Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  Six years after the end of the war, in 1951, the Soviets gave the prison to the Stasi. At first, the Stasi ran it along similar lines to the Soviets, torturing prisoners to extract confessions. But by the end of the 1950s, the Stasi decided they wanted a new look, and they put their inmates to work, building 200 cells and interrogation rooms on top of the old Soviet submarine-cells. By the early sixties, Hohenschönhausen had become the Stasi’s main remand prison, its cells filled with political prisoners awaiting trial, many of them failed escapees. And it was here that Wolfdieter was now arriving, inside that white fruit-and-vegetable van.

  It shudders to a stop. The door is pulled open and Wolfdieter dragged from the pitch-black of the van into a huge white room the size of an airport hangar, festooned with bright lights. Many prisoners say this was the most terrifying part, the sudden noise and lights after hours of darkness – hibernating animals wrenched into a sudden summer. At the end of the white room, a door leads into the prison. There is no final snatch of fresh air, no glimpse of the walls of the prison; instead, Wolfdieter stumbles forwards, following the other prisoners as the guards yell at them.

  ‘Kleider aus!’

  Wolfdieter takes off his trousers and shirt.

  ‘Alles!’

  Then his underwear.

  ‘Bücken!’

  Now the humiliating strip-search.

  Finally, they give Wolfdieter his prison clothes and take him to his cell: number 34. This is now his name.

  In the other cells are most of the people arrested that night. A Stasi file lists all of forty-three: a photo-lab assistant, a vet, students, mechanics, several ‘housewives’, a librarian, a hairdressers, a lighting technician, an optician, an accountant, a carpenter, an architect, a fireman and a nurse. The oldest is sixty, the youngest fourteen.

  A few hours after arriving, as Wolfdieter sits in his cell in the dark, the door to his cell opens and a guard walks in.

  ‘Nummer 34! Kommen Sie!’

  Wolfdieter follows the guard along the corridor to a small room, which, after the sterile anonymity of the cells, feels almost homely. There’s a desk, a telephone, a set of cupboards, even wallpaper. Behind the desk sits a man with neat hair and a clean-shaven face. There’s a typewriter in front of him. It is now six in the morning and Wolfdieter’s interrogation is about to begin.

  The Stasi were good at a lot of things – recruiting people, cataloguing their files – but there’s one thing, perhaps above any other, they wanted to become masters of: interrogations.

  In the fifties they’d got a bad name for themselves. People had come out of prison with terrifying stories about the Stasi: beatings, torture. And believe it or not, the Stasi cared; they didn’t like the bad press so they wrote manuals forbidding beatings and physical torture. While some renegade officers still did it, most didn’t have to resort to physical torture. Instead, they became masters of psychological torture, creating a special academy in Potsdam, a town not far from Berlin, where senior Stasi officers learnt ‘operative psychology’.

  Sitting in that interrogation room, Wolfdieter was about to be questioned by an officer who’d spent months learning how to break people down, an officer with a degree in the subject, and what Wolfdieter didn’t know was that the process of interrogation had begun long before he entered the room. It had begun the moment he was put in that van, the journey and everything after it carefully designed to begin the process of breaking someone down until they gave up their secrets willingly. It was all part of the Stasi’s strategy of zersetzung – ‘decomposition’.

  The journey to the prison should have taken half an hour. Instead, the Stasi guard drove the van for hours, taking a route that went right outside of Berlin and back again. It was all about disorientating prisoners, so they’d think they were a long way from home, their friends, their family.

  Once in the prison, that burst of light, the shouting guards, the strip-search, all of that was to break prisoners down further. Apart from the instructions barked at them, none of the guards talked to the prisoners to explain where they were or what would happen next. The Stasi had learnt that ignorance was the best short-cut to fear. Then there were his prison clothes – they were far too big for him. That was deliberate. It’s a minor detail, but imagine wearing clothes that don’t fit you, all the time. You don’t feel yourself.

