The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (51 page)

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.

The Bethke brothers admitted that had they known the Wall would be coming down within six months, they would probably have still gone ahead with the rescue, but there was no way that anyone could have foreseen the speed at which Communism collapsed. Across the summer of 1989, the Iron Curtain that had separated Communist Europe from the West since 1947 started to unravel, and on 9 November 1989, East Germans were given permission to travel to the West unconditionally. It wasn’t what the East German government had meant to do, but once the announcement was mistakenly made, it proved impossible to stem the tide.

The honour of being the last known escaper via Checkpoint Charlie went to Hans-Peter Spitzner. The teacher’s wife Ingrid had been granted permission to visit relatives in Austria, and Spitzner was determined to follow her with their seven-year-old daughter Peggy. Relying on the rule that military personnel’s vehicles were not searched when they went through the border, Spitzner tried to find an American soldier who would help him and Peggy. For two days, his search was fruitless but on 18 August 1989, just as he was on the point of giving up, a young serviceman, Eric Yaw, agreed to assist.

Persuading Peggy that this was just an adventure on their way to see her mother, Spitzner and his daughter squeezed into the boot of Yaw’s Toyota Camry. After an agonising half hour, during which the car was stopped at Checkpoint Charlie, the boot was opened and they were in the West. Although the border patrol used infra-red cameras to check for escapers – at one stage they had even used X-rays without thought of the consequences to those exposed to them – Spitzner believed that the car’s black paintwork, already hot in the August sunshine, masked their presence. All that remained was to stop Ingrid from returning to the GDR, and a hastily dictated note to the receptionist at her hotel ensured that the family was reunited.

Official figures suggest that there were at least 5,075 successful escape attempts from Berlin during the twenty-eight years that the Wall stood. No one knows how many plans were foiled by the Stasi. At least 136 people died trying to flee from the GDR. The watchtowers and the death strips may have been dismantled, and some of those who committed state-sponsored murder found guilty, but there are still many in the city who remember the time when escaping was worth anything – even losing your life.

Disney’s
Night Crossing
is one of the few English-language fact-based films about escaping from East Germany. It takes some liberties with the facts (the Stasi were nowhere near as close on the families’ heels as the movie indicates) but the story itself was dramatic enough that it didn’t need much spicing up. The 2001 German film
Der Tunnel
is based on the creation of Tunnel 29; the 1963 West German film
Durchbruch Lok 234
takes the 1961 train breakthrough as its source.

Spy thrillers of the 1960s used the Wall as a backdrop: the end of John Le Carre’s
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,
both the original novel and its film version starring Richard Burton, sees Alec Leamas choose not to complete his escape from East Berlin.
Funeral in Berlin,
the second movie featuring Michael Caine as British agent Harry Palmer (unnamed in Len Deighton’s original book) is centred on an escape attempt; the 1972 TV series
Jason King
deliberately used a similar plot in the episode “A Page Before Dying” by Tony Williamson.

Sources:

Beck, Kristin:
Verschleierte Flucht: Mein Weg in die Freiheit
(Ullstein Taschenbuchvlg, 2006)

Berlin Film Unit documentary:
The Wall
(Berlin Film Unit, 1962:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nch5MbnvTqY
)

Der Spiegel,
28 March 1962: “DER DRITTE MANN WARTETE IM GRAB”

Des Moines Register,
12 September 1966: “5 Bulldoze Way Into West Under Hail of Red Bullets”

Funder, Anna:
Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall
(Granta, 2003)

Hertle, Hans-Herman:
The Berlin Wall Story
(Christoph Links, 2011)

http://www.ballonflucht.de/html/englisch.html
: Günter Wetzel’s own account (translated by Gary Holland) of their flight. Note, where this contradicts other accounts, this has been followed.

National Geographic documentary:
The Berlin Wall: Escape to Freedom
(Michael Hoff Productions, 2006)

Palm Beach Daily News,
8 December 1961: “Sensational Escape Story Told by Harry Deterling”

Salt Lake Tribune,
15 September 1964: “Sharp US Note Protests Gunfire at Berlin Wall”

Taylor, Frederick:
The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961-9 November 1989
(Bloomsbury, 2009)

The Florence Times,
30 January 1963: “Trapeze Artist Makes Slide to Freedom” from an AP report

The Milwaukee Journal,
24 November 1969: “German Escapees Devise New Tricks”

AP News: 10 March 1988: “Three East Germans in Truck Smash Border Barriers at ‘Bridge of Spies’”

Popular Mechanics,
November 1983: “Daring High-Wire Ride to Freedom”