by Paul Simpson
To begin with, escapes weren’t as hard as they later became. The Wall itself didn’t boast the defences that later generations would feature, but people who crossed it were risking their lives. One of the very first to go was East German soldier Conrad Schumann. The nineteen-year-old former shepherd was part of a brigade that was transferred from Dresden to Berlin on 12 August 1961, the day before the Wall was erected. The soldiers must have known that something major was going on: their pay was increased by nearly ten per cent for “danger money”.
On 15 August, Schumann was on guard at the corner of Bernauerstrasse and Ruppinerstrassse, and watched as a small girl was refused entry back into West Berlin. Her parents were waiting for her on the western side: she had simply been visiting her grandmother in East Berlin before the Wall was erected. That didn’t matter: free travel between the two sides was simply not permitted any longer. Even though the child could see her parents, the rules were strict: she was sent back to her grandmother’s house.
According to accounts that Schumann later gave, that was the catalyst for his escape. He swapped his full sub-machine gun for an empty one, as people on the West German side called for him to come over to them. By chance West German cameraman Peter Liebing was standing near the junction, and photographed Schumann as he hesitated for a moment, then vaulted over the barbed wire, and ran to a police car that was on the other side of the barrier. “I had him in my sight for more than an hour. I had a feeling he was going to jump. It was kind of an instinct,” Liebing later explained. “I had learned how to do it at the Jump Derby in Hamburg. You have to photograph the horse when it leaves the ground and catch it as it clears the barrier. And then he came. I pressed the shutter and it was all over.” The still photograph – as well as cine footage of the escape – became an iconic image, representing the desire of East Germans to flee the country.
Schumann’s family were not impressed by his defection, and he received numerous pleas from them to return to the East, which he declined. The East German secret police, the Stasi, would have loved to use him as a poster boy to show the failings of the West, but Schumann refused to cooperate, remaining in the West, where he worked for car manufacturers Audi. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, he was able to return home, but was still regarded as a traitor by some. Suffering from depression, he hanged himself on 20 June 1998.
While East Germans were finding holes in the barbed wire and desperately making their way through to a new life in the West – around 12,000 people managed to escape during the latter part of 1961 before the Communists tightened security at the Wall – some gave their lives in the pursuit of freedom. Nine days after the Wall was erected, on 22 August, the East German police and army were told that anyone “violating the laws of our GDR is to be called to order, if necessary by use of weapons”. Two days later, Günter Litfin was the first escaper known to be shot.
The tailor, who had worked in West Berlin until the Wall, decided to try to cross the border near the Reichstag building just north of the Brandenburg Gate. When he was spotted, Litfin dived into the Spandauer boat canal that separated the two parts of the city, and swam desperately for the Western side. He was within a few inches of the bank when a border guard fired his sub-machine gun; Litfin was hit in the head, and sank underwater. His corpse was fished out from the canal later that day.
One of the few watchtowers that wasn’t destroyed in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall has been preserved near the Invalidenfriedhof, the invalids’ graveyard that sits beside the canal, close to the site of Litfin’s death. It has been preserved as a memorial to Litfin.
In the very early days of the Wall, there were still many buildings abutting the barbed wire, and while the interiors of the buildings may have been within East Germany, their exteriors were in the West. This meant that people would jump from the windows and as the Communists began emptying the houses of tenants and bricking up the windows of the lower levels, so potential escapees had to take ever increasing risks. The West German fire brigade would often assist jumpers: on 24 September, seventy-seven-year-old Frieda Schulze tried to make the leap but was held back by East German soldiers before she was finally able to free herself from their grasp and fall into the firemen’s arms below. Eighty-year-old Olga Segler wasn’t so lucky, dying of internal injuries caused by her fall.
