by Paul Simpson
Meixner had noticed that a sports car stopped at Checkpoint Charlie had nearly slipped beneath the barrier when the young woman driving it lost her concentration and let go of the handbrake. The twenty-two-year-old Austrian student was able to mark the exact height of the barrier, and then searched for a car that would be able to pass beneath. The British Austin Healey Sprite fit the bill, and even came with a detachable windscreen.
Like Leslie Collitt a couple of years earlier, Meixner had fallen in love with an East German girl and wanted to live with her in the West. He therefore planned to bring her and her mother through in the car. Of course, it wouldn’t be as easy as accelerating up to Checkpoint Charlie and cheerfully driving under the barrier. The East Germans had built four-feet-high walls around which the cars had to drive as they approached the border. Meixner practised assiduously at driving round these at high speed, creating a mock version of the border crossing in a deserted space in West Berlin using oil drums and piles of bricks to simulate the obstacles.
On the chosen day, Meixner drove into East Berlin and collected his fiancée and future mother-in-law, hiding them behind the seats and removing the windscreen. When he reached the start of the inspection point, rather than meekly going into the bay to allow his papers and vehicle to be checked, he floored the accelerator and shot round between the walls, exactly as he had practised. The guards were too astonished to open fire, and Meixner reached the final straight without a shot aimed at him. Pointing the car directly at the barrier, Meixner ducked his head and slammed the accelerator pedal to the floor. The Healey Sprite sprang forward, and passed beneath the barrier, exactly as planned.
Double metal barriers were erected by the East Germans within days. No one was going to emulate Meixner’s feat. They’d just have to think of something different – as Horst Breistoffer did a few years later, removing the battery and heating system from a 1964 Italian Isetta car to create a compartment inside which an escapee could hide. Nine East Germans were brought across before Breistoffer’s pimpernel activities were brought to a close when he was caught with the tenth refugee.
Jockey Michael Meyer felt claustrophobic within the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and determined to escape in the late summer of 1964. On Sunday 13 September, he decided to swim for it across the River Spree, but after thirty minutes in the water he realized that he hadn’t reached the Western side. At 5.20 a.m., he approached the barbed-wire fence close to Checkpoint Charlie, but as soon as he went beneath it, the border guards started firing at him. The Stasi claimed that they fired 300 shots during the incident, some of which, as the US Ambassador noted to the East German commandant in a sharply written note the following day, penetrated the American sector, risking the lives of residents and US Army personnel in the area. At least five of the rounds hit Meyer, but he struggled on. US Sergeant Hans-Werner Puhl went to Meyer’s aid, even though East German border guards were trying to pull him back. Puhl threw a gas grenade, which forced the Communists to retreat, and Meyer managed to cross the wall, with assistance from a rope that Puhl threw him. Although he lost a large amount of blood, Meyer recovered in hospital, although one of the bullets remained in his back.
Events three weeks later were to have long-lasting repercussions for those wishing to escape from Berlin, when East German guard Egon Schultz was shot during the shutting down of what became known as Tunnel 57 (the tunnel titles derived from the total number of successful escapees). The West German students responsible for the tunnel were held accountable for the shooting in the East German propaganda that followed – and it was only many years later that the truth came out. In the meantime, many East Germans became wary of involvement in such attempts, and escapers lost public sympathy.
The tunnel was the brainchild of Peter Schulenberg and engineering student Hubert Hohlbein, whose mother was in the GDR, as well as future Skylab astronaut Reinhard Furrer. It ran from 97 Bernauerstrasse on the Western side of the Wall for 145 metres, coming out in a courtyard at 55 Strelitzerstrasse. Although only seventy-five square centimetres wide, the tunnel took six months to dig, with the students working in two-week shifts underground, not coming up for air during that time and risking their lives in the hot, cramped, and scary conditions – if any part of the tunnel roof or wall collapsed, the digger would be lost for ever. Hohlbein was the first to enter East Berlin from the tunnel, after they realized that the soil through which they were digging had become softer, and they could smell air.
