Artie Mead: Hi guys, welcome back to The History Buff—the History Buff series on the Berlin Wall, where we chart the history of the wall that divided a city for 28 years. So, in the last episode, I was joined by fellow Berlin tour guide Quincy, where we discussed the building of the wall on that fateful night in August 1961 and its various revisions and additions over its 28-year existence.
So, with the building of the Berlin Wall, friends and families were cut off from each other overnight, intensifying the yearning for reunification and freedom as individuals sought to escape political oppression, economic hardship, and the stifling constraints of life under a repressive regime in which you weren’t allowed to leave.
So, in this episode, we are going to discuss the escapes that took place at the Wall, both successes and failures, and the tragic deaths at the Wall. And for this, I am joined by another fellow Berlin tour guide, Tina, of Tina’s Tours Berlin. Welcome, Tina.
Tina Searle: Thank you, Artie. Happy to be here.
Artie Mead: Yeah. Very, very happy to have you. Do you want to just, first of all, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into touring here in Berlin?
Tina Searle: Yeah. So, I’m an Australian. I’ve been living in Berlin for seven years this summer. I came to Berlin on a nerdy history vacation because I’ve always been really fascinated by modern history. It was one of my favourite subjects in high school. My mum and dad really brought modern history to life. They’d pull a book off the bookshelf and link it to the newspapers and the news that we watched as a family at seven o’clock every night. And I became aware of how fascinating human story is, how silly humans are. You know, this whole expression, those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. I became, I became aware of this—it’s a history rhyming with itself kind of nature. And I just found it fascinating. I chose psychology rather than history at university, although I played with history, but I was worried that I wouldn’t get any social jobs with lots of humans if I studied history. Hence why I did psych. But I kept reading history books for fun. And that’s what.
Artie Mead: I do as well. I, I, I’m not a trained historian. I just read a lot of history books.
Tina Searle: Literally favourite thing to read—history books. So just sort of relax. That’s how I.
Artie Mead: Relax.
Tina Searle: Yeah, I just had a week’s vacation, and I read a book called Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism. Can recommend. Fascinating. And yeah, I had such an interest in modern history that when I’d saved the money for a Euro trip, I wanted to come to Berlin. I spent a whole 10 days here, which you would think is a lot of time for one city. I thought that would be enough for all the museums and the tours I wanted to do. I, I fell completely in love with the city. I decided to move here. When I did, I didn’t speak German, so I didn’t really have professional options in my field of psychology. And so I asked the question, okay, is there a job I could do in Berlin in English that would fulfil me, that I would really love, and that is how I became the world’s best psychologist. Most professionally fulfilled person—as a Berlin tour guide. Love.
Artie Mead: That. Spectacularly.
Tina Searle: Lucky.
Artie Mead: That is a lovely, lovely story. And you know, you’re very good at your job, and it’s very clear that you have a passion for it. So yes, I think you’re a perfect fit for The History Buff. And by the way, I, you’ll probably hear me refer to Tina as Miss Ernestina because that’s actually her real name, and it’s just the best name in the world. So Miss Ernestina, thank you very much for joining us.
Tina Searle: Thanks, Artie.
Artie Mead: So I guess before we get started, we should maybe mention a couple of facts and figures and maybe clear up a few misunderstandings about the Berlin Wall because, as we’ve discussed in episodes beforehand, the way you have to remember Berlin and the Berlin Wall is that the Berlin Wall was a barrier that was built around West Berlin, because remember, West Berlin is this island of Western land in East Germany, about 170 kilometres inside East Germany.
Okay. And obviously, this series is about the Berlin Wall, so we’ll be talking mostly about that. But there was actually another border. Okay. And this was the 7,000-kilometre border between the Eastern and Western blocs that actually ripped through the heart of Europe, stretching from northern Finland all the way down to the Black Sea. And that was actually closed in 1952. So yeah, it’s, I guess, important to make sure that people know about that—that it wasn’t just Berlin. And people say often, why didn’t people just go around the Berlin Wall? But actually, the reason that they couldn’t is because, yeah, it was built around the whole city.
Tina Searle: I love this one expression that, you know, the Iron Curtain—they say it descended across Europe all over the continent. The borders between the Socialist East and the Capitalist West were sealed. And West Berlin was like the hole in the Iron Curtain. I love that analogy.
Artie Mead: As in between 1952 and 1961.
Tina Searle: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. The last hole.
Artie Mead: Exactly. So, obviously, a lot of escape attempts happened at that inner German border that became that, you know, was part of the Iron Curtain. Now, I think, as tour guides, I think the most widely accepted figure for—because when you talk about escapes at the Berlin Wall, you often talk about it as in, in general, also at the inner German border—and I would say the most commonly repeated figure is that there were just over, I think, a hundred thousand escape attempts in total. And of those, only 5,000 were successful.
Tina Searle: So as I understood, that’s when we’re talking just the Berlin Wall and just from the point where the first generation of wall was built. So we always say in Berlin, 5,000 successful escapes over the wall. I think one of the state organisations has 5,075. But then recently, checking all my facts for this podcast, I found an actual government state website that said between the building of the wall—so 13th of August 1961—and the end of 1961, there were actually 50,000 escapes. So, I went hunting with lots of our nerd colleagues, as we do, and I was like, ‘Hey guys, what’s this about? We all say 5,000 escapes,’ and a colleague explained that that 5,000 count is really from when the first generation of wall was complete.
Artie Mead: Okay.
Tina Searle: But of course, they sealed the border overnight on the 13th of August 1961. But things like the underground sewage systems—to seal off the full sewage system—was actually a several-month process. So when we say there’s 5,000 successful escapes over the wall, I think we’re talking just that loop that enclosed the island of West Berlin and from the point when the first generation of wall was actually built.
Artie Mead: Right. Okay. Well, