piers Anderton heard about all this and met with the trio. He was convinced that if he could film the swim and the escape, he would make a good deal. But he knew that his boss in New York would have a hard time approving the $50,00 that was still needed to finish the tunnel.
Just a few days before, a powerful explosion had blown a large hole in the wall, through which it was believed it was possible to escape to West Berlin. But the escape was poorly planned and the explosion too weak to do much damage. Nevertheless, there was hue and cry in East Berlin and Moscow, with articles about the terrorist act and announcements of counter-measures. East Germany had already started to raise the wall in some places and to build an additional inner wall at the beginning of the no-go zone, which extended to the wall itself, where border guards fired on everyone without warning. The US authorities in Berlin did not want this and considered that any US interference in the break-outs was harmful to them.
Anderton finally managed to extract a promise from his boss that he was willing to pay $7500 for exclusive rights to report on the tunnel, but on the condition that he could not tell him anything about it yet. The money worked wonders, the work progressed rapidly and soon the tunnel was dug past the wall and into the restricted area.
They had major problems with ventilation. The longer the tunnel, the more suffocating the air. So they ran narrow pipes along the wall and used fans to send fresh air to the diggers. The diggers’ dirty clothes and shoes were left in the cellar, and then someone would take them to a reliable person to wash them.
Anderton was in charge of organising the filming at NBC and was told by the editorial staff that NBC must not be involved in any way in the construction of the tunnel or the organisation of the breakthrough. The Germans must organise everything themselves, as they would bear the consequences of any failure. Therefore, two Bavarians were hired as cameramen and electricians. The filming was extremely difficult, as the cameraman was lying on his back in the narrow tunnel, with his feet forward, awkwardly filming with a small camera. They filmed several times a week, trying to capture the smaller details; the first aid box, the shovels for the excavation, the switch to warn the diggers, the air supply pipes, the dirty mattresses on which the diggers rested, the washed laundry drying on the lines, the remains of sandwiches, and so on.
The tunnel was always damp, with five people working in shifts, and the excavated earth had the breath of centuries past. Where it had been dug, the walls and ceiling were reinforced with wooden planks donated by a nearby timber merchant. Despite this, water entered the tunnel and was pumped out by a small and not too loud hand pump.
Tunnelling
Meanwhile, Harry Seidel did not sit with his arms crossed either. He paid the owner of the Krug pub on Heidelbergerstrasse 1000 dollars for the temporary use of his cellar. Heidelbergerstrasse was the most unusual street in Berlin. Here, the border of East Germany practically reached the facades of the houses on the opposite side. Thus, the inhabitants entered their houses here and children played on the pavement, which was East German territory. The distance from the cellar where Seidel was bathing to the photographer’s studio on the opposite side was therefore barely 20 metres. The shop where the exit from the tunnel was located was closed on Sunday, so there was no one there, and that was the day chosen for the escape.
Harry Seidel and his companions waited quietly in the shop for the refugees to arrive. He was angry. They were all dragging unnecessary items with them, and one of the women, even though she knew she would be crawling in the mud, put on a fur coat and high-heeled shoes. Some of the refugee women almost had a nervous breakdown at the sight of the narrow opening and started crying, even though the border guards walked back and forth right next to the shop. Some of the babies, who had been put to sleep by sleeping pills, were simply placed by Seidel in aluminium containers used to transport excavated earth and taken to West Berlin. On that day, twenty defectors made their way through the tunnel into West Berlin.
Meanwhile, Anderton’s CBS colleague Daniel Schorr was furious because he still did not have “his” tunnel to report and film the action. Finally, James O’ Donnell, a freelance journalist and White House liaison man himself, alerted him to the fact that Fritz Wagner was raising funds to build a tunnel on the opposite side and suggested that he should be involved in the project. Schorr happily agreed and attended the meeting. The tunnel builders at Kiefholzstrasse asked for 10,000 marks for exclusive rights to film the tunnel and the escape itself. Schorr agreed to only 5,000.
