Authors: Frederick Taylor
The public and agonising nature of Fechter’s death left the GDR authorities seriously rattled. It led within days to instructions that
violators of the border who are wounded as a result of the use of firearms, are to be recovered
immediately and without delay
[emphasis in the original] and transported to the hinterland for first-aid treatment, so that this is not visible on the enemy side.
The number of paramedical teams on the border was to be increased and stretchers kept ready, one for each section of the Wall. Plans were drawn up so that any wounded escaper could be transported to hospital by the quickest and shortest route.
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In Peter Fechter, the Berlin Wall had found, not its first, but perhaps its greatest martyr. This was a shame from which the East German regime never quite recovered, despite its best, most cunning propaganda efforts.
If the Springer media empire had indeed become involved in helping with the costs of the 28 June tunnel (as well as providing a safe location
for its entrance), its role was to be trumped a few months later by the American broadcasting giant NBC. The network agreed to actually finance an entire escape tunnel in exchange for the exclusive film rights. It paid DM 50,000 ($12,500 then or roughly $100,000 in today’s purchasing power) to a group of tunnel builders including yet another colourful, complicated figure of the escape movement, Hasso Herschel.
Herschel, born in 1935 in Dresden, was a brawny, bearded adventurer and, like Harry Seidel, a champion athelete. In Herschel’s case the sport was swimming, but his background was otherwise very different. Seidel’s anti-Communism developed slowly, while Herschel had always been rebellious, running into problems with the East German authorities in his mid-teens. In 1953, he was arrested for participating in the June riots. Refused higher education because of his anti-Communist politics, like Rudi Dutschke he travelled to West Berlin to take his school-leaving examination. Back in the GDR, he was arrested in 1956 for possession of items such as a camera, a telescope and a typewriter purchased in West Berlin. He served four years in prison for breaking the ‘law for the protection of inner-German trade’. Herschel would later admit to being active as a minor agent of West German intelligence.
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After his release in 1960, having persuaded the authorities that he was a changed man, Herschel became a trainee engineer for the East German railways. But in October 1961, he crossed into West Berlin with a forged Swiss passport.
Herschel enrolled at university in West Berlin, but his main priority was to get his sister and her baby daughter to the West. He decided not to shave until he had managed to help them escape, and in consequence sported a beard of Old Testament proportions. It made him an instantly recognisable figure on the escape scene.
In 1962, Herschel was introduced to two Italians also studying in West Berlin, Domenico (‘Mimmo’) Sesta and his friend Gigi. Mimmo and Gigi had known each other since high school in Italy. Both were now students at the FU—Mimmo, of construction engineering, and Gigi, of graphic art—and since the border closure had become marginally involved in escape projects. Mimmo had a German girlfriend, Ellen. Their closest student friend, Peter, married with a child, had been trapped in East Berlin by the Wall. They decided to get him out, and
found a factory building in a side-street just off Bernauer Strasse that would suit the start of a tunnel. A similar search in East Berlin, aided by introductions from Peter’s circle of friends and family, supplied a convenient basement a hundred yards or so on the Eastern side.
The Italians and a few friends began to dig ‘Tunnel 29’ in May 1962. At first the going was very tough, because just here the ground was mostly clay. They could only pray they would soon get through to easier sandy terrain. However, progress remained slow. They found themselves short of both of muscle and money.
The first problem, of finding labour for the project, was relatively easily remedied. University friends brought them into contact with Hanno Herschel, who, despite his rigorous anti-Communist opinions, at first sight reminded Mimmo of Fidel Castro. The Italians were impressed by Herschel’s optimism and lack of self-pity, despite the four hard years he had spent in an East German jail.
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Even more impressively, Herschel came with a circle of his own. They also recruited the members of a group who had attempted a tunnel further north at Wollankastrasse. It had suffered from subsidence, betraying their route and almost burying them alive.
Money was a more difficult issue. They needed materials for shoring up the tunnel, which was to be almost 150 yards long. It was also conceived as a substantial and fairly roomy route that might, with luck, be usable for more than one escape project. All of this did not come cheap.
