by Paul Simpson
As Richter learned later, the Stasi began to cross-reference the transit lists with the number of defectors and realized that every time he went from East to West, someone went missing. It was highly unfortunate that the occasion they decided to search his car was the time that he was carrying his sister and her fiancé across the border. Richter was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, although he was ransomed after four.
Some of the most successful escapes have formed the basis of movies, many released solely in German-speaking territories. One, however, captured the imagination of executives at the Walt Disney Company. The daring feats of Peter Strelzyk, Günter Wetzel and their families were immortalized on celluloid in the 1982 Disney feature film, Night Crossing, which gave a pretty faithful account of the Germans’ balloon passage over the border (although Wetzel has since set the record straight with a detailed account on his own website www.ballonflucht.de).
The inspiration for the flight came from an article that Wetzel’s sister-in-law showed him during a visit she made to the family from her home in America during March 1978. The report from the International Balloon Festival in the American town of Albuquerque gave Wetzel the idea of using a hot-air balloon to cross the border. It was pretty much silent and would rise well over the border fortifications. Wetzel and Strelzyk and had discussed their mutual desire to get their families to freedom in the West, and on 7 March 1978, the two families agreed to work together to get the four adults and four children away by balloon.
None of the people involved had any experience with ballooning, so they weren’t sure exactly how to go about making one. They decided to make the balloon itself with a lining fabric used for leatherwear, which they could obtain in sufficiently large quantities, and created their own burner from a propane gas cylinder, stove pipe and a valve. The “basket” was a sheet of metal with guard rails and flat steel bars to which the balloon could be fixed. However, after trying to test a prototype, they realized that they needed to rethink a number of elements.
After burning all evidence of the first balloon, Strelzyk and Wetzel began work on its successor, after evaluating various potential fabrics. Umbrella fabric, tent nylon and taffeta were the eventual choices and a second balloon was constructed, although it too presented problems with fuel supply and inflation. Disheartened, the Wetzel family decided to pull out of the project. While Günter Wetzel considered building a glider, the Strelzyks pursued other avenues of escape via the foreign embassies, but none of their plans amounted to anything.
The Strelzyks then tried to flee using their own balloon, but their flight on 3 July 1979 was unsuccessful, and they crashlanded in woods still on the East German side. A couple of weeks later, the Stasi had found the materials left by the Strelzyks at the site, leading them to be more vigilant for anyone buying the kit required for the escape. Knowing that they were running out of time, Wetzel and Strelzyk agreed to work together again. Using some ingenuity, and travelling as far as they dared, the families were able to purchase what they needed – using bedding as an alternative where absolutely necessary – and by 15 September 1979, the new balloon was ready to go. Weather conditions were ideal, so the families agreed that there was no time to test this third attempt. It would have to work first time.
At 1 a.m. on the morning of 16 September, the two families arrived at the launch site, between Oberlemnitz and Heinersdorf, and within ninety minutes, the balloon was inflated. After problems with the launch, in which one of the flyers was injured, they got under way, but a hole in the top of the balloon meant they had to use the burner continuously, jeopardizing how long they could remain in the air. Still, they were able to ascend to a height above the reach of the searchlights at the border. (Contrary to the impression given in the movie, the East German police weren’t hot on their heels, but it makes for a more dramatic sight on screen.)
Although they didn’t know it at the time, they had already crossed into West Germany when the burner packed up, and they were forced to land in fields, which they later discovered were at Finkenflug near Naila. Heading south to get further away from the border, they came upon a farmhouse with West German implements, and then encountered a car, containing two policemen. The pair were surprised to be asked if they were in the West, replying, “Of course you are, where else would you be?” The tense relationship between the Wetzels and the Strelzyks meant that after they arrived in the West, the two families went their separate ways.
As Günter Wetzel explains in his account of the flight, one of the biggest concerns that the families had was that someone would betray them to the authorities. They ensured that a friend from the West knew what they were doing in case they suddenly disappeared into the harsh East German prison system, and they were worried that their purchases would attract undue suspicion. Even being stopped for driving the wrong way down a one-way street was enough to make Wetzel believe that the Stasi had come for him.
Their fears were justified. By the start of the 1980s, the web of informants run by the Stasi meant that over ninety per cent of escape attempts were foiled at the planning stage, and only five to eight per cent were successful. No one could have dreamed that by the end of 1989, the Wall would be no more: those who wanted to escape still looked for ways around the restrictions placed on them by the Communist authorities, and hoped that they could trust those around them.
Twenty-four-year-old Kerstin Beck found herself embroiled in a much larger month-long adventure than she had anticipated when she decided to use her time studying languages in Afghanistan as a way of escaping from the GDR. The daughter of a diplomat, she had some experience of the world outside the Communist sphere of influence, and she wanted to see all the world, not simply the “one corner” that the East Germans allowed.