The escape is believed to have taken place on 7 August and between 50 and 80 people are thought to have escaped through the tunnel. James O’ Donnell carelessly mentioned all this to a senior American official at the mission in Berlin, and soon word of it was passed up the hierarchical ladder to the American ambassador in Bonn himself, with the remark that the massive nature of the venture probably doomed it to failure. The Ambassador was concerned, convinced that this was detrimental to American interests, and urged the mission in Berlin to persuade Schorr to give up the filming.
Schorr had a cold shower only a few days later. He was called into a US military mission, handed a phone and assured that this was a special line that was completely secure. The call came from the White House, where Blair Clark, the editor-in-chief of CBS, was staying with Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He coldly but kindly told him that the US administration in Berlin did not want any trouble and ordered him to give up filming the escape under the wall. Schorr returned to his hotel, flushed. By then he had already shot two reels of a film about the tunnel, which was to be shown by CBS on 13 August. He knew that NBC’s competition would jump in instead.
Stasi’s informant Siegfried Ushe was familiar with the project down to the smallest detail. He knew which assembly points the trucks would take the fugitives, who came from all over Germany, not just Berlin, and where they would stop along the way. He did not know exactly which house would be used to enter the escape tunnel. The escape would start sometime between 4 and 7 pm.
It was a very risky act. Just arriving near Treptow Park and gathering almost a hundred people, almost all of whom had some luggage, was suspicious. Even getting into the tunnel and crawling out the other side will take several hours. Three lorries would take the fugitives to the vicinity of the park, while others would arrive on foot. After exchanging passwords, they would enter the house where the entrance to the tunnel was located, undetected. Ushe communicated all the details of the plan to his confidant at Stasi Lehmann.
August 7th 1962 was an unusually cool day for summer and it started to rain lightly. The refugees from other parts of Germany had come to Berlin by different routes – some by train, others by bus, others brought by friends – so they were slow to gather at the places where they boarded the trucks.
The Stasi and the East German police were also on standby. A squad of police with a water cannon was hidden in Treptow Park, waiting for instructions. The border guards were ordered to be on high alert as four American jeeps with mounted machine guns were spotted on the other side of the border. At the same time, some Stasi agents in plain clothes mingled with the walkers in the park. Unusual persons checking the identity cards of anyone who wanted to enter the park from the side streets was a sign that a betrayal had taken place. A panic ensued and everyone who could tried to inform someone else to leave the vicinity of the park as soon as possible. By interrogating the detainees, the Stasi quickly discovered where the entrance to the tunnel was – in the Sendler house on Kiefholzstrasse.
Edition
Meanwhile, on the west side, a trio of volunteers were preparing to enter the tunnel, climb all the way down and cut through the wooden floor that separated the tunnel from the basement of the house. Sawing the thick planks was difficult and when half of them had been sawed through, the first digger stuck his head out of the tunnel and called, “Mr and Mrs Sendler, we’re here, come quickly!” It had been agreed that because they had allowed the tunnel exit to be in the basement of their house, they would be the first ones to escape to the West. But only Mrs Sendler spoke up and shouted, “Get out of here, and quickly! I don’t want to go to the West!”
No amount of cajoling helped and soon the house was suspiciously quiet. The diggers, convinced that the couple had changed their minds, continued sawing boards, believing that three trucks with refugees were approaching. But their hearts were still squeezed. What is going on? All that was happening was that in the garden of their house, the Stasi had already interrogated the man and demanded that he allow them to enter the house. Mrs Sendler joined him, complaining that she was ill and that someone was sawing boards on the floor of the cellar of their house. She knew that the escape had failed.
Then a squad of police with Kalashnikovs came to the house and waited for the diggers to come out of the tunnel. Meanwhile, the Stasi, noticing that some of the fugitives were hesitantly crossing over, not knowing what to do, while others were already quickly leaving the vicinity of Treptow Park, decided to arrest everyone they still could and to take them all to the main police station at Alexanderplatz.
On the west side of the wall, Anderton and his cameraman watched and marvelled at the unusually large number of police patrols on the east side of the wall from a nearby abandoned railway building. Anderton kept his eyes peeled for his CBS colleague Schorr, convinced that he was already busily filming, as this was “his tunnel”, NBC was just an observer. He didn’t notice it, but when he saw the uniformed police with Kalashnikovs entering Sendler’s house, he knew the thing was a giveaway.
