Authors: Frederick Taylor
After Göring, the authorities created what were in essence shrines to ‘murdered’ border guards, often preserving the man’s room in his barracks just as he had left it, complete with family photographs, possessions and so on. Groups of recruits, schoolchildren, and youth-group members would be given tours of such memorial sites. A guide would recite all the anti-Western catch-phrases, and rail against the ‘provocations’ of the West German and NATO warmongers, who had cut this young man down in his German democratic prime.
Peter Göring was the first of the Berlin border martyrs with whom the East German regime attempted to construct a myth of the ‘noble defender of the border’ and to establish a kind of macabre
esprit de corps
among the troops themselves.
This latter task was not necessarily easy. From documents recently uncovered, it is clear that Göring himself was among the keenest servants of the state, straining at the leash to do its bidding. Others were not so eager, their families even less so. The wife of a master sergeant from the First Border Brigade was reported as telling him, after she read the news of Göring’s death: ‘Under no circumstances should you sign up for another year’s service’. The woman was summoned to the company commander for a ‘clarifying conversation’.
10
Of twenty-five soldiers of the East German border forces who died in Berlin during the Wall’s existence, almost half—eleven—were actually killed by escaping colleagues (including, in one case, a fleeing Soviet soldier). Unlike most other fugitives, such escapers were fully armed and able to return fire.
Nineteen-year-old officer cadet Peter Böhme, in training at a camp in Potsdam, deserted on 16 April 1962 with a comrade. They took pistols and ammunition, and for two days succeeded in evading a sizeable manhunt. On 18 April the two young men tried to cross the fortified border into West Berlin, sneaking from the Potsdam suburban railway station of Griebnitzsee on to a small triangle of land belonging to the Western district of Wannsee. When challenged, they opened fire. A shoot-out ensued. Böhme died, while his companion, Cadet Gundel, was arrested.
The leader of the patrol that had challenged the fugitive deserters was shot and died soon after. Jörgen Schmidtchen, was killed by a bullet from the ‘bandits’ as an official East German report described the desperate young men trying to flee the workers’ paradise.
11
Although this killing of a border guard in the course of his duties preceded that of Peter Göring, Schmidtchen was not hailed as a ‘martyr’ in the same way—perhaps because the circumstances of his death, involving the attempted escape by two disillusioned GDR soldiers, officer cadets into the bargain, would have raised too many uncomfortable questions.
In January 1962, the East German government finally introduced conscription. Until 13 August it had not dared to do so, for fear of unleashing a tidal wave of draft-dodgers, fleeing Westwards to avoid induction. Now there was nowhere else to go, compulsory military service could be imposed on the population. The law came into force in April 1962, and the first compulsory recruits were marched into their training barracks without delay.
Previously, recruitment was achieved by enormous social and emotional pressure. In schools and factories, staff and visiting recruiters did their best to get boys to sign up. FDJ organisers were given targets for sign-ups among their young people. There were financial incentives for volunteers, and the promise of preferential treatment in civilian life if a young man signed to ‘do his bit’.
Once a youth had succumbed, he was the state’s to do with as it wished. At eighteen, Hagen Koch, for instance, had applied to join the East German navy, but found himself, so he recounts, blackmailed instead into joining the
Stasi’s
military arm, the Felix Dzerzhynski Regiment. And so he ended up at Checkpoint Charlie with a pot of paint and a brush on that extraordinary day in August 1961.
Another young East German of approximately the same age refused to accede to the blandishments of the recruiters who came to his high school in Luckenwalde, around forty kilometres south of Berlin. The boy did more than just that, in fact. He stood up in school assembly and gave his reasons, then wrote a letter to his school principal in which he proclaimed: ‘My mother did not bear us, her four sons, for war. We hate war and want peace.’ The boy, a high-flying student and prize-winning athelete, found his marks automatically reduced. His ambition was to become a sports reporter. It was now made clear that without army service he would not gain entry to the course at Leipzig University that would enable him to follow his chosen career.