In March 1984, shortly before she was due to return to the GDR after a six-month study-visit to Kabul, she met a member of the Mujaheddin resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, who took her to her mother’s house. When she revealed that she didn’t want to return to the Communist state, they agreed to help her cross over into Pakistan. Wearing the burqa adopted by Muslim women, Beck accompanied the Mujaheddin, pretending to be a relative of the men from Tajikistan. Even as the alarm was raised in Kabul by loyal fellow East German students, and planes searched in the hunt for her, Beck was getting through the various Soviet checkpoints and closer to the border.
Her luck nearly ran out when the four armed men who were going to take her into Pakistan ran into another group who realized that Beck was a westerner – they didn’t care whether she came from the Communist East or capitalist West: she was a white woman, a symbol of what they were fighting. Even though she was wearing the burqa, the way she walked set her apart from ordinary Afghan women. Although they took her across the border, her fate was undecided: one group thought she was a Soviet spy, another wanted to ransom her, while one Mujaheddin leader wanted to marry her. Eventually she was taken by a member of an exiled Afghan family to their house in Peshwar – and from there, she was finally able to head to the airport to board a plane to Frankfurt in West Germany.
An attempt by a thirty-seven-year-old to escape using a home-made motorized glider on 20 December 1986 came to nothing when he lost his bearings and ended up exactly where he started from, near Potsdam. He might have got away with it if various residents who saw his flight hadn’t reported him to the authorities.
A flight by a light plane, piloted by an eighteen-year-old on only his second solo sortie, was rather more successful on 15 July 1987: flying beneath all radar detection, the young man flew to the British military airfield in West Berlin. The British Army kindly returned the plane to the East Germans at the Glienickie Bridge, scene of various handovers during the Cold War period including U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and Soviet human rights campaigner Anatoly Sharansky.
The bridge was the setting for two other escape attempts – one failed on 9 December 1987, when two men tried to break into the military lane, and only succeeded in detach
ing the closed entrance gate from its hinges before skidding into the gatepost. Four months later, on 10 March 1988, Bernd Puhlmann drove a truck with two friends, Gotthard Ihden and Werner Jäger, on board, at high speed through the steel barriers. Unlike many of their fellow refugees, the three men hadn’t spent ages planning their route – they were drinking beer around midnight and decided it was time to go!
Perhaps surprised by the attempt, which would turn out to be the first successful breaching of the border at this point in the twenty-seven-year history of the Wall to date, the border guards didn’t fire – although Puhlmann suspected that the propane tanks on the back of the 7.5 ton truck were a good deterrent as well (they were actually empty). The flatbed truck destroyed the two metal gates on the East German side, as well as a chain-link fence before coming to rest in West Berlin, taking off another steel gate in the process. The three men were not injured, but the truck was a write-off. The West German authorities considered prosecuting the men for destruction of property and dangerous driving!
Families were split by the Berlin Wall, in the first instance in 1961 by the erection of the barrier itself. If you were in the West when it went up, there you stayed, and vice versa. The numerous escape attempts meant that generations could be divided: youngsters were often more daring, and participated in the various schemes, while their parents remained behind, often suffering as a direct result of their children’s activities. One particular family was determined to be reunited on the Western side of the Wall, although it would take fourteen years for all three of the Bethke brothers to achieve that.
“Life in freedom is impossible without risk,” Holger Bethke told Popular Mechanics magazine after his daring flight from Berlin in 1983. He was the second of the three to escape: his brother Ingo had preceded him eight years before. Ingo had been drafted into the army, and was posted along the border between East and West Germany, near the river Elba, an area regularly patrolled by border guards. The fast-moving current was usually sufficient deterrent to those wishing to cross, even without the death strip containing mines, barbed wire and tripwires leading to automatic weapons that fired pellets at anyone caught within range.
Four months after returning to Berlin, and now working as a street sweeper, the twenty-one-year-old Ingo rented a car and on 26 May 1975, he drove back to the location he had chosen to cross with a trusted friend. The two men edged forward, using a small paddle to pat the ground in the minefield, in case Ingo’s memory of where the mines were laid failed him. The theory was that if the paddle caused a mine to explode, they might be captured, but at least they wouldn’t get all or, worse, part of their legs blown off. All went well, and they weren’t spotted by the guards. Reaching the bank of the Elba, they inflated mattresses, and floated out on them into the water. It was pitch black, and the two men paddled as quietly as they could across the 150-metre-wide river towards the Western bank.
When they pulled themselves on shore, they were surprised to find a West German border patrol van. According to Ingo, when he tapped on the van window, one of the officers told him it was a cold night to go swimming; Ingo disagreed. “Not when you’re swimming out of the East.”
Ingo’s escape had repercussions for his family. His parents had both been high-ranking officials within the East German administration, and were forced to quit their jobs. The youngest of the three brothers, Holger, was constantly followed by the Stasi, putting him under intolerable pressure. However, he too outwitted the border patrols and the secret police.
By 1983, the fourth generation of the Berlin Wall was in full operation, complete with death strip, lights, automatic weapons, beds of nails, brushed sand which would show up footprints, and tripwires. Trying to cross it was regarded as little short of suicide, even though there were some who still tried. If he couldn’t go through it, and he couldn’t go under it because of the vibration sensors and the tunnels that the border patrols themselves had created, Holger would have to go over it.