The three diggers finally sawed through the wooden floor and cautiously looked into the cellar. There was no one to be seen. They entered it and the room next door. Armed police officers were already gathered in the vestibule. The house looked completely empty. If they had stayed in the tunnel, they might have heard the warning shouts: “Come back, come back! The Stasi is everywhere!”
Finally, they were overwhelmed by radio calls, quickly returned to the tunnel and crawled back to the West. At 7pm, the Stasi told the switchboard that all was quiet in the house. The loot had escaped them because they had waited too long. They arrested only the two Sendlers and discovered a veritable stockpile of coffee, cognac, wine, washing powder, chocolate, champagne, butter and sausages. The Stasi managed to arrest about forty of the defectors and interrogate them about who their contact person was. The interrogations were aimed at finding out whether anyone else might be digging a tunnel.
One of the detainees did say that he had heard that another tunnel was being dug in Berlin, that it was already 150 metres long and that it would be finished at the end of August. This was the tunnel on Barnauerstrasse, which was being dug by two Italians and a German, and in which Anderton was interested. The Stasi, of course, looked at the tunnel in the Sendler house the next day, and the police crawled into it, but they did not venture far, fearing that it was booby-trapped.
The Girrmann Group met the very next day to try to find out how the betrayal had taken place. They wanted to find out from those who had been involved in organising the escape how the events of 7 August had unfolded. Schorr had to go to the US embassy in Bonn to give a statement explaining exactly to what extent he and CBS had been “involved in an act that could have resulted in a number of deaths”. The official American position was that such actions destabilised the position of the Western powers in Berlin. He did not get an answer to his question as to how it was possible that an NBC crew, headed by Anderton, had turned up on the scene at that very moment and even filmed, albeit from a distance, what was happening on the other side of the border.
The West German government soon decided to officially stop supporting Girrmann. On the first anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, strong West and East German police units were deployed on both sides of the Sendler House, as everyone expected riots. The two police forces watched each other with binoculars and kept a close eye on what was going on. On the west side, flowers were placed near the wall and empty bottles were thrown on the other side.
Then an official report from East Berlin said that “border police blew up the tunnel leading to Sendler’s house”. The interrogation of those who did not manage to escape was brief, with the official report stating that most wanted to flee to the West to join a partner or relatives, while some expected better living conditions in the West, either to avoid the military or simply to study. None of those imprisoned was stupid enough to admit that they hated the socialist system in East Germany.
The East German police have also learned from interrogations that another tunnel, 150 metres long and a few metres deep, is being dug somewhere on Bernauerstrasse, on very difficult clay terrain. No one could say exactly where it was, but some people only knew that there was a water tap nearby, leading to the eastern part of the city. This was the third news of a new tunnel in a month.
Various theories circulated about who betrayed the Kiefholzstrasse tunnel, but in the end everyone was convinced that the tunnel must have been betrayed by one of the couriers who constantly travelled between West and East Berlin. One of the imprisoned fugitives discovered to his astonishment that the police had repeatedly asked him about all the couriers, but not about Siegfried Usche. Since he had no way of passing on this knowledge, the mystery of the betrayal of the Kiefholzstrasse tunnel remained unexplained.
Naturally, the Stasi arrested the three Girrmann couriers and put them on public trial. The sentences were severe: twelve, eight and six years in prison. The Sendlers were released from prison after testifying in favour of the prosecution. When they returned to their house, they found that, although they had been given back their confiscated belongings, the most valuable items had disappeared. The same day, when they re-entered the house, shots rang out. Someone fired at them from the west side of the house through the wall. The police counted eleven shots. Someone must have been very well informed to know when the Sendlers were coming back into the house.
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Death by the Wall
On 17 August, it was a grey day and slightly dewy. Two young bricklayers, Peter Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik, were returning to work from a midday pint near the Wall when they suddenly realised they had a golden opportunity to escape to the West. They headed for a small factory just across the border, two blocks south of Checkpoint Charlie. They entered the factory and saw that all the windows facing the West were boarded up, except for one small one, which had barbed wire on it. They had actually intended to escape through the wall, which was only four metres from the factory, at night, but were frightened by the footsteps they heard in the factory yard. They decided to take the risk and escape in the middle of the afternoon.