Schulenberg collected the first batch of escapees, who travelled through the tunnel on the night of 3/4 October. One of the first through was Hohlbein’s mother. In total, fifty-seven East Germans fled that night. Unfortunately, a second batch weren’t so lucky. Although the tunnel-diggers believed that one of the potential escapers betrayed them, Stasi records suggest that two of their operatives had spotted Furrer and the other students who were guarding the tunnel entrance at Strelitzerstrasse and thought they were suspicious. The students thought that the plain clothes Stasi men were really civilians looking for the escape route, and didn’t demur when they said they wanted to fetch a friend who would also want to come along. Instead the Stasi brought back the border guards, including twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Schultz.
When faced with the guards’ machine guns, the students knew they needed to retreat rapidly, and student Christian Zobel fired a warning shot to alert those who were down the tunnel. This provoked a wave of firing, during which Schultz was hit by ten bullets. The students dived back into the tunnel, and hurried as quickly as they could back to the West, fearful that at any moment a hand grenade could be thrown in behind them, bringing the walls crashing down to entomb them. Probably because they were tending to the fatally injured Schultz, however, the guards didn’t pursue the students, and all of them reached safety.
Schultz’s death became a political cause célèbre, with the East German authorities making great play of the “treacherous murder” and “assassination” of the border guard. The students admitted that a shot had been fired, but there was no proof that the bullet had hit Schultz. They sent balloons over the Wall near Checkpoint Charlie stating that “The causative murderer is the East German secret police. These men, with great acting skill, first pretended to be fugitives. Reluctant to intervene themselves, they instead fetched the soldier and had him clarify the situation. But the real murderer is the system that addressed the massive flight of its citizens not by removing the cause of the problem, but by building a wall and giving the order for Germans to shoot Germans.”
East Germany demanded the students’ extradition; instead the West German public prosecutor closed the case. More than a hundred different institutions were named after the martyr in the following months. In 1992, an investigation proved beyond a doubt that Schultz had been killed by bullets from a Kalashnikov, fired by one of his colleagues. Zobel’s bullet did hit Schultz, but lodged in his lung and wasn’t the cause of death. The damage to the escapers’ cause, though, was long-lasting.
While many of those who wanted to flee had to risk the death strip, the barbed wire and the border guards’ machine guns, various groups found unusual methods of exit during the mid-1960s, as the defences at the Wall started to be made even stronger. In January 1965, six people, including a seventeen-year-old girl, hid inside wooden cable drums that belonged to the Berlin Electricity Works, and were transported to West Berlin by haulage contractors.
The Holzapfel family, complete with their nine-year-old son, used a zipwire to cross from the roof of the East Berlin House of Ministries (the home now of the German Finance Ministry) to the West on the night of 28 July 1965. The guards charged with watching for such manoeuvres, after Hans Klein’s escape three years earlier, assumed that the Stasi were responsible, and were using an unorthodox method of infiltrating agents into West Berlin!
A year later, five East Germans bulldozed their way through the border at Staaken. Knowing that they would be fired upon when they approached the wall in their stolen vehicle, th
e escapers stuffed rags into the cabin, since they couldn’t accumulate enough steel plate in time. But they did think of a back-up plan if they didn’t succeed: “My friend had a lot of pepper with him,” the driver later explained. “And if a border guard had come along and caught us, he would have thrown it in his eyes.”
The driver, a twenty-four-year-old professional bulldozer operator, was accompanied by his pregnant wife and their four-year-old son, as well as another married couple. According to the interview he gave with the Associated Press, they had originally intended to break through the day before, but hadn’t had time to weld steel plates to anything beyond the fuel tank and the windows.
On the morning of Sunday 11 September 1966, they knew they needed to go, or risk discovery. They bulldozed their way through the four barbed-wire fences before ploughing into a tree. More than a hundred bullets were fired at them, but they only received slight injuries. However, they knew they had to get out of the bulldozer before the sub-machine guns could inflict any more damage, so they went under a garden fence and ran into the house, with the boy crying, “Are we in the West? Are we in the West?” The East Germans pulled the bulldozer back and repaired the fence.