The money problem was solved in June in spectacular fashion. Hearing that a local film company was making a drama about a tunnel between East and West, they approached them and suggested someone might want to film a real escape. From there, one thing led to another. After arguments and contractual problems—they needed a substantial sum ‘up front’ so that they could finish the actual dig—a deal was done with the American television network NBC. Apart from the production team in Berlin, only NBC’s president in New York and his assistant knew the details. With an advance payment of DM 50,000, the tunnellers’ problems were over. Their financial ones, at least.
A total of forty-one different tunnellers, mostly students, took part in the excavation. The organisers piped in air and provided tools and food—even an underground rest and dining area—for the tunnellers.
The work was interrupted by severe flooding and took until September 1962. Once they were through to the East and digging beneath territory where the
Vopos
and the
Stasi
were active, dangers increased. They faced ‘an unpleasant surprise’, especially if the East Germans put listening equipment in the basements of houses on the border. They tried to minimise the noise, but this was always a potential hazard.
So was the possibility of betrayal. With so many involved, there was always the danger that
Stasi
spies would infiltrate the operation. One day, two men appeared and introduced themselves as Rolf and Dieter. The pair both had partners in the East, they said, and wanted to bring them over. Dieter even had a child. They had borrowed money and tried to dig a tunnel of their own with hired help, beginning in a deserted bakery just up the street. However, the task had proved too much. Looking around, they had chanced on Mimmo and Gigi’s tunnel.
The Italians and Herschel, who had now become joint project boss, decided there was something not quite right here. Rolf seemed OK, but they had doubts about Dieter. They agreed to let them join in, but under strictly controlled conditions.
Only after the Wall came down would they discover that it was, in fact, Rolf who had been the
Stasi
informer. His reason was quite straightforwardly emotional. He did in reality have a girlfriend in the East, whom he desperately wanted to help to escape. The
Stasi
picked him up when he was visiting her, put him in solitary confinement, and threatened him and the girl with long jail sentences if he did not agree to infiltrate and betray the escape movement.
The tunnellers had the wrong ‘guilty man’, but the effect was the same. In order to neutralise Dieter, they kept him and Rolf slightly apart from the others, and secretly changed the tunnel’s destination.
They had discovered another suitable basement, closer to the Wall—so much closer that by this time the tunnel had already passed it. They left Dieter and Rolf in their belief that the tunnel was going on to its original destination, in the Rheinsberger Strasse, while making plans within their trusted inner circle to break into the alternative one in Schönholzer Strasse.
On the all-important day of the breakthrough, Rolf and Dieter were put under guard and confined to the antechamber. Escapers on the
Eastern side would be given the address in Schönholzer Strasse, but the
Stasi
, if they were being kept informed by a traitor, would continue to await a breakthrough in Rheinsberger Strasse.
The escape itself was a sophisticated operation. With the help of NBC, they obtained short-range radios to communicate with each other, including the helpers at the Eastern entrance. The escapers would come through in timed groups. Mimmo’s West German girlfriend, Ellen, agreed to act as courier, appearing at various prearranged rendezvous in that part of East Berlin to alert the groups of escapers that the operation was ‘on’. This she did by coded messages. She herself would know by a white sheet hanging from a window on the western side of the Bernauer Strasse, also visible from East Berlin side, whether there were any problems in the tunnel. Several very tense hours passed until everyone got through. Ellen herself returned to West Berlin via the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint, like any normal tourist.
In some of the most moving and dramatic film footage of the Cold War, the NBC team filmed helpers advancing through the tunnel and then bringing the escapers to the West. The tunnel had sprung a slow leak after the breakthrough into the Schönholzer Strasse basement, so that the floor of the escape route was wet and muddy. One young woman—determined to arrive in the West looking her best—crawled through the sludge in a Dior dress.