They had already removed the barbed wire from the window when a worker entered the room, looked at them, turned around and left. They quickly climbed out of the window and ran towards the wall. Shots rang out. Kulbeik was quicker and had already climbed the wall and started to remove the barbed wire. He looked back and saw that Fechter was standing petrified at the foot of the wall, not moving. “Hurry up and climb”, he called to him and jumped off the wall into West Berlin.
Fechter acted as if he had realised that it all made no sense and that he was not capable of climbing a few metres of the wall. He clutched a narrow concrete support that protruded every few metres and waited. A hail of bullets rained down on him and he collapsed, howling in pain.
A young girl who had completed a Red Cross course happened to be near the wall at the time and wanted to come to the aid of the injured man. But the border guard shouted to her, “You can’t go in there! They’re shooting!” She shouted back, “Pigs, criminals!” And she asked passers-by to photograph the event. People began to gather on the west side of the wall, and they could clearly hear Fechter pleading for help, “Help me, why don’t you help me.”
The US command in Berlin has also been informed of the incident. It ordered the American guards, “Observe, but do not cross the border.” More and more people began to gather on the west side of the wall, shouting over the wall, “Pigs! Murderers!” A few journalists leaned ladders against the wall and took pictures of the wounded Fechter, who was moaning, twisted into two folds. Smoke bombs were thrown from the eastern side of the wall, trying to prevent filming.
Fifty minutes after Fechter was wounded, four police officers came to him, put him in an ambulance and took him to hospital. But he was already dead. In the afternoon, several thousand Berliners gathered at Checkpoint Charlie and shouted abuse at the East German police officers who stood motionless on the other side. The West German police, fearing a riot, tried to disperse them, but they started shouting at them too, and then at the American soldiers at the checkpoint: “Yanks, go home!”
By coincidence, a Soviet military bus drove by, taking soldiers to the change of guard at the war memorial in the British sector of Berlin. An avalanche of stones came crashing down on it, the whistles cracked and the Soviet soldiers hid under the seats. Only the British military police calmed the situation. The protests continued for several days, with hundreds of people laying flowers and erecting wooden crosses on the west side of the wall, where Fechter fell. The media did not lag behind, showing photographs of the injured man crying for help. According to East German reports, the shooting was “justified, decisive and correct, and the use of firearms was necessary”.
One of those disturbed by the death of Peter Fechter was Erich Schreiber, a 20-year-old East German border policeman, who was one of those who shot him. He was praised and promoted for this. However, in a letter to his girlfriend Erika, he wrote: “You ask me and want to know why I was promoted. This is a serious thing that doesn’t happen to people every day. I shot and killed a border violator who was trying to escape from the East to the West. Even if this upsets you and you don’t want to deal with the killer anymore, please don’t talk about it with anyone.” The letter was confiscated by the censors and the girl never got it.
Fechter was buried only ten days after his death. The authorities did their best to keep the date and place of burial unknown, but word spread quickly and hundreds of people gathered in the cemetery. Fechter’s sister was unable to attend the funeral because she had fled to the West herself a few years earlier and knew that she would be arrested on arrival. The family wanted a church funeral, but the authorities refused to allow it. Only a representative of the city’s funeral commission spoke at the funeral, saying, among other things, that Fechter’s decision was rash and stupid. After the funeral, the police quickly removed all flowers and wreaths from the grave.
Meanwhile, the digging of the Bernauerstrasse tunnel, which two Italians and a German remembered and which had already been reported to Stasi, resumed after a brief lull caused by the tunnel on Kiefholzstrasse. But now more and more people knew about it, and that was worrying. There were also technical problems. A large rock was encountered which could not be removed and had to be bypassed and the correct direction of excavation had to be redetermined.
The tunnel was already extending over the wall into East Berlin when they came across a water pipe dripping, causing puddles to accumulate on the floor of the tunnel. If the pipe had burst, plumbers from East Berlin would have come to fix it and discovered the tunnel. The leak got bigger and bigger and the puddles on the ground got bigger and bigger. A quick decision had to be made on how to proceed. They measured the length of the tunnel again and found that they were less than 30 metres from the house on Schönholzerstrasse on the other side of the wall. This house was not originally their target, but it was closer and therefore less digging would have been necessary. It did have a cellar, but they did not know what it was like, whether the floor was cement or not, they did not know any of the occupants and they did not have a key to the cellar.
