Authors: Frederick Taylor
The route was known as ‘Tunnel 57’ because of the number of people who escaped through it. Like the September 1962 tunnel, it was supposed to provide a semi-permanent escape route that could be used over a long period of time.
However, its use came suddenly and disastrously to an end. Shortly after midnight on 5 October 1964, a party of helpers from the Western side surfaced in the courtyard of Strelitzer Strasse 55. They were confronted with two desperate-looking men who begged to be allowed to go West. When the helpers agreed, the men said they had to fetch a
comrade who was waiting outside. No sooner had they left than a group of armed
Grepos
and soldiers appeared. ‘Tunnel 57’ had been betrayed.
The West Berliners retreated to the tunnel entrance. One of the armed tunnel guards, Christian Zobel, fired a number of shots to cover their flight, and the East Germans fired back. In the darkness and the confusion, one of the East Germans was hit and tumbled to the ground.
The
Vopos
pursued the West Berliners into the tunnel. Shots were again exchanged, but all the Westerners made it back to the French sector.
The man Zobel hit had died of his wounds. He was not a border guard but a regular soldier by the name of Egon Schultz, and he left behind a wife and children. Zobel himself was plagued by conscience about the death, and others shared his discomfort. Only after 1989, when the world gained access to East German government reports from the time, was it revealed that Schultz had, in fact, been killed by his own comrades. Zobel had indeed wounded him in the shoulder, and he fell to the ground, but it was East German bullets that actually killed Schultz—as he struggled back to his feet.
The East Germans nevertheless made Egon Schultz another ‘martyr’ to Western thuggery. They waged a long campaign to have his ‘murderer’ turned over to GDR justice.
Nineteen sixty-four was not 1961. The East German propaganda campaign achieved some success. The shooting led to widespread disquiet and to a campaign on the Western side against confrontational escape projects, where weapons might be used. There was suddenly talk of the money that had changed hands, of mercenary motives on the escape helpers’ part, and of careless use of firearms. The newspaper and magazine articles were no longer so flattering. Fuchs, it was claimed, had made ‘hundreds of thousands of marks’. The two Italians who had been paid by NBC for ‘Tunnel 29’ the year before had been able, one source claimed, to buy a hotel on the proceeds. Tunnel guards were portrayed as gun-toting toughs.
The tunnelling teams were no longer the darlings of the Western media. They learned—as one of them put it—‘for the first time…the meaning of character assassination’.
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It was also clear by this time that the escape organisations themselves
were heavily infiltrated by the
Stasi
. The rate of betrayals and subsequent arrests of escapers and helpers was becoming too great to justify the benefit.
Indirect methods were called for, and they were found.
The reinforcement of the Wall was also a response to numerous spectacular escapes by individuals.
There was still room for individual enterprise. In 1962 Hans Meixner was a 21-year-old Austrian student in West Berlin. His foreign nationality enabled him to visit East Berlin much more freely than a West German or West Berliner.
Invited to a wedding in the East, Meixner met Margit, a young woman who worked as a clerk for the East Berlin city government. They fell for each other. Being optimistic young people, they applied for permission to marry and for Margit to join Hans in the West. The request was unsuccessful. As were successive, increasingly desperate pleas to various GDR authorities.
Luckily Hans was able to drive into East Berlin whenever he wanted. Returning from one such trip in the spring of 1963 via Checkpoint Charlie, he saw how a young woman in a sports car was given a hard time by the
Grepos
. Her vehicle was so low-slung that when she accidentally let go of the handbrake the sleek vehicle almost slipped under the heavy wooden barrier blocking the exit to West Berlin.
The incident set Meixner thinking. On his next trip, he managed to mark the exact height of that barrier. He then set about looking for a car that would go under it, if only by a couple of inches. Finally he found one—a British Austin Healey Sprite. As a bonus, it had a detachable windscreen.