With the Wall becoming ever-harder to cross directly, people started to find ways around it altogether. Bernd Boettger’s way of crossing the border was unique to him: he actually devised his own new method of transport, which then went into production around the world. His escape in 1968 necessitated the creation of the aqua-scooter.
The chemical technician had spotted the lightship, the Gedser, anchored in the North Sea fifteen miles or so off the beach at Mecklenburg over eighteen months before he finally clambered aboard the Danish ship in September 1968. Although he was a strong swimmer and former lifeguard, Boettger quickly realized that he wouldn’t be able to battle the currents and temperature of the water, so would need some form of mechanical assistance. However, when he first tried out his prototype, he was noticed by the marine patrols, and arrested. Although he was sentenced to three months in jail for an illegal attempt at border crossing, the term was suspended because he worked in an essential industry. He was even allowed to remain based near the sea.
Boettger worked on the second machine for a year, knowing that the tenacity of the guards meant that he would only have one shot at this. If he was caught again, then the East German authorities would have no option but to throw the book at him. His craft had to be quiet, efficient, and reliable. The final machine lived up to all his requirements, and would give him around fifteen miles’ range.
Late in the evening of 8 September 1968, he entered the water at Warnemuende, just a few hundred metres from the guard post. Immediately submerging to a depth at which the guards couldn’t spot him, Boettger spent ninety minutes underwater before surfacing and heading for where he hoped the lightship would be. Three hours after spotting the light he was picked up by the crew, after a total of five hours in the water.
As a result of the publicity given to his escape by the European press a few weeks later, Boettger’s invention came to the attention of Rockwell International, who developed it for commercial use. Sadly, Boettger himself died in a diving accident off the coast of Spain in the early 1970s.
The East German authorities regularly added to the perils of the death strip. Dogs, mines automatically firing weapons – all were present to prevent anyone from treacherously trying to leave the Democratic Republic. And not everything was immediately obvious to the naked eye, as Miriam Webber discovered.
The sixteen-year-old student had been arrested for sedition in the autumn of 1968, after preparing posters complaining about the police reaction to protests in Leipzig following the demolition of the old University Church of St Paul on 30 May that year. She and a friend had been kept in solitary confinement for a month until they broke down and confessed. When she was let out to await her trial, Webber decided to flee the country.
Heading to Berlin from her hometown on New Year’s Eve 1968, Webber naively looked for weaknesses in the Wall, discarding the Brandenburg Gate because the Wall was too high, even though there didn’t appear to be any other barriers there (in fact they were all on the far – Western – side of the Gate, within the hemispherical section of the Wall at that point). She believed she had found what she was looking for when travelling by train near the Bornholmer Bridge.
As fireworks were celebrating the New Year in the West, Webber started to make her way through the gardens that abutted onto the death strip, by chance not encountering any of the guards who normally patrolled them, and climbed a ladder to look over the hedge at the strip. She managed to get through the barbed wire, cutting her hands to shreds in the process, and started to cross the death strip on hands and knees, all the while expecting the guards to spot her. To her surprise, despite the fact that the strip was constantly illuminated, no one spotted her. She froze when a giant German Shepherd guard dog seemed alerted to her presence, but it didn’t raise the alarm.
Webber crossed the final barbed-wire fence, and thought she was going to make it. She was actually at the border Wall itself, looking across into West Berlin – and as she moved toward the final railing, she activated nearly invisible tripwires, which now criss-crossed the entirety of the area in front of her. She had been so careful, but was caught because of yet another security measure.