A courier was sent to the other side, but returned with bad news. The police strictly controlled the street in front of the house, and anyone who wanted to enter had to show their ID. But there was no other way out, the risk had to be taken and the fugitives had to be informed by courier that the road to freedom would be changed and would lead from the five-storey house at Schönholzerstrasse No 7. The day of escape was set for 14 September.
Anderton was pleased. He already had a script in his head for a short documentary about “his” tunnel. It would describe all previous attempts to escape to the west side, including the first attempts to crawl through Berlin’s water pipes, jumping over barbed wire, crashing vehicles into walls and other bizarre escape attempts. Of course, the film’s climax was to be a sufficiently detailed shot of the construction of the Bernauerstrasse tunnel and – so he hoped – the successful breakthrough of a large number of East Germans.
He occasionally had to give some money to the bathing organisers, who used it to cover their costs and kept some for themselves as compensation for lost time. Anderton’s team now numbered five people, including the cameramen, and had already filmed a lot of material in secret. Also on 14 September, it had already taken up positions in a rented apartment near the tunnel entrance, and then secretly moved filming equipment and spotlights into the tunnel entrance.
Now the diggers already knew that all along Schonholzerstrasse, residents must lock the front doors of their houses at 8pm sharp. Anyone who wanted to enter had to unlock them with a key, which, of course, the migrants did not have. However, the four diggers still crawled through the tunnel under the cellar at number seven. They listened, but all was silent. They pushed the chisel up and found that the floor was made of clay, not cement. They quickly removed it and climbed down into the cellar. They were armed with two revolvers and a short automatic rifle. But where are they, are they really in the right place?
They had to step out of the basement into the lobby, hoping they wouldn’t meet any of the residents, and see which house number they were in. At 6 p.m., the occupants of number seven started to return from their jobs, talking and laughing among themselves, and then, at around 7 p.m., everything stopped.
In the meantime, the migrants were already gathering in the neighbouring streets, waiting for a signal to go to house number seven. They were signalled to leave by couriers who identified them by certain signs. They would quickly enter the lobby and then enter the cellar through the basement door, saying the word “Potemkin” as a sign that they were real fugitives. They immediately descended into the dark opening and began to crawl through the tunnel until they emerged onto Bernauerstrasse, dirty with earth and scratched by the obstacles. As soon as they arrived, they were blinded by the spotlights of an NBC camera crew. The first defectors were loaded into a van and driven to safety and away from the cameras.
The fugitives arrived at house No 7 in a precise order. Just before 8 p.m., two more women were supposed to arrive, but only one appeared, followed immediately by a man in a long leather coat with a hat on his head – a typical Stasi outfit. shouted the digger, drawing his revolver. The man stood there, surprised and frightened. He was one of those who had somewhere learned of the possibility of defection and had appeared unannounced.
At 8 pm, the housekeeper came downstairs and locked the door as usual. So far, only about half of the nearly 30 expected escapees have escaped. Someone will have to pluck up the courage to climb out of the cellar and use a screwdriver to unlock the front door again every time one of the latecomers comes home and locks it. The operation was in a hurry to be finished, but the defectors were still coming and several prams had already been piled up in the hallway by mothers who had decided to flee with their small children. So many prams in the lobby could have aroused suspicion among the residents, so they were quickly moved to the basement. Those who might not have made it to No 7 in time will have to wait for the next day, although the chances were very slim by then. The water was flooding the tunnel more and more, and the last to escape were crawling through the tunnel, which was already half submerged in water.
Two more escapees managed to escape the next day, even though the tunnel was almost flooded. They were unable to inform the others and the operation was over. Many of the diggers – mainly students – who took turns digging loudly protested the presence of NBC cameramen. The idea that someone was going to make a profit and money at the expense of an idealistic project was repugnant to them.