Meixner rented the Sprite for a week, tested it on the East Berlin run and confirmed that without the windshield it could pass beneath the barrier pole. He practised for hours on an empty lot in West Berlin, swerving between oil drums and round piles of bricks, to simulate the four-feet-high walls placed at intervals across the road at Checkpoint Charlie, just before the crucial final barrier. Once through the border inspection on the Eastern side, cars still had to slow right down and weave in and out of these obstacles. Then, of necessity going slowly, they
reached the horizontal barrier. Only once this was raised by the Eastern border guards and the car was actually in West Berlin proper could the driver accelerate away at normal speed.
When Meixner finally satisfied himself that he could perform this ‘slalom’ manoeuvre at speed, he drove over to East Berlin. He spent the daylight hours instructing Margit and her mother, who was coming with them, on what to do. After dark, he squeezed first his fiancée and then her mother into the space behind the seats. It was unnecessary that their presence withstand an inspection—only that they not be visible to the casual eye. Finally, he drove back to Checkpoint Charlie.
The little sports car was routinely waved into the inspection bay at the barrier. Meixner braced himself. He had already removed the detachable windscreen. He remained outwardly co-operative until the last moment—and then suddenly hit the accelerator. Instead of entering the bay, Meixner spun the wheel to the left and headed for the concrete obstacles.
Despite frantic shouts from the guards, Meixner swung his way among the barriers, left and right. Luckily both the car and its hidden cargo stayed in one piece and on course. He emerged safely—his worry had been that he might meet a car coming the other way—and accelerated towards the heavy barrier, which funnelled into a final, buswidth concrete-walled conduit leading into the West. It was the last test. He held the steering wheel steady, pointed the car at the barrier and pushed the accelerator to its limit, then ducked. The Austin Sprite passed beneath the barrier with just a crucial couple of inches’ clearance.
Within seconds, Meixner was through into West Berlin. No time for the guards to open fire.
The astonishing break-out by the young Austrian and his two passengers was one of the most famous individual escapes of the time. And like most such feats, its very success ensured that no one could repeat it. Within days, the East Germans had placed double metal barriers across the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint so that no future escaper could pass through, no matter how low-slung their vehicle.
More common than such spectacular but idiosyncratic stunts was the building of secret compartments into trucks and regular cars, in which passengers could be smuggled to the West. Those driving back into
West Berlin from the East were automatically required to open up their car boots and bonnets. A compartment had to be fitted out so that only a thorough inspection, if necessary a dismantling of the entire vehicle, could be guaranteed to find the concealed fugitive. In Burkhart Veigel’s converted Cadillac (which was painted a different colour and provided with different plates and licence documents for each trip) the secret compartment could be opened only by a complicated process involving button-pushing, lever-pulling, opening the front driver’s door at an angle of thirty degrees—and tuning the radio to an exact, pre-programmed frequency. The area between the dashboard and the engine was a favourite, as was that behind or under the rear seat. In the end, the success of such methods brought on the use of X-ray devices.
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By autumn 1964, the border barrier that divided Berlin was generally known as ‘the Wall’. This was not entirely accurate. There existed, in fact, a total of just fifteen kilometres (less than ten miles) of wall in Berlin, mostly consituting the city-centre sections.
There were 165 guard towers, in the early years constructed of wood, and 232 bunkers and firing/observation posts. The other 130 kilometres of barriers, including those bordering on the provincial GDR, consisted basically of barbed-wire fencing. The border strip was not yet comprehensively covered by searchlights, nor was the access road parallel to the strip continuous. The use of mines and self-triggering shooting devices, which killed and maimed many on the so-called ‘inner-German border’ between the Federal Republic and the GDR, was forbidden in Berlin for fear of international protests.
All the same, even before further major engineering work was undertaken in the mid to late 1960s, the ‘Wall’ (even if it was mostly still a fence) constituted a formidable barrier, one that even professionals found it hard enough to get the better of. And, as it got harder, so the price of going West went up.
The unhappy ‘Tunnel 57’ of October 1964 was probably the last ‘not-for-profit’ escape project in which refugees were not expected to pay. Thereafter, money was asked for and given.