Instead, the boy enrolled as an external student at the Tempelhof High School in West Berlin. For two years he commuted between home and city, studying for his
Abitur
, the university qualifying examination he was denied in the East. On Friday 11 August 1961, at twenty-one now a young man, he set off again from Luckenwalde. His brother took him on his motor bike as far as Teltow, the beginning of the S-Bahn line. From there he travelled to West Berlin. Two days later, the border was sealed.
The young man’s name was Rudi Dutschke. Marooned in West Berlin, he became not a sports reporter but a political scientist at the FU. He remained a Marxist, although not of the Ulbricht kind. Later, in the mid-1960s, Dutschke rose to international prominence as the most famous and charismatic leader of West Germany’s radical student revolt.
12
Before the Wall, there had been morale problems and desertions in the police and the army. It got no better after the border was sealed. Scores, and eventually hundreds, deserted to the West, often in pairs and small groups.
Some fled on the spur of the moment. One
Grepo
platoon commander, stationed on the suburban part of the border, who fled West with a
comrade in December 1961, described the foxhole conversation that preceded the escape:
As we were lying there, he suddenly said to me: ‘What would you do if I were to clear off?’ My answer was: ‘Well, there’s only one thing I’ll say to you—as a Christian I can’t shoot at another human being.’ So straight away he said, ‘I’m clearing off. Do you want to come with me?’
After some hesitation, the platoon commander went with him. They made their way over the fence and through the barbed wire, hurling themselves on to the soaking ground whenever a searchlight swept the area. They stumbled into a garden on West Berlin soil and introduced themselves to the surprised householder, who gave them each a cigarette and called the police to come and fetch them.
13
Things got so bad that a report to the Politburo suggested that there were young men who joined the border police precisely so that they could get close to the Wall and have the opportunity to flee. Supposedly unreliable types were dismissed from the border units in December, on account of close family contacts in the West, or criminal records, or subversive utterances such as ‘glorifying conditions in West Germany’. The mere fact of having visited West Berlin before 13 August was often enough, especially if it involved ‘going to the cinema there and attending dances’.
14
After every major desertion, anxious discussions went on, trying to discern why this individual or group had ‘betrayed’ their duty. ‘West contacts’ were often blamed, plus seductive offers from the West’s ‘traders in human beings’.
In one case, a guard’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend, who lived in West Berlin, stood every day on her side of the border and pleaded with him to join her. Finally, he went ‘over the wire’. Contrary to their indoctrination, which explicitly forbade conversation with people on the Western side, other guards from the lad’s regiment had chatted to his girl across the border. They kept her informed about when and where he would be on duty. Among these young men, personal and group loyalty obviously took precedence over military duty. ‘His comrades,’ the investigation document concluded plaintively, ‘had not identified, in this harmless young girl, the class enemy’.
15
Searches of young deserters’ rooms would reveal mind-warping audiotapes of Western rock ‘n’ roll, letters from friends in West Berlin or West Germany, or in one case tell-tale photographs of Elvis Presley plastered all over the bedroom wall.
16
Sometimes, however, the weak links just couldn’t be predicted. Major Bruno Krajewsky was a senior officer of the East German Second Border Brigade. In fact, he was a very powerful man, whose signature could for years be found on disciplinary documents. A pre-war Communist and member of the SED, the major seemed the perfect, politically reliable People’s Policeman. Officially entitled ‘Sub-Departmental Leader for the Investigation of Special Occurrences’ he basically acted as his regiment’s troubleshooter and enforcer. It was Krajewsky they called in to investigate things that went wrong, including attempted desertions and successful escapes to the West. It was his job to write reports recommending disciplinary measures and proposing how further unfortunate incidents be prevented.