The successful escape of 29 East Germans to West Berlin was reported in the media four days after the event by the New York Post and the New York Times. A few days later, NBC organised a meeting between the defectors and the diggers in a local restaurant. Nearly 20 defectors and only a few diggers turned up. Others refused to attend the meeting out of protest. One refugee remarked: “It was humiliating to have to crawl through a tunnel to see the Americans filming the movie at the end.”
But the new inhabitants of West Berlin soon had to get used to their new way of life. They faced an uncertain future, with no jobs in the West and, for most of them, no relatives. Despite all the criticism of the communist system, it provided free medical care and a crib. Food in East Germany was poor and scarce, but it was cheap, as was housing. Now they had to get used to high prices and the realisation that they had to help themselves, and that was very upsetting.
Escape, we are betrayed
Escape attempts continued, of course. But these were isolated escapes, which often ended tragically. Rabbits often played an important role. At night, they increasingly appeared in the forbidden zone by the wall and sounded the alarm. Border guards paid full attention to them, allowing the fugitives to scale the wall.
Harry Seidel, of course, has not stood still in the meantime. He decided to dig another tunnel for a mass escape. It would start on Heidelbergerstrasse in the basement of the Krug beer hall, right where the tunnel in which the unfortunate Heinz Jercha lost his life started. Why bother looking for a new cellar when he could use the old one. Of course, the new tunnel had a different direction and ended up in the cellar of a fashionable tailor who wanted to escape to the West.
Seidel needed help in informing the defectors, so he turned to the Girrmann Group. And who did this group send to the meeting? None other than Siegfried Ushe. He, of course, immediately informed his agent at Stasi. But before they had organised themselves there, the tunnel was already finished. Seidel had helped the tailor and his wife to escape through it in the first place. He then returned to the beginning of the tunnel and sent two colleagues into the tunnel to help those – there were supposed to be about forty – who would also escape, but would arrive later. When the two men climbed out of the tunnel, Stasi agents were waiting for them with machine guns pointed at them. One managed to escape back, the other was shot and captured. They also arrested the first four fugitives who had already entered the house.
But this did not discourage Harry Seidel. In October 1962, he carried out the construction of the Kleinmachnow tunnel in the western part of the American sector. There was no high wall, just a tangle of fences and barbed wire. For a whole year, the three brothers had been digging a tunnel towards the house of the Schaller family, who wanted to escape to West Berlin. Since there were no houses on the west side near the border where they could start digging in the cellar, they simply put up a small wooden shack and attached a sign saying “Gardens” to it. This allowed the diggers to come and go without being heard.
Harry Seidel offered to help them, as the tunnel was so far advanced that those working in it were running out of air. The tunnel was not yet finished and the house was ten metres away when the defectors were informed that the escape was planned for 14 November. There was a rush and it was decided to exit the tunnel a few metres in front of the outer wall of the house. When the time came to escape, someone would climb out of the tunnel at night, knock on the door and invite the fugitives to enter. It was risky, but feasible, as border controls were less frequent there.
What no one knew was that the Stasi had already arrested the Schaller family and some of those it knew wanted to escape on 11 November. Under pressure, the Schallers told him what signals would signal that the escape could begin. After months of searching, the Stasi hoped that Seidel, who had caused them such trouble, would fall into their hands. At night, where he thought the tunnel was, he discreetly dug a hole, placed 2.5 kilograms of TNT explosive and an equal amount of RDX explosive in it, and covered it all with autumn leaves. There was so much explosive that it didn’t even matter that it wasn’t placed in the immediate vicinity of the tunnel. If necessary, the Stasi will blow up the tunnel to prevent the miners from escaping back to West Berlin. The police action was so important that it was personally approved by the head of the Stasi himself, Erich Mielke.
One of the couriers was nervous, so he sent his mother across the border to go to Schaller’s house to see if everything was OK. The mother knocked on the door and asked where the Schallers were. A stranger answered and told her that they were not at home (in fact, they were already in prison). On her return, the mother said that the Stasi was at the house, but her son told her that she was exaggerating. If this were true, the Stasi would have arrested her immediately. He did not inform Seidel of his mother’s suspicions.