Graduate student Leslie Colitt was desperate to bring his fiancée out from the East. They had met the year before, when travel between the two sectors wasn’t a problem. He was on holiday in France with his parents when the Wall went up, but was determined to bring Ingrid across. Westerners were still allowed to cross into the East, but their movements were being watched far more carefully. Colitt’s original plan was to travel with Ingrid by train, with her using his sister’s American passport. She learned sufficient English phrases to deal with the questioning she might receive, and prepared for her escape.
All seemed to go well initially, but to Colitt’s horror, on the day they chose to implement the plan in late September 1961, an astute border guard noticed that he had entered East Berlin three times within one day. Although he was able to come up with a suitable story to placate the East German, Colitt knew that going back through Friedrichstrasse station with Ingrid at his side would be too risky. The only route was via the border crossing on the south side of the city at Zimmerstrasse, which would eventually become known as Checkpoint Charlie, the scene of a tense confrontation a few weeks later between American and Soviet tanks. To Colitt’s relief, the guard on duty at the crossing waved them through the barbed wire and the tanks to enter the West. In common with all refugees, Ingrid was interrogated by West German and Allied intelligence, in case she was a plant by the Stasi. Her father was demoted from his post at the East German state engineering company as a result of her escape, even though he knew nothing of it; her parents were eventually allowed to travel to West Germany when they were pensioners.
Train driver Harry Deterling used the transport system to great effect on 5 December 1961, as he brought his wife, four children – and a trainload of other passengers, many of whom were unaware of what was going on – over to the West. The railway crossed the border at Staaken, and when Deterling learned that the line was going to be blocked off, on 3 December he and his family decided that they had to act now.
According to the press conference he gave after reaching the West, Deterling persuaded officials that he wanted to “improve his technical qualifications” and was thus allowed to run an extra train that wasn’t on the schedule. This became what he described as “the last train to freedom, departs today at 7.33 p.m.”. The train – initially with hundreds of passengers on board, the vast majority of whom departed before the terminus – ran to Albretchtshof station as planned but instead of stopping, Deterling, with his friend Hartmut Lichy acting as fireman, kept the steam engine fired up and headed up the single track that crossed the border. Although the two men hid in the coal tender, and the passengers who knew of the escape ducked to the floor, in case they were fired upon by the guards, the audacity of the plan seemed to amaze the border patrols, and not a single shot was aimed at them.
Of the thirty-two passengers on board, seven decided to return to East Berlin of their own accord. Deterling celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday the day after the escape, and told reporters, “Freedom is my happiest birthday present.”The train was pulled back over the border by an East German locomotive, and the line was shut the next day. It was reopened eventually in 1995. Deterling’s plan became the basis of the 1963 West German film Durchbruch Lok 234.
By this stage, the East German authorities were trying to plug every possible gap in their Wall. Houses beside the border became derelict, and access to the sewerage system was blocked off with gratings. This meant that those seeking to help people escape had to find alternate routes, and some would pay the ultimate price for their willingness to assist those in need. One of the most famous of the escape-helpers to be killed was Dieter Wohlfahrt, who was killed o
n 9 December 1961.
The twenty-year-old student had Austrian citizenship, and therefore was allowed to cross the border between East and West without restrictions while growing up. When the Wall prevented his East German friends from free movement, he decided to find ways to help them get to the West. As part of a group of students, he was able to come up with various ways to evade the security forces, initially through the sewers. His Austrian passport allowed him to enter East Berlin, and he would act as “cover man” for the escapees, opening the manholes that led down to the sewers. However, when the sewers were blocked he was as happy to assist with more blatant crossings, and in early December 1961, he agreed unhesitatingly to help Elke, a seventeen-year-old student fetch her mother across the barrier not far from where Harry Deterling had broken through the border on his train.