During her interrogation, the Stasi were keen to discover exactly how Webber had known the way to evade the security measures. How did she know how to cross barbed wire? Who told her about the proximity of the gardens to the Wall at the Bornholmer Bridge? How did she persuade the highly trained guard dog not to raise the alarm? When they didn’t believe her, Webber made up a story that should have set off as many alarm bells for her interrogators as the tripwires on the Wall. She claimed that she had met men in a bar who had given her handy hints for Wall-jumping – something that in the atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion that permeated Berlin in the Cold War days would simply never have happened. The Stasi followed up her “lead” and eventually realized they had been fooled. Webber was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment and told that she had nearly started World War III – if the guards on either side had fired at each other during her flight, the situation could easily have escalated!
US General George S. Patton once said, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” East Germans wanting a new life in the West knew they had to come up with as many diverse ideas as possible to evade the Stasi and the border patrols. Although a Milwaukee Journal feature from 1969 suggested that an average of 500 refugees were still crossing the border each month, the true figure seems to be more like a fifth of that. Some were audacious, borrowing Soviet Army uniforms and taking advantage of the rule that allowed uniformed military personnel complete access to the city. At one point, Playboy club membership cards were waved towards the guards; they looked sufficiently like the passes allowing free access that the border soldiers were fooled. Photographer Horst Beyer persuaded a group of attractive athletes into posing with guards at Freidrichstrasse, then kept backing up to get the “perfect photo” until he had crossed the line into West Berlin.
And while Bernd Boettger devised a completely new mode of transport, a group of escapees in 1969 looked back to history for inspiration – back around 3,000 years, in fact, to the Trojan War. The siege of Troy had gone on for ten years before the Greeks pretended to depart, leaving a huge wooden horse outside the gates of Troy apparently as a peace offering to the gods. The Trojans duly dragged the surprisingly heavy object within the gates – and that night the Greeks who had been hiding within let themselves out and put the town to the sword.
The Germans didn’t have a wooden horse available. They did, however, have a cow – or, more accurately, a bull, a display item that was transported between East and West. By July 1969, it had already been used on two occasions to bring escapees over the border, but on 7 July, the border guards direct
ed the van in which it was being carried from the back of the queue at the Drewitz border crossing. Opening the rear of the van they found the wooden crate, with the cow inside – and inside that was an eighteen-year-old girl, only identified as Angelika, from Karl-Marx-Stadt who was travelling to meet her fiancé. He had paid 5,000 DM for the escape, and would owe a further 5,000 when she reached the West. Angelika was imprisoned for two years and ten months, although a ransom was paid by the West German government after four months to ensure her release; the professionals responsible for the cow received three years in prison each.
During the 1970s, the border between West and East became easier to cross – so long as you were West German. In 1971, it was decreed that West Berliners could visit the GDR once or several times for up to thirty days a year “for humanitarian, family, religious, cultural and tourist reasons” while the following year, those who fled to the West before 1 January 1972 lost their East German citizenship but could re-enter East Germany without fear of prosecution. East German citizens under retirement age could make trips to the West (provided there were hostages left behind to ensure their return). A Basic Treaty, signed at the end of the year, normalized relations even further.
That didn’t halt the flood of escape attempts from East to West Germany. According to official GDR figures, there were 2,699 in 1972 and 3,004 in 1973, of which 242 resulted in successful “border breakthroughs (it’s worth noting that figures compiled after unification suggest that there were really 1,245 successes in 1972, and 1,842 in 1973, 144 of these in total through Berlin itself). Border troops were reminded of their responsibility to call, “Stop! Border guards! Hands up!” before firing but told that weapons were to be used “ruthlessly” to prevent escapes.
Some of these escapes were the work of Hartmut Richter, who had fled to the West in 1966, by swimming across the Teltow Canal dividing Berlin. His motto was very simple: “The first one who comes over helps the others to escape.” When the transit rules were relaxed, Richter crossed over the border regularly and realized that once the border guards started to recognize faces, they weren’t so stringent in their security checks. In 1973, he was asked by an acquaintance if he knew of anyone who might assist with helping an escapee; Richter decided to do it himself, and the young woman was the first of thirty-three East Germans who Richter smuggled through in the boot of his car, after picking them up from a shed on his parents’ property near the village of Glindow, or from a bus stop near Finkenkrug.