  Then his cell. And it is here you see zersetzung at its most insidious. Though the cells could pass for a modern prison in many Western cities from the time – clean, white, functional – there were small but important differences: the light switches were on the outside of the cell, as well as the button to flush the loo. It was all about control – or rather, lack of it. Prisoners had to plead with guards to turn the lights off at night, to turn them on in the day, to flush the loo when it stank out their cell. Political prisoners who arrived with confidence and self-worth soon felt insignificant. Inhuman. Worthless. Finally, in each cell there was a small window at the top, no bigger than your hand. Prisoners would peer through, hungry for a glimpse of the world outside, but the glass was designed so that they couldn’t see anything. Like looking through spectacles with the wrong lenses, everything was a blur. The world was just outside Wolfdieter’s window, but he could never see it.

  And so by the time a prisoner arrived for his first interrogation, as Wolfdieter had now, they were a shadow of themselves. Sitting upright on a small four-legged milk stool, stripped of his name, hungry, tired, no idea where he is, an anonymous prisoner in ill-fitting clothes, number 34 waits for the first question.

  It starts with the obvious ones.

  Why did you go into ‘democratic Berlin’ (that’s what the party calls East Berlin) on 7 August 1962? Where did you go? Who did you see?

  Wolfdieter answers, giving as little information as possible, telling his interrogator what he guesses he already knows. Wolfdieter tells him about the Girrmann Group, the House of the Future, then about Renate and his plans to get her out of the East. He talks about the day of the operation, his trips around East Berlin, passing messages on, but gives no names.

  His interrogator types it all up. ‘Phone numbers?’

  ‘They’ve slipped my mind,’ he says.

  At no point does Wolfdieter’s interrogator beat him. Instead, he waits for Wolfdieter to disintegrate. Four hours in, sitting on the stool, hands on his knees, Wolfdieter’s back begins to ache, pain streaking through his legs. Eight hours in, his voice rasps, there’s no water and he can’t remember when he last ate. Ten hours in and the room is now swaying, his ears ring, the edges of his vision darken and all he can think about is sleep.

  Sleep.

  Sometimes Wolfdieter drifts off mid-answer, crashing off the stool onto the cement floor, the bump wrenching him from his half-dreams. Each time, the interrogator strolls around from behind his desk, calmly places Wolfdieter back on the stool and the questions begin again.

  The Stasi want to know everything about the operation, despite knowing a huge amount from their informant and from the tunnel itself. That night, like detectives at a crime scene, they’d spent hours measuring, documenting and drawing the tunnel, noting its height (1 m), width (0.8 m), depth (2.3 m), the lack of wooden supports and lighting system. The only measurement they didn’t get was the length: they sent a dog into the tunnel, but it only went ten metres in, and none of the Stasi were brave enough to go further. They noted the tools left behind: an axe, ‘two wood drills and a chisel’, then turned to the rest of the house, listing everything inside, the ‘upholstered chairs’ and ‘bookcases’.

  Still, they want to know more.

  ‘How did you keep in contact with Detlef Girrmann?’

  ‘What was agreed with the West Berlin police?’

  Question after question after question.

  Now and then Wolfdieter’s interrogator slips through a side door into another room and there’s a rumble of conversation. Later, Wolfdieter discovers that the interrogators are monitored by other Stasi officers, peop
le who listen in, check they’re asking the right questions. Back in the room, his interrogator begins again. More questions. More falling on the floor. Dry mouth. Half-dreams. Finally, late in the afternoon, twelve hours after his interrogation begins, Wolfdieter is taken back to his cell.

  Shuffling along the linoleum corridor, Wolfdieter is instructed not to talk to other prisoners, not even to look at them. He is told to look down at the floor, following markings that show him where to walk. At one point he hears footsteps approaching, another prisoner perhaps, but before he can snatch a glimpse of them, his guard pushes him into an empty holding cell. These cells are stationed at intervals along the corridor so that if two prisoners are walking along it, one can be taken aside. No chance of interaction, or a sympathetic gesture. No solidarity here.

