Standing at the window, Evi looks towards her neighbours’ houses. They know each other well, they talk, share problems, help each other out. But she won’t tell them about this.
What she doesn’t know, as she stares out into the darkening night, is that two of her neighbours have been spying on her and her family for months. Codenamed Walter and Wilhelm, they’re informants for the Stasi and they’ve been instructed to watch Evi and Peter. All the time.
Walter and Wilhelm have been diligent. They’ve told their Stasi handlers all about Peter’s life in East Berlin, how he lives beyond his means, and they even told their handler the moment they knew Evi was pregnant. They watch the front door closely, note the times Evi and Peter leave the house and return each day. In more recent reports, they’ve made a special note of the ‘friends visiting from West Berlin’. They will try to find out what they’re up to.
It’s now late, and Evi pulls the curtains, cocooning the three of them in a house she hopes she will soon leave and never see again.
22
The Girrmann Group
January 1962
JOACHIM SHIVERS. IT’S his first winter in West Berlin and it’s freezing, the streets covered in ice. He’s glad of the coat he smuggled out of East Berlin three months ago; he’s kept it with him all this time, from the CIA house to Marienfelde Refugee Camp, and now here, the student dorms at the Technical University in Berlin where he’d enrolled to study communications engineering.
It had been a hard few months. When Joachim arrived in West Berlin, he missed his mother and sister so much it hurt, particularly when he heard how brave they’d been when the Stasi turned up at their apartment after he’d escaped. His mother had calmly batted them away: ‘Oh, he’s in Dresden studying. Why would you even look for him here?’ The Stasi had badgered and questioned and threatened, but his mother stood firm and eventually they left. He missed that. Her spirit. But he had no idea how to get her to West Berlin.
That’s when he’d heard about them: the Girrmann Group. It was formed the night the barbed wire went up, when a law student called Detlef Girrmann and a couple of friends decided they wanted to help people escape the East. Within a few months, they’d helped hundreds leave: borrowing passports from West German friends, they matched them with people in East Berlin who looked similar, then couriers smuggled the passports over the border.
Someone at university put Joachim in touch with the Girrmann Group, and he’d asked if they could help his mother and sister escape. Yes, they said, but they’d have to try something new. Border police were now onto the passport scheme, its officers given manuals containing dozens of photos of different-shaped noses, eyes, lips and cheeks, so they could spot the difference between the passport photo and the person in front of them. They’d caught hundreds this way and sent them to prison.
Now, the Girrmann Group were trying something new. Instead of using borrowed passports, they were buying blank passports from embassy contacts in Vienna, Belgium and Switzerland. This meant they could add the escapee’s own photograph – less chance of a VoPo noticing the passport was fake. A month later, the Girrmann Group had found two blank passports for Joachim’s mother and sister and smuggled them into East Berlin. The passports were Viennese, so his mother and sister filled their bags with Austrian schillings and tram tickets, learnt a few Austrian phrases, then crossed the border into West Berlin.
They were all in West Berlin now, trying to build new lives, but it wasn’t easy. Joachim had spent so long thinking about how to get over the Wall that he hadn’t thought much about life beyond it. He’d gone from a world where he had almost no control over his life to one where he could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and it was dizzying. He’d understood how to behave when there was something to push against, but here in West Berlin, like a zoo animal released from a cage, he wasn’t sure what to do. And now Joachim was living in West Berlin full-time, no longer just a weekend visitor, he could see the cracks beneath the surface.
For the Wall had changed West Berlin too: when Walter Ulbricht built his Wall to stop East Berliners leaving, he’d effectively encircled West Berlin. For Berlin was 100 miles inside the Soviet zone in East Germany, which is why many described West Berlin as an ‘island of freedom in a Communist sea’. An island of freedom that was now surrounded by a wall.
