The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (50 page)

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 directed 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.

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 detaching 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!