Authors: Frederick Taylor
Once the last of the escapers entered the tunnel, Wohlfahrt would wait a few extra minutes, in case of latecomers. Then he would cross to the sewer entrance and drag the manhole cover back until it fell into position and everything looked normal. Afterwards he would drive the car to some out-of-the-way spot and park it ready for the next night. Finally he would return to West Berlin on foot via the checkpoint.
The first day of the operation began after dark on 8 October 1961. Dieter Thieme, the originator of the scheme, watched from the upper landing of an apartment block just on the Western side of the border, where he had a view of the East Berlin factory yard. Hour by hour, Thieme watched the groups enter the sewer. For four nights everything went perfectly. At least 134 escapers made it through, according to the highly informal lists kept by the student helpers. Veigel thinks it was actually considerably more, because accurate accounting was not a high priority, and proper lists were made only on the final two nights.
After they had made it through, the muck-encrusted refugees were piled into a Volkswagen bus and driven to one of the FU’s student hostels. There they could finally strip and shower. Afterwards they were given fresh clothes. At a time of their choosing, they would report for registration as refugees at Marienfelde. They were told to use fictional cover stories to explain their escape, since it was known that the
Stasi
had agents in the camp administration.
It was on the fifth night of the operation, 12 October 1961, that something went wrong. Badly wrong.
Midnight had arrived. The last of the escapers were on their way through. Wohlfahrt had replaced the manhole cover and left. Another successful night’s work, it seemed.
Then Thieme, watching from his lookout on the Western side, suddenly froze. The student leader saw an unfamiliar vehicle race into
the factory yard and squeal to a halt. A squad of armed
Vopos
filed out and began flinging up all the manhole covers they could find. They then stood with their machine-pistols trained on the openings.
The
Vopos
made no immediate attempt to go down into the sewer tunnel. The horrified Thieme, of course, had no time to divine their ultimate intentions. He hurried down to the Western sewer entrance. He had to warn the members of the reception committee, who would still be crouching by the grille, ready to help through the last of the escapers. The grille lay on the Eastern side of the border. Anyone discovered there would be liable for immediate arrest or worse.
Fortunately, however, the last of the escapers was already safely through and the helpers were preparing to climb out on to the Western side. Reassured, Thieme returned to his lookout. The
Vopos
stayed there until six the following morning, still waiting by the open manholes. They never dared go down into the sewer.
So the most successful of the sewer escape routes was closed. Whether it was betrayed, or whether the
Vopos
simply observed suspicious activity and decided to take action, is still uncertain. Thieme found out from his contacts in West German intelligence that the East Germans installed a much sturdier, heavily reinforced grille in the sewer tunnel, one that no hack-saw could reduce.
This kind of reinforcement by the East Germans seems to have been general after mid-October. There were rumours that at least one more small group had made its way through a network of storm drains connecting Reinickendorf, in the French sector of West Berlin, with the East Berlin suburb of Pankow, but even so well informed an escape organiser as Veigel has no precise information on the matter. Like the ‘Girrmann Group’ organisation, such operators kept quiet about their routes, in order to foil
Stasi
agents operating in the Western welfare and registration agencies.
In these early days, the organisers also did not talk to the press. But some of their clients did. Once in the West, some of the East German escapers had a tendency to brag about their success. ‘Yes, the press did wreck some of our escape routes,’ Thieme would later tell an interviewer. ‘But most of the damage was done by the refugees themselves. After us, the deluge, was the attitude. And there’s always an urge to play the hero’.
7
In the meantime, towards the end of September 1961 the ‘Girrmann Group’ had also completed its first tunnel. The sandy Berlin soil was fairly easily worked, but correspondingly loose. Because of this, tunnels also required proper support, props and roofs to protect those digging below.
This first tunnel was just over twenty-five yards long, starting from the basement of a shed on land adjoining the Schönholz goods station, just inside West Berlin. It ran directly under the border into the East Berlin district of Pankow, more precisely into the Pankow municipal cemetery. The Eastern entrance lay beneath the memorial slab of a conspicuously well-tended grave. That autumn, twenty-three East Berliners found their way through this slightly macabre portal into the West over a period of two weeks. Then the
Stasi
was tipped off by a double agent in West Berlin. The East Germans set up an observation post. When two young East Berlin women tried to enter the tunnel on 29 December, they were arrested and imprisoned.
But passports, not tunnels, were what the ‘Girrmann Group’ was famous for. Tunnels were exciting, dramatic, and caught the public imagination, but considering the effort, expense and risk involved, they were rarely as cost-effective as other escape methods—so long as those methods could be used.
In the months after 13 August 1961, the ‘Girrmann Group’ helped some 5,000 trapped East Germans to attain a new life in the West. Their efforts began as an informal attempt to enable FU students trapped behind the Wall to continue their studies in the West. By the beginning of 1962, the organisation had become something much bigger. Word had spread, and the ‘Girrmann Group’ now accepted any would-be escapers referred to them by their network of contacts in the East.
Forged or altered documents were the preferred method. They seemed to be almost foolproof, and until January the organisation lost not a single escaper or helper. Veigel recalls bringing through six refugees at a time in this way.
This first great phase ended quite abruptly on 6 January 1962. On that day, Burkhart Veigel went East yet again on his West German passport. In East Berlin he met up with an escaper couple, to whom he gave two
foreign passports in the usual way. Then, as they waited in line at Friedrichstrasse station to undergo the border formalities, the couple were suddenly singled out and taken away by
Vopos
. The train they had been planning to catch left for the West. Veigel waited, hoping that his two escapers would return shortly. When they did not, he reluctantly obeyed the rules of the escape business and climbed aboard the next S-Bahn. Within minutes, he was safely on the other side of the Wall.