Immediately after it was built, West Berliners showed what they thought of the Wall, covering it in graffiti: Es gibt nur ein Berlin – ‘There is only one Berlin’ – and the letters ‘KZ’, the initials for a concentration camp. Though, technically, West Berliners were free to drive or fly to West Germany, with the Wall looming over them, they felt trapped. Unless they had West German passports, they couldn’t cross the border to visit friends or family in East Berlin, so many West Berliners felt there was no reason to stay. Every day, hundreds flew to other cities in Germany until West Berlin had one of the lowest birth rates in the world. The government was so scared by the exodus that it paid Zittergeld – ‘tremble-money’, to people who agreed to remain or move to West Berlin. As ambitious, conformist types moved to Frankfurt or Hamburg for mainstream careers, radicals, waifs and strays moved to West Berlin, including those who wanted to avoid conscription to the West German Army, as living in West Berlin meant you were exempt. And it was here, in this schizophrenic, confused city, that Joachim had to make a new life.
His first few months at university had been a culture shock. Back in the East, student life was strictly controlled: he’d been told which lectures to go to, there was no personal choice. Here in West Berlin, Joachim had to make his own decisions and it was overwhelming. It was freedom, but too much freedom and he couldn’t cope.
As an outsider, he’d found himself gravitating towards other East Berliners in the student dorms; they would eat together in communal kitchens, cut each other’s hair and talk over beer in the evenings. Today, he was just about to head out to meet some of them when there was a knock on his door.
Joachim opens it to find three friends standing there. There’s Wolfhardt (Wolf) Schroedter – tall, blond and charming, always laughing. Wolf had grown up in East Germany and, like Joachim, his father died after the war. As a teenager Wolf had been a model socialist citizen – he was part of the Free German Youth, sang all the right songs with the right kind of enthusiasm. But aged seventeen, after long nights listening to radio from West Berlin and questioning what he’d been taught, Wolf decided to escape. He boarded a train to East Berlin, then crossed the border into West Berlin (this was pre-Wall) and lived in a church boarding house for boys while he finished school. Now, he was studying engineering.
Next to Wolf were the two Italian students – Mimmo and Gigi. Sitting on Joachim’s bed, the three of them tell him why they’re here. They tell him all about Evi and Peter, how they need to escape East Berlin as soon as possible and how they have an idea for a new kind of escape route: a tunnel. And they want to use this tunnel to help others escape too. They are ambitious. They want this to be the biggest single escape since the Wall went up and they are telling Joachim all of this for one reason: they want his help. As an escapee from East Berlin, they feel they can trust him. Plus, his background in communications engineering will come in useful.
Joachim looks out of the window, the streets below full of students, people like him who are free to do whatever they want. He thinks about the risks. It’s not just escapees who are being targeted by VoPos; escape-helpers from West Berlin have been killed too.
A few weeks ago, a member of the Girrmann Group had been involved in an escape that had gone horribly wrong. Dieter Wohlfahrt was a chemistry student at the same university as Joachim, just twenty years old, and since the Wall went up, he’d helped hundreds escape. One evening, Dieter had driven to the border to help the mother of a friend sneak into West Berlin. Using bolt clippers and pliers to cut through two layers of barbed wire, Dieter was about to pull the woman through when she called loudly to her daughter waiting for her in West Berlin. VoPo
s had heard, ran towards Dieter, shooting at him, their bullets piercing his chest. Dieter lay there bleeding as West Berlin and British police watched helplessly, too afraid to trespass into the East. Eventually, after an hour, East German border guards had carried his lifeless body away.
If Joachim was shot by VoPos, he knew that police in West Berlin wouldn’t help him. Then there was the other risk, the one almost too horrible to think about: what if the tunnel collapsed and he was buried alive?
Joachim thinks about his mother and sister, both now here in West Berlin, yet here are these students, asking him to tunnel back into the country he’s just escaped, to rescue people he doesn’t even know. There are so many reasons to say no, all more logical than the reasons to say yes, but Joachim, who had seen, aged six, how escapes could go badly wrong, Joachim who hates cold water, Joachim who loves numbers and circuits and electricity and still sometimes dreams of being an astronaut, Joachim finds himself giving an answer.
He says yes.