On 14 November, night fell quickly and the temperature was just above zero. Meanwhile, the Stasi arrested everyone who approached the house and took them in for questioning. Harry Seidel was the first to step out of the tunnel, approach the house and knock on the door. But it was not one of the defectors who appeared, but a couple of burly policemen. They grabbed him, put a gun to his temple and took him to the exit of the tunnel. There were two brothers inside, and when one of them heard the phrase “Come out, we have to help the sick man” spoken loudly, he was about to climb out of the tunnel. The other brother stopped him, because it was agreed that they should always speak only in whispers. Did Seidel want to warn them?
Then Seidel shouted, “Run away, we are betrayed, the soldiers will shoot you!” The next moment, he felt someone hit him on the head with a hoof. He staggered, and the brothers began to crawl quickly back down the tunnel. Stasi realised it was time to set off the explosives. Schmeing, the commander of the police unit, shouted, “Blow it up!” At that moment, someone pointed to a young couple in love, tightly embraced, walking in the darkness near the place where the explosives had been planted. Schmeing shouted again that they should blow the tunnel. The policeman hesitated, then pressed the detonator. Nothing happened. He pressed again and again nothing happened. “The pigs have escaped,” the commander bellowed.
Schmeing wanted to find out why the explosives did not work. He pulled the wire out of the ground and followed it almost to the tunnel. It had been cut. One of the policemen had a bad conscience and did not want innocent people to die. But at least the Stasi had Seidel, who was in jail awaiting questioning. They interrogated him all night and accused him of as many as five tunnels, the digging of which he was supposed to have organised this year. “You’re in over your head”, he was threatened.
Censored film
Almost nobody knew about the 90 minutes of film tape made by NBC. NBC first secured the sponsorship of Gulf Oil and then started editing. But despite the secrecy, the news leaked out. Time magazine had already published it in its October issue and also stated that some people had been paid in exchange for the sale of the film rights. It was supposedly intended to cover the cost of the excavation, with the remainder being retained by the participants.
These were rather unpleasant insinuations. NBC initially denied them, as the White House wanted to know whether they had permission from the US occupation authorities to film. CBS was following the instructions of the US administration not to undertake such projects because they endangered the already tense relations between the West and the East. The Berlin Senate and the West German government also refused to show this obviously more or less propaganda film. It was understood that they were now all against it.
“Screening the film would be irresponsible and contrary to national interests and would complicate the situation in Berlin,” was the White House’s position. The media reported that the documentary, entitled The Tunnel, was likely to be screened at some point. The editors had to go to great lengths to obscure the faces of the tunnel diggers and those of the refugees who still had relatives in East Berlin.
The screening of the documentary was met with mixed reactions. The event was no longer topical, so there was not much interest in it. Nevertheless, the film won three Emmy Awards at home in May 1963; for Best Documentary, Best International Reportage and Documentary of the Year. It was never screened in its entirety in West Germany and was cut by more than half.
Two days after Christmas, the trial of Harry Seidel started, and the defections continued. In December, a third bomb shattered several metres of the wall and broke six windows in the American section. Another East German border guard defected to the West. A steel-plate bus carrying two German families crashed into a wall and eight adults and children escaped. The Stasi never found out who had sabotaged the explosion on the day Seidel was arrested. Some later claimed that it was the police commander Schmeing himself.
Contrary to what many people believe, Siegfried Ushe had nothing to do with the betrayal of the tunnel at Schaller’s house. He continued to work as a courier for the Girrmann Group and everyone trusted him. The Girrmann group was disbanded shortly afterwards, having been “intercepted” by Stasi agents, and Ushe continued his career elsewhere.
In 1964, Wolfgang Fuchs took over the role of the imprisoned Harry Seidel as “tunnelmeister” and started digging on the Bernauerstrasse again. His tunnel was the longest of all, but he missed his direction and looked out into a courtyard instead of a cellar. Nevertheless, 75 people escaped in the two days before the border guards arrived. Then someone opened fire and one policeman fell dead. In East Berlin, the “murder” was publicised.
The West German authorities have been working to free those who helped dig the tunnels and were caught and imprisoned in the process. This is how Harry Seidel found himself free in 1966. It is not known how much they had to pay for him, but it was probably many tens of thousands of marks. The break-ins continued until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Then the wall was demolished, and only a few remnants remain as mute testimony that people cannot be imprisoned behind walls.