The plan was the brainchild of a friend of Holger’s, Michael Becker, a plumbing and heating fitter, who first tried to escape during a holiday in Hungary in 1979. He made it across several barriers that partitioned Hungary from Austria, and had only one ten-feet-high fence left to climb when he was spotted by a border guard, arrested, and sentenced to twenty months’ imprisonment. On his release, he was even more resolved to get away, and took inspiration from a West German magazine article about earlier escapes – which included details of the Holzapfel family’s zipwire run from the top of the House of Ministries back in 1965. What worked once could work again, albeit in a revised form.
When Becker approached Holger with the idea in November 1982, the youngest Bethke was delighted, even if Becker only gave his plan an eighty per cent chance of success. The odds were improved when Holger brought Ingo in on the scheme using letters with fake return addresses, cryptic telephone calls and messages via third parties. (In the account given to Popular Mechanics shortly after Holger and Becker reached the West, Ingo’s identity was kept secret, presumably for fear of further reprisals against his parents and other brother.)
Becker made some wooden rollers, supposedly for a cart for his father’s garden, and obtained 297 feet of quarter-inch steel cable from a friend who worked at a crane-making factory. He and Holger scouted out a suitable location, choosing a house on the corner of Schmollerstrasse and Bouchestrasse. Its top floor was a storey higher than the building opposite it on the Western side, and in all their visits, neither man saw a border guard near (after their escape, a new watchtower was built at the spot!). Practising their manoeuvre in a local park, Holger and Becker pretended they were training for the circus.
They needed to get the cable over the wall to the far side, where Ingo would be waiting, which meant learning how to shoot a bow and arrow. But by 30 March 1983, the two men were ready to make their getaway. Dressed as electricians, they lugged their equipment to the top floor of the house, and waited for darkness.
At 3 a.m. on 31 March, they made contact with Ingo via walkie-talkie, and then shot the arrow across to the West. The guard in the nearest watchtower seemed to be asleep, and didn’t stir, even when the arrow fell short and landed in a tree. The second arrow landed on a flat roof. The third missed the target but landed in the courtyard of the building where Ingo was waiting, although it took him an hour to find it, lodged in a tall bush. Ingo attached his end of the line to his BMW, to provide maximum tension, after the other two wrapped theirs around the chimney. Even though the chimney started to buckle under the strain, no one was alerted – not even the little old lady (a genuine small elderly person!) in the apartment beneath them. Holger went first, but ended up two yards from their target balcony. He therefore swung his legs up onto the cable, and shimmied down. Becker followed and the two men were safely in the West.
That left just Egbert, the middle brother, in the East, and unsurprisingly the Stasi made his life hell after Holger’s escape. They watched his every move, and ransacked his apartment. At one stage, they tried to entice him with a free ticket to the West, but he maintained his love for the GDR, knowing it was a trap. In Cologne, Ingo and Holger ran a bar called the Al Capone, and tried to think of ways of reuniting with their brother.
The answer came courtesy of Playboy magazine. Membership cards from Hugh Hefner’s club had once upon a time been able to fool the guards, and now a feature on a baby helicopter within the magazine’s pages inspired Ingo. When he went to an air fair in Hanover to examine it, he discovered it was only a prototype, but a chance conversation with two French pilots alerted him to the existence of “ultralights” – miniature planes, of the type used at the start of the James Bond film Octopussy to enable 007 to escape from danger. Five metres long, with a ten-metre wingspan, they could seat two people and fly at around eighty miles per hour.
Ingo and Holger not only had to buy the planes, but learn to fly them as well. After numerous scrapes – including losing three propellers, burning out engines and even
breaking a wing – they eventually felt confident that they could pull off their plan: fly over the Wall into East Berlin, swoop down and collect Egbert, and then fly back to the West.
On 25 May 1989, they were ready to go. Egbert had established a pattern of jogging in Treptower Park early each morning, so when he received the coded message from his brothers, he was equally prepared. Now veterans at evading the border guards, the brothers had chosen their time carefully: they knew that the guards were forbidden from firing at aerial targets without permission, and at 4 a.m., the odds of a guard gaining that permission from his battalion commander (who would probably have to refer it up the chain of command anyway) and firing at them in the few seconds that they would be noticeable were negligible. They didn’t take chances though: in what was probably the cleverest part of their plan, they affixed huge red stars to the underside of the planes’ wings. Even if a guard was suspicious, he would think twice, if not considerably more times, before risking using his initiative and firing on a Soviet plane.
Flying over the Wall from a sports park in the West, Ingo and Holger piloted their planes to Treptower Park, where Egbert was waiting. Ingo came in to land; Holger stayed at altitude, watching for any signs of the guards. Egbert raced to the plane, and Ingo took off again, following his brother over the Wall. As they had hoped, the red stars were sufficient precaution to avoid an attack, and once they were safely in the West, they brought the planes in to land on what was at that time a field outside the Reichstag building, which had previously served as the seat of government for the united Germany. Abandoning the planes, they had a rapturous reunion.