  If Wolfdieter were allowed to look up, he would see a thin piece of rope running along the corridor at head height – the prison’s silent alarm system. Not that it was used much as no one ever tried to escape. Even if someone made it out of the prison, they would find themselves in a huge military complex, surrounded by factories that churned out Stasi paraphernalia: spy cameras, fake number plates, microphones. If someone made a run for it, the guards would tug the piece of string, triggering a red light down in the control room. There was no loud ringing. The silence was as much a part of this prison as anything else; there was no noise to find comfort in. To that end the prisoners were all given slippers, the guards too.

  Eventually Wolfdieter arrives back in his cell and there, a surprise: another prisoner. At first Wolfdieter is grateful, he has someone to talk to. His cell-mate is pale, thin and inquisitive, and Wolfdieter answers his many questions. Only later does he guess that he must be a zelleninformator – a ‘cell informant’ – put there by the Stasi to find out what secrets Wolfdieter hasn’t already given up. This was a common Stasi tactic; they knew prisoners were desperate to talk to people apart from their interrogators and they spread zelleninformatoren through Stasi prisons, instructing them to wheedle out other crimes from their cell-mates. The Stasi don’t mind prisoners knowing these cell-informants exist. Sometimes they even spread false rumours that a prisoner is an informant, just to create distrust.

  No solidarity here.

  That night, Wolfdieter tries to sleep, tries to ignore his zelleninformator’s questions but it’s difficult. Like all inmates, Wolfdieter is instructed to sleep flat on his back, hands over his blankets. If he rolls over, moves his hands, the door opens, a slippered-guard whispers in, wakes him, orders him back into position.

  At midnight, Wolfdieter wakes to see a guard standing over him; he’s pulled out of his bed and taken back into the interrogation room, the same man sitting behind a desk.

  Round two.

  As Wolfdieter’s interrogator begins again, down the corridor other prisoners from the botched escape are answering questions. There’s a vet who wanted to rescue his wife and one-year-old baby through the tunnel, but they were arrested at the house, his wife taken to a woman’s prison along with their baby. During her interrogation, the Stasi took her baby away. She had no idea if she would ever see him again.

  Then there’s the couple who owned the house, Edith and Friedrich Sendler. Both say they had nothing to do with the tunnel, but their interrogators don’t believe them: ‘How do you explain the fact that your living room was hacked open from below? Why is it that tunnellers from West Berlin drilled through your living room floor in a perfect spot with no furniture on it? Your statements are completely illogical and unbelievable…’

  In each room, behind the interrogator is a window. As the prisoners sit on stools, answering questions, the deal on offer doesn’t need to be spelt out: confess and after prison you’ll be out there again one day, in the world through the looking glass. If you don’t, you’ll stay here; who knows if you’ll ever leave. Some prisoners spent years in remand prisons, refusing to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. By the time they were released, there wasn’t much of them left.

  All across Berlin, in various Stasi prisons, the students, vets, teachers and doctors answer questions about that night. Their interrogators fax the information around so that it can be cross-referenced and checked. Night after night it goes on: the official interrogations, the unofficial ones in their cells.

  Wolfdieter loses track of what he’s said. Loses track of time. Himself. What he’s now experiencing is the Stasi’s most effective interrogation method: sleep deprivation. The Stasi are proud that they’ve moved on from the barbaric torture methods carried out by the Soviets: Stasi prisoners don’t usually leave their prisons with broken teeth and arms, yet the Stasi’s brand of torture is still physical, only that the damage is invisible. It happens deep within the body. As the CIA would later discover when using sleep deprivation as an ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ following 9/11, it is an incredibly powerful tool, one that strikes at the core of you, at the biological functions that determine your mental and physical health.