On 7 December 1962, however, the gamekeeper decided to turn poacher. In the small hours of a gloomy winter’s morning, the man who had spent the past couple of years doing nothing but checking for flaws in the border defences, appeared quietly on the dark eastern shore of one of the border lakes (the exact location is not mentioned) along with his wife, three children, and another family group. They all clambered silently into a boat and launched themselves across the lake.
Krajewsky had chosen this night not just for its midwinter darkness but because the lake was covered in thick, drifting fog. As the incident report commented:
K. knew his way around the border area very well and knew that our patrol boats were stuck fast because of fog-formation. In contrast to the Western patrol boats, they are (as he also knew) not fitted out with radar…
17
The major, his family and friends rowed quietly—very quietly—across the lake through the fog and made it to West Berlin, where they reported to the astonished police. The Westerners thought nobody could get past
the Eastern patrol boats. And perhaps the supposedly ultra-loyal Major Krajewsky was one of the few who could.
The report on this expert escape was forwarded to Chairman Ulbricht himself. It blamed the influence of Major Krajewsky’s wife, who had worked in the export department of a chemical works and got a bit too close to some Western clients.
Disappointingly, the big boss’s reaction goes unrecorded.
With the relatively simple passport-substitution route closed off by new visa regulations, and barriers everywhere strengthened against all but the very heaviest of vehicles, the numbers of escapes dropped, but they became ever more professional.
One route was the so-called ‘Scandinavian Tour’. This used rail connections that still ran from the Ostbahnhof in East Berlin to the Baltic ports of Warnemünde and Sanitz. From there ferries crossed to Denmark, which was NATO territory.
Couriers would supply escapers in East Berlin with non-German Western passports, plus tickets and travel documentation and even luggage, to make it look as if they were foreign travellers who had started out from Zoo station in West Berlin, then changed trains for Copenhagen. Escapers would mingle with the crowds on the platform at Ostbahnhof, exactly as if this were the case. Within a few hours they were safely in Denmark. From there they could easily travel to West Germany.
The ‘Scandinavian Tour’ ran successfully for a few months before being betrayed by a
Stasi
agent codenamed ‘Franz Fischer’ who had successfully gained the trust of the ‘Girrmann Group’, even operating successfully as a courier. Escapers and couriers arrested on that last ‘tour’ ended up with heavy jail sentences. The
Stasi
agent who sealed their fates was an affable Greek medical student at the FU named Georgis Raptis. This revelation, decades later, astonished all who knew him. For years afterwards, Girrmann had continued to describe the Greek as ‘a terrific guy’.
18
With all the relatively easy ‘passport routes’ now closed, the time between summer 1962 and summer 1964 was the era of the tunnellers. The underground routes were expensive, labour-intensive, and dangerous for other reasons apart from the usual ones. The Wall crossers risked being shot as they fled. The swimmers of lakes or canals ran the extra risk
of drowning. The tunnellers, however, risked live burial. The sandy Berlin sub-soil was fairly easily workable, but liable to crumble. And if an inadequately supported tunnel collapsed or subsided, even if the tunnellers survived, there would be tell-tale sinkage and slippage on the surface that would mean instant discovery by vigilant border patrols.
There were two main kinds of tunnel. The short, shallow and narrow one, which could be dug in a few days, and the longer, larger, deeper, more durable one.
The first kind was favoured by Harry Seidel, a former East German champion cyclist who had left for the West after being forced to take performance-enhancing drugs. Seidel developed a passionate loathing of the regime he had abandoned. He was in the West when the border was sealed, but returned through the wire several times in the weeks after 13 August to get family and friends out. After being arrested on the border, and then escaping, Seidel decided to build tunnels instead.
A colourful and charismatic character, super-fit, strong and courageous, the then 22-year-old Seidel was a true working-class East Berliner. He enjoyed strong personal contacts with people on the other side of the border, which made finding would-be escapers easier and theoretically more secure. He quickly became famous for his exploits—and would pay a very heavy price.