23
The House of the Future
SIEGFRIED UHSE, THE hairdresser, stands in front of the house. It’s grand, imposing. Not what he’d expected. He pushes the door to see if he can sneak in, have a look around. But no, it’s locked. He pauses. This is his first mission and he doesn’t want to mess up.
Shortly after he’d become a Stasi informant, Siegfried had been asked by his handler, Lehmann, to infiltrate the network of students in West Berlin who helped people escape from East Germany. Fluchthelfer they were called – ‘escape-helpers’. The Stasi were obsessed with preventing escapes; Erich Mielke had told his employees they were all responsible for stopping people fleeing, and he’d even set up a new department to co-ordinate the work. At first, the Stasi focused on breaking up escape plans hatched in the East; now they wanted to infiltrate escape networks in West Berlin.
It’s hard to know what Siegfried would have made of his assignment. After all, he’d chosen to live in West Germany, and now he was hunting down people like him who wanted a different life. But if he had conflicted feelings about his mission, there was no one he could talk to – spies who broke cover could be put on trial in military tribunals, and serious infractions resulted in beheadings or a shot in the neck. Two hundred Stasi officers had already been executed.
Four months into his assignment, Siegfried didn’t have much to show for it. Then one night, at a favourite jazz club, he’d got a tip-off. A guy he’d got chatting to had told him to go to a student bar called Berliner Wingolf. A few days ago, Siegfried went there and spun a story about wanting to get his girlfriend and mother out of East Berlin. Did they know anyone who could help? Yes, they’d said, and they’d told him all about the headquarters of the largest escape network in West Berlin – Haus der Zukunft – the ‘House of the Future’.
‘You’ll find the guy who runs it there in the afternoon,’ a student had told him, and so now, on 18 March 1962, Siegfried had set off to find it. He’d discovered that the House of the Future was in Zehlendorf, one of the wealthiest areas in West Berlin. Alighting from the train at Krumme Lanke station, Siegfried clipped along the cobbled streets, gazing up at the grand houses set among parkland and trees until he’d arrived at the House of the Future, a house so large it looked like a small castle. Behind it, a lake surrounded by meadows, maple trees, weeping willows and rhododendrons. This was the heart of liberal West Berlin: musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic played concerts here, Shakespeare plays had been performed around the lake, and now, here he is, a Stasi spy, trying to infiltrate this world.
Siegfried rings the doorbell and a few moments later, a man wearing dark-rimmed glasses opens the door. ‘The eternal student type,’ Siegfried will later tell his handler. Siegfried doesn’t yet know it, but he’s struck gold. This is Bodo Köhler, one of the three founders of the Girrmann Group, the same group that helped Joachim’s mother and sister escape. Bodo had escaped East Germany a few years earlier and was studying theology at the Free University. In his spare time, he helped run West Berlin’s most prolific escape network.
Siegfried gives him his cover story and Bodo listens, opening the huge door, welcoming him in.
Walking through the corridor, Siegfried has never seen anything like it – dozens of students huddled in groups, talking different languages. As well as a student hangout, the House of the Future is a hostel, and people from all over the world stay here, stuffed into its rooms from the ground floor to the attic, some helping to orchestrate escapes from East Berlin.
One of the foreign volunteers is an American called Joan Glenn. Originally from Oregon, she’d been studying at a branch of Stanford University in Stuttgart. A few months ago, she’d come to West Berlin, and was so affected by the Wall that she abandoned her studies and decided to help East Berliners escape. With her flawless German, Joan was brilliant at it, and she’d pioneered an efficient system that was getting hundreds out of the East.
In the morning, volunteer students from West Berlin would cross the border into East Berlin. ‘Test people’, Joan called them. They wandered around the East for a while, then returned through the checkpoint at the border, making a mental note of the VoPos’ procedures that day. Back in West Berlin, they passed this information on to a second group: the couriers. That same day, couriers smuggled blank passports (usually Swiss or Belgian) into East Berlin, hand-delivering them to escapees, telling them about any new VoPo procedures at the border they should be aware of. Then they’d rehearse the details of the escapees’ new identities with them – which usually meant reciting names of towns in Switzerland or Belgium. For the final stage of this VIP escape-service, the volunteers would follow the escapee to the checkpoint, standing a few people behind them. ‘This gave the refugee a feeling of reassurance,’ Joan later explained.