Later, Veigel heard that the escaper couple had immediately confessed everything to the
Stasi
. The train he took was the last to leave before the East German police shut down the S-Bahn and sealed off the station. Had Veigel waited just a few more minutes, he would have been caught like a rat in a trap.
The sudden disaster was simply explained. That same day, 6 January, the East Berlin authorities introduced a new measure for foreigners. Henceforth, all Westerners crossing the border into East Berlin had an entry permit inserted into their passports. This was given up when the visitor returned to the checkpoint before travelling back to West Berlin. So, anyone attempting to leave without such a permit in their passport could not have entered East Berlin earlier that day, and therefore must be an East German escaper. It was similar to the measure they had enforced for West German nationals back at the end of September.
Also in January 1962, the East Germans began to construct a road behind the border barrier, which gave a free run for guards, their vehicles and attack dogs, and also the beginnings of a ‘free-fire zone’. To set foot in this area immediately criminalised the intruder, making them fair game for the heavily armed
Grepos
.
A gradual but inexorable tightening of the rules-West Germans were soon subjected to strict visa requirements when visiting East Berlin, making the passport route harder still—was followed by systematic physical reinforcement of the border.
In this complex and fast-moving game of cat-and-mouse, which would continue for years to come, the ingenuity and ruthlessness of both sides would be tested to the limit. And perhaps ultimately there could only be one winner.
The Ulbricht regime, after all, commanded the big battalions.
By the early spring of 1962, Veigel had become a known quantity to the East German security forces.
Stasi
documents show that on 24 March he was added to their list of key escape helpers. ‘Active combating’ of this prolific and daring facilitator was ordered, and a warrant issued for his arrest.
The business no longer even remotely resembled a student prank. The East launched a barrage of insults and atrocity accusations against the West and the tunnellers and escape facilitators alleged to be its agents. The reality was, of course, more complicated, and would rapidly become more complex yet, but Ulbricht’s regime wasted no opportunity to label Veigel and his comrades as terroristic ‘saboteurs’ and heartless ‘traders in human beings’.
A significant boost to the East German authorities’ propaganda campaign against the Western escape organisations came on 23 May 1962. Private Peter Göring of the First East German Border Brigade, aged twenty-one, was on duty in the vicinity of the Invalidenfriedhof cemetery, hard by the Spandau Ship Canal. A figure was spotted scaling the border barrier. By the time the
Grepos
organised themselves, the escaper had crossed the last barrier and launched himself into the canal. On the far bank lay West Berlin. Despite warning cries and shots, he kept on swimming.
The fugitive was a young high-school student from the East German city of Erfurt named Walter Tews. He had come to Berlin specifically in order to escape, improvising his planned route from a tourist guide he bought at the station on arrival. He harboured an absolute, if perhaps naïve, determination to reach the West. Walter was also, though at 1.80 metres (5' 10") very tall for his age, only fourteen years old.
When he had swum two-thirds of the way across, Walter was hit by automatic fire and seriously wounded. Despite this, he managed to pull himself out of the water on the far side and find some protection in an alcove in the canal wall. He was now inside the British sector of West Berlin. Several armed West Berlin policemen had arrived in the vicinity and made efforts to retrieve the boy from his hiding place.
East Germany’s border forces were allowed to shoot at escapers, but with two provisos: no firing on women and children, or on to Western territory. Both rules were immediately broken. Despite his unusual
height, Walter was a minor. He had also reached West Berlin soil. However, he continued to come under fire from the Eastern side. So did the West Berlin cops trying to rescue him. They accordingly fired back.
At last the shooting stopped. A civilian was able to dangle a rope for Walter to grab. They hauled the desperately injured teenager to safety and got him to hospital. By a miracle, young Walter Tews survived, but the crippling effects of the wounds he suffered during his swim to freedom remain with him decades later.
8
Meanwhile, on the far side, the Border Brigade was about to gain its first martyr. Göring slumped down during the final exchange of fire and was found to have suffered three wounds: a superficial wound on his right hand, a bullet through his left shoulder, and a lethal ricochet that entered near his left kidney. He was dying. Another guard had been hit in the thigh, but was never in danger.
The East German regime seized its propaganda opportunity quickly and ruthlessly. Private Göring was granted a state funeral with full honours. Streets, military units and barracks, and schools were named after him all over the GDR, a process that continued until well into the 1980s. He was posthumously promoted to sergeant. He became part of the teaching in schools and at FDJ meetings.
The week after Göring’s death, a poem authored by a ‘First Lieutenant Grau’ appeared in an East German weekly. Two verses give the tone:
The foe’s deceits you did despise,
To us and to your oath stayed true,
Saw right through his barefaced lies,
So like a coward he murdered you.
You gave your all, beyond persistence,
You sacrificed for our good sake
Your hope-filled, precious young existence,
You fell for our proud republic.
9
This doggerel would often be reprinted and anthologised in the years ahead.
The fourteen-year-old boy whom the martyr tried to kill is, of course, not mentioned either in the poem or in accounts published in the GDR.
The official version was that Göring and his comrades had been lured into a trap by ‘terrorists’ and treacherously attacked in a ‘staged border provocation’. ‘West Berlin troops…carried out an armed ambush with American weapons against border security forces of the German People’s Police,’ thundered the statement. The Easterners had fired not a single shot against Western territory. East Germany’s Chief Prosecutor offered a reward of 10,000 marks (West) for the capture of those responsible.
In fact, both a secret report by the East Germans’ own investigators and the enquiries of the Western police showed two things. First, the East Germans had fired off far more bullets than the Westerners—a total of 128 against 28. And second, against the specific orders of his superior, Göring had left cover, looking for a better position to deliver a kill-shot against the would-be escaper. He had thereby exposed himself to fire from the Western side. His own weapon was set to ‘automatic fire’.