The escapers arrived covered in mud and sand, overwhelmed by a mix of happiness, relief and shock. They wept and they laughed. Rolf and Dieter were held until all the escapers—Peter and his family, Herschel’s sister and niece, and the other fugitives, twenty-nine altogether—were safely through.
Then, and only then, was Rolf permitted to inform his girlfriend and Dieter’s wife of the plan. Both women, along with Dieter’s baby son, hurried to the Schönholzer Strasse and came through later that night. Rolf and Dieter disappeared almost immediately and the tunnellers never saw them again. Rolf knew all about the long reach of the
Stasi
and its unforgiving view of those who broke agreements.
There was just one disappointment. A water pipe had cracked during the breakthrough into the Schönholzer Strasse. The tunnel, which they
had intended to keep using for some time, filled with water and had reluctantly to be abandoned.
DM 20,000 of NBC’s money was spent on the actual tunnel. The rest was shared between the two Italians and Hasso Herschel. The sums of money involved, and the publicity provided by the NBC film, caused great controversy in the escape movement. The film accelerated the polarisation between idealistic volunteers and hard-headed, though not necessarily dishonest, professionals.
At the time, this split was not yet clear. While the Mimmo-Gigi-Herschel team were digging the final yards into East Berlin, a newspaper cutting of the dead Peter Fechter was fixed to the basement wall, just by the entrance, so that every digger beginning his shift would be reminded of why he was putting himself through this.
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For his part, for the next few years Herschel continued to organise escapes, and he took money from the escapers and their relatives in the West. He made a business out of it. But he delivered what he promised. And as for the money, when Burkhart Veigel decided to incorporate a compartment for refugee-smuggling into an American Cadillac, and he ran low on funds, it was Herschel who helped him out.
As 1962 became 1963 and then 1964, the tunnelling continued, but outside in the wider world things were changing. The crisis atmosphere that followed the building of the Wall slowly gave way to a kind of sullen acceptance.
After incidents such as the shooting of Private Huhn, the Allies began to put pressure on the West Berlin authorities to crack down on the rescue organisations. The final straw—and arguably the end of the ‘heroic’ period of escaping—came in the autumn of 1964 with the ‘Tunnel 57’ incident.
‘Tunnel 57’ was built by a man named Wolfgang Fuchs, who had himself escaped from the East with his wife and child shortly after 13 August. Fuchs, like many escaped Easterners a passionate anti-Communist, dedicated himself to helping others reach the West. For his big tunnel project, three years later, he made careful plans, raised money, and gathered a group of enthusiasts, mainly students from West Berlin, who were keen to help. He also hired a mining engineer to make sure the tunnel was properly shored up.
Fuchs’s project seemed to be the consummation of all the technical and organisational developments since 13 August. Like the ‘Tunnel 29’ group, he solicited money from media organisations to help with up-front costs, including DM 15,000 from German journalists, $2,000 each from the French magazine
Paris Match
and the London
Daily Mail
, and a price of $370 per picture from the press agencies AP and UPI. Only recently has it also become known that Fuchs received DM 30,000 from a secret fund controlled by the Bonn ‘Ministry for All-German Affairs’. The money was channelled through a student group connected with the ruling CDU party.
30
Work began in the spring of 1964. Fuchs’s team went under the Wall from a damp bakery cellar in the French sector, near the Bernauer Strasse, and dug 150 metres under the border to the bathroom of a flat in a block in the Strelitzer Strasse. The spacious tunnel was completed after seven months of back-breaking work. The metre-wide opening in the bath-room floor on the Eastern side was concealed by a packing-case, which could be pushed aside to enter the tunnel.
Many of the escapers were from provincial East Germany. The first of them were summoned by a telegram that informed them: ‘Aunt Emma dead stop expecting you immediately stop Gisela’.
At Friedrichstrasse station they were met by a courier, with whom they exchanged a password. They were escorted to the Strelitzer Strasse. There the courier got in contact via walkie-talkie with an observer on the Western side, who was watching the guards’ movements at the Wall. They waited anxiously for the moment when they could enter the building where the tunnel entrance was situated without being observed.