But that level of support came at a cost. A few months ago, one of Joan’s American friends from Stanford had been standing behind one of his escapees when the East German was arrested. The VoPo had discovered that the East German’s passport was fake and somehow guessed that the man standing three spaces behind him was connected. The would-be escapee got off lightly with a suspended sentence. The American student was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. The message was clear: escape-helpers would be treated more harshly than escapees. Yet Joan kept going, ignored the risks. There were rumours that she and Bodo were in love. This was the world that Siegfried had just entered, Bodo his guide.
Bodo takes Siegfried into a small office where they can talk discreetly. There, Siegfried tells Bodo more about his fictitious mother and girlfriend, but, at first, Bodo isn’t interested. They’re not planning any more escapes, he says; their last operation just fell through.
But then Siegfried mentions that he has West German citizenship and Bodo starts paying attention: here is someone who can cross into East Berlin when he likes, and that makes Siegfried a precious commodity. Siegfried could be a courier, delivering messages and passports to escapees in East Berlin. Bodo hands Siegfried a pre-printed form (that’s how well organised his network was) and asks Siegfried to write his details – name, address, telephone number. Then Bodo says goodbye and Siegfried leaves.
Siegfried has done well. Not only has he entered West Berlin’s biggest escape network, but now they will call him when they begin plotting their next escape operation.
All these details come from the Stasi report, written the next day by Lehmann after his meeting with Siegfried at 10 a.m. at the Stasi safe house ‘Marienquell’. And it’s here, in this report, that you get the sense that Siegfried is getting a taste for his new life as a spy. Because this is not the only intelligence gathering Siegfried does that week. He also invites an acquaintance – a blond, muscular metal-worker – to the Dandy Club, a jazz bar in West Berlin. They get drunk, the metal-worker oblivious to Siegfried mining him for information, and eventually Siegfried finds some: it turns out the metal-worker has a friend who works in American counter-intelligence and he gives Siegfried a photograph.
&n
bsp; Then, for his hat-trick, Siegfried tells Lehmann that he’s spotted a job advert in the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper for a hairdressing position at the McNair American army base in West Berlin. Lehmann is delighted and tells him to apply.
The report ends with a brief to-do list for Siegfried:
1. Go back to the House of the Future in two weeks.
2. Maintain friendship with the metal-worker to find out more about the American spy.
3. Get the job at the hairdressers in the army barracks.
Proving the perfect spy, Siegfried does all three.
24
The Factory
QUESTION: HOW DO you dig a tunnel into the most heavily guarded country in the world? How do you find somewhere safe to dig from and somewhere safe to dig to? How do you dig your tunnel when you can’t use machines in case you’re heard by one of the most powerful secret police forces on earth? How do you buy tools when you have no money? How do you avoid hitting a pipe and drowning? How do you see in the tunnel when there’s no light? How do you breathe when the air runs out?
And if, somehow, you do all this, and you get to the other end, what if the secret police are waiting for you?
It begins with maps.
Wolf gets hold of some from a friend in local government and he, Mimmo and Gigi spread them over their dorm-room desks, running their fingers up and down streets, along rivers, checking the locations of underground pipes and the height of water levels, trying to find the best place in West Berlin to start digging. Too far from the Wall and they could be digging for months. Too close, and they could be spotted by VoPos over the Wall in East Berlin. Then there’s the soil to think about: Berlin’s foundations are mostly crumbly and sandy, prone to collapse. They need to find somewhere with clay-like soil where a tunnel might hold firm. And finally – water. The groundwater in Berlin is high, sometimes just a metre below ground. If they don’t find high ground to dig from, the tunnel could flood and they’ll drown. With pencils they circle potential digging sites along the border, but there’s only so much they can tell from the maps.
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