Wohlfahrt, his friend Karl-Heinz Albert, and Elke drove to the agreed crossing at the corner of Bergstrasse and Hauptstrasse, with Elke remaining in the camper van on the Western side. Wohlfahrt and Albert climbed over the rope marking the border and started to cut through the three layers of barbed wire. However, according to Albert, Elke’s mother started to call out for her daughter, which alerted the East German border patrol. They barked an order for everyone to stop, but rather than wait for them to obey, they opened fire. Albert crawled back to West Berlin, but Wohlfahrt was hit, lying about twenty feet from the border. Although West German police and British military police tried to go to his aid, their East German counterparts made it clear that they would fire on anyone who approached him – and they themselves had no intention of giving any aid to the dying man. He was left there for an hour before being carted off.
The East Germans tried to make a propaganda coup from Wohlfarht’s death, claiming that the young Austrian and his friends had opened fire on the state police, but this was vehemently denied. “The Communists’ claim that the young men had pistols and plastic bombs with them was clearly made up out of thin air. It is their old method of saying, ‘The deceased is guilty.’” The guard who shot Wohlfarht didn’t face legal proceedings after the reunification of Germany, apparently because he might have been acting in self-defence.
Wohlfahrt’s death and the lack of action by the police and the British military prompted fierce criticism from the mayor of Berlin, who pointed out that “the reserve demonstrated from our side will only encourage the Eastern ruling powers to continue to show no consideration for human life”. The influential Der Spiegel magazine also pointed out that Wohlfahrt “was a victim of the bitter realization that, now all other escape holes have been sealed, the only way out is to break through the walls or the barbed wire by force.”
The deaths of Günter Litfin and Dieter Wohlfahrt, among many others during that first year that the Wall existed, including Lutz Haberlandt, Axel Hannemann and thirteen-year-old Wolfgang Glöde, did not serve to deter those who wanted to reach the West. As the Berlin Wall became literally more concrete, with materials from the Second World War bombsites contributing to the more permanent barricades that were now erected from breeze blocks and concrete slabs, people sought other routes, and the most obvious one was underground.
According to Dietmar Arnold, the head of the Berlin Underworlds Association, between 1962 and 1972, the authorities are now aware of seventy-one different tunnel projects that were begun, with around twenty per cent being successful. Occasionally construction work on the roads in the vicinity of the Wall will reveal others. One of the more unusual was the Seniorentunnel, which was masterminded by an eighty-one-year-old man, who made it clear that he didn’t even want to be buried in East Germany. Together with a dozen fellow senior citizens, he spent sixteen days digging a tunnel with very unusual dimensions: while its 160-feet length meant it passed from beneath a chicken coop on Oranienburger Chaussee on the Eastern side to Frohnau in West Berlin, it was six feet high, rather than the usual few inches. This meant that considerably more earth had to be moved, but, as one of the escapees explained when they reached the West on 5 May 1962, “We wanted to walk to freedom with our wives, comfortably and unbowed.”
A good proportion of the tunnels were begun from the Western side, often by those who had already escaped and wanted to be reunited with their loved ones. East Germans had to be extremely careful when discussing any plans: the Stasi built its reputation on its formidable army of informants, and Berliners intending to travel were always on the lookout for eavesdroppers. Many tunnels, such as one dug from Heidelbergerstrasse in the Western district of Neukölln in mid-September 1962, were betrayed to the secret police, but others, like Tunnel 29 which stretched from Bernauerstrasse to Schönholzerstrasse, enabled many East Germans to escape (sometimes to find themselves filmed on their arrival in the West by camera crews from American network NBC who helped finance Tunnel 29 in exchange for the rights!).
The interest of the West in the plight of the Berliners sometimes led to difficult publicity for the East German authorities. By mid-1962, the infamous death strip had started to take shape, with a second wall behind the border Wall. Over the years, between these two could be mines, tripwires, or dogs. On 17 August, Peter Fechter, a nineteen-year-old bricklayer, was shot near the Wall while trying to escape with his friend Helmut Kulbeik. They hid out in a carpenter’s workshop near the wall in Zimmerstrasse and once the border guards were out of sight, intended to cross the death strip and then climb the far wall. They were shot at as they reached the boundary with the West; Kulbeik was able to clamber over, despite the barbed wire and glass at the top. Fechter was shot in the hip, and lay for a long time in front of hundreds of witnesses, bleeding out slowly in full view of the TV cameras.