Hasso Herschel, in his benign enough adventurer’s way, was a symbol of the new, profit-based escape fraternity. Whether it was a matter of
digging a tunnel or converting a car to carry hidden passengers, escape was becoming a time- and capital-intensive process.
Slowly, the student idealists and the passionate anti-Communists started to charge an economic rate for their services, or they gradually left the scene. Burkhart Veigel continued until 1967 and then returned to his medical studies. After qualifying, he decided to put some distance between himself and the
Stasi
, and left West Berlin for Stuttgart in West Germany, where he built up an outstanding reputation as an orthopaedics specialist. Reinhard Furrer, another prominent escape helper who had been involved in the ‘Tunnel 57’ incident, resumed his scientific studies. He gained a physics Ph.D. and in 1985 enjoyed the distinction of becoming West Germany’s first astronaut, launched into space aboard the US space shuttle
Challenger
.
Travelling between East and West Berlin with a fake Western passport—a means by which thousands had come West during the first months of the border closure—had within a couple of years become very difficult indeed.
One solution was provided by the readiness of Third World (especially Middle Eastern) diplomats based in East Berlin to bring escapers to the West concealed in their cars. Diplomatic privilege meant that cars bearing the ‘CD’ plates of countries the East Germans considered friendly were rarely searched. But the services of such flexibly inclined envoys did not come cheap. Another reason why during the 1960s the average escape fee doubled to between DM 10,000 and DM 15,000.
Another solution—espoused by Burkhart Veigel once he had converted his Cadillac—was to bring escapers out, not through the Wall inside Berlin, but via other ‘socialist’ states such as Hungary, Czecho-slovakia and Yugoslavia. The borders between these countries and the Western states adjoining them were well guarded, but with nothing like the paranoid thoroughness of the borders between the two Germanys and the two Berlins. West German tourists passed to and fro fairly freely. The escaper would travel to Prague or Budapest, meet his or her escape helper, be concealed inside a vehicle and transported across the border, usually into Austria.
Klaus Schulz-Ladegast had been picked up by the
Stasi
four days after 13 August 1961 and imprisoned at the
Stasi
jail in Hohenschönhausen
and later the notorious Bautzen prison. He was released after four years, married, and found a job. But any romantic feelings he had once harboured for the East were long gone. He had now decided to go West and was simply awaiting his opportunity.
Unwilling to risk the Wall, Klaus entered into a contract with a professional escape organisation, which specialised in getting people out through ‘the socialist abroad’, as the other Communist countries were known. Klaus and his wife made their way to Czechoslovakia. At a village near the Austrian border, they met up with one of the organisation’s representatives, a bluff, far-from-idealistic truck-driver type.
The deal was simple: the thousands of marks that this operation cost would be repaid by the escapers once they were in West Germany and earning hard currency. It was a very similar deal to that demanded by the ‘traders in human beings’ who operate between the Third World and Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Then as now, such organisations had ways of ensuring that escapers held to the deal once they were safely in the West.
Klaus’s wife went first, stuffed into a compartment inside an old Mercedes. The driver took her across the border to Austria, then returned for Klaus. Klaus was likewise pushed into this cramped space for what he hoped would be a short trip. His hopes seemed to be fulfilled, but just as Klaus thought they must be near the border, the driver turned off the main road. Klaus froze. Had he been betrayed? It was not unknown for escape organisers to sell their charges to the
Stasi
. The car stopped. Klaus heard the driver leave. When he returned, some while later, his sweating passenger heard several heavy objects being dumped into the boot of the car. Then the penny dropped. The objects were cases of beer. Booze was, of course, cheaper in ‘socialist’ Czechoslovakia than in capitalist Austria…
A little later, they passed safely over the border. Klaus was reunited with his wife. That evening, the young couple strolled through the Austrian border community where they would stay overnight before travelling to West Germany. They ate the first meal of their new life and took the chance to see their first Western film.