  Fatigue comes first, then irritability, problems concentrating, reading and speaking. Your body temperature drops. You find it hard to make decisions. You lose your appetite, become disorientated and you hallucinate. As your body weakens, so does your mind and you begin to withdraw from everything around you. That information comes from research carried out by scientists who have only monitored what sleep deprivation does to the human body up to this point. For obvious reasons, they can’t go further, though they know from research on animals that sleep deprivation eventually kills you. It seems that it’s not because of a particular problem with any single organ: instead, your whole body, deprived of the regenerative function of sleep, collapses.

  Wolfdieter is now in the early stages of this process. Tired. Cold. Confused. Withdrawn. You can see the effects of this in his forty-page interrogation, typed up neatly in his Stasi file. Wolfdieter begins to crumble, giving more names, places, dates. At the end of the third night, his interrogator gives him a confession to sign. Wolfdieter reads it. It’s seventeen pages long and it contains everything he told his interrogator. Then, at the end of his statement, he reads something that even in the depths of exhaustion Wolfdieter knows he never told him: how the tunnel operation was all part of a plot involving West German and American governments. He’s confused: they have enough to send me to prison, why do they need to add these lies?

  ‘That’s not what I told you,’ says Wolfdieter, somehow finding the strength for a final moment of defiance.

  His interrogator looks back at him blankly. ‘You will sign it.’

  Wolfdieter is shaking; he can barely read it, understand it, but something within him has stirred at this final insult, the lie in this typed-up confession, and though his body is broken, he wants to hold on to something: the simple truth of that day.

  Looking at his interrogator, he tries again. ‘No sir, I won’t sign it.’

  His interrogator smiles. ‘Yes you will,’ he says, the bored confidence of someone who’s been through this many times. ‘You will sign everything.’

  And he is right. At five in the morning, Wolfdieter Sternheimer signs the confession.

  When I ask Wolfdieter why, why he’d signed a statement that wasn’t true, knowing this could lead to a tougher punishment, his answer is simple.

  ‘I was so, so tired.’

  45

  Mole-hunt

  SIEGFRIED IS NERVOUS. He’s been summoned to the House of the Future and he knows why: they are trying to work out what happened, how the Stasi knew so much, who betrayed them.

  It’s two days after the operation and everyone is in shock, trying to piece it all together. Joachim, Hasso and Uli are lying low at university, wondering why it went wrong, and Bodo Köhler is on the hunt for the mole.

  As Siegfried walks into Bodo Köhler’s office, his mind races. Bodo had always been suspicious of him and now he’s looking for someone to blame. How to keep cover? He needs to find someone else to cast a shadow on. Not too obviously; just enough to raise
questions.

  Siegfried looks around the room. There are only a few people there, several other escape-helpers from that afternoon, all waiting for Bodo to come in and begin.

  Footsteps. Then Bodo’s voice: ‘Well, here’s another corpse.’

  Siegfried looks up to see Bodo looking straight at him and in a flash of panic he thinks Bodo knows everything, but then—

  ‘Obviously you can’t go to East Berlin any more,’ Bodo continues, and Siegfried realises what he means: Siegfried is burnt. It makes sense: having been part of an operation busted by the Stasi, Siegfried can’t be a messenger again. Too risky.

  Bodo looks around the room, says they need to talk through the operation, go through every detail to find the cracks. Turning to each person, he asks them to account for their day, every minute of it, all the places they went to, and to tell him if they noticed anything suspicious.

  When it’s Siegfried’s turn, he tells Bodo about the meeting with Wolfdieter. There was another man with them too at that meeting, he says, a vet who wanted to get his wife and baby through the tunnel. Like Wolfdieter, the vet had volunteered to pass messages on to people in East Berlin. Siegfried tells Bodo about that meeting, saying he noticed something odd: the vet was agitated, he says, and when he left, instead of walking to the train station, the vet took a taxi, which Siegfried thought was strange…

  He tails off. Is that enough? Be subtle. Not too heavy-handed.