As with Wohlfahrt, the Western authorities felt unable to give assistance (a Time magazine report suggested that a US Army officer was given specific instructions not to do anything) and Fechter took two hours to die. However, unlike in Wohlfahrt’s case, Fechter’s death did lead to some positive action – four days later, an ambulance was stationed at Checkpoint Charlie. Two of the guards who shot at him were convicted of manslaughter in 1997; a third had subsequently died. A memorial stands at the spot where Fechter died.
A documentary produced around the time of the first anniversary of the Wall’s erection in 1962 by the Berlin Film Unit, simply titled The Wall, demonstrates many Berliners were gradually becoming used to the scar on their city. That didn’t mean that everyone had given up. In fact the following year saw many highly unusual methods of escape tried, starting with East German acrobat Hans Klein who decided to use his natural talents to cross the border.
On the night of 27 December 1962, the thirty-six-year-old anti-Communist acrobat climbed a steel pylon and leaped to the porcelain insulator on a 110,000 volt high-tension cable, which ran sixty feet over the heads of the guards – if he had touched both the tower and the cable at the same time, he would have been turned to ashes. “I could hear humming and had a tingling sensation in my seat,” he admitted to the Associated Press, describing how he slid seventy yards then jumped to a second tower. Two guards were patrolling the wire barricades facing the Teltow Canal, but Klein was above the reach of their searchlights.
After sliding a further thirty yards, Klein hooked his legs over the cable and started to pay out a rope he had coiled over his chest, hoping to sling it over the cable, and then climb down it into the West. The temperature, though, was seven degrees Fahrenheit (nearly minus fourteen Celsius) and his hands had numbed. He missed the rope and he fell forty feet to the towpath, breaking his arms. When he recovered consciousness three hours later, he called for help, and the West German police and fire brigade came to his assistance.
On 17 April 1963, nineteen-year-old Wolfgang Engels tried to break through the wall in a novel way, using a Soviet armoured personnel carrier. As a young soldier he had helped to put up the barbed-wire barriers in August 1961, and now, employed by the National People’s Army as a panel beater, he decided to liberate a personnel carrier from the garage where he was working. Engels d
rove straight at the Wall, but unfortunately the Wall was rather stronger than the personnel carrier. However, the impact was sufficient to create a hole, through which the young German could scramble, only to find himself enmeshed in barbed wire. At that moment, a border guard approached him, and, as he told a History Channel documentary in 2009, “I found myself standing in the middle of the rolls of barbed wire. I didn’t even feel the bullets hitting me.”
Engels was saved by the new rules of engagement that followed Fechter’s death. A West German policeman provided covering fire and Engels pulled himself over the Wall, with the assistance of some West Berliners, who took him to a local bar. “I came to on top of the counter,” he later joked. “When I turned my head and saw all the Western brands of liquor on the shelf, I knew that I had made it.” Although seriously injured, Engels survived.
Possibly emboldened by Engels’ actions as well as previous successful escapes by this method in December 1962 and February 1963, a group of young East Berliners stole a bus on 12 May and tried to break through the cement barriers at the Invalidenstrasse border. They so nearly made it, too – but the 138 shots fired by the border guards stopped the bus a mere three feet from the final barrier, and it skidded into the anti-tank wall. Driver Gerd Keil and two of the passengers were seriously injured; all eight on board were arrested and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to ten years.
Cars were an obvious way of transporting people across the border, but the guards tried to be rigorous in their searches. They couldn’t anticipate that someone would simply try to drive underneath the barriers that they had set up – but when Hans Meixner did exactly that a few days after Keil’s failed attempt in May 1963, the guards acted quickly to prevent anyone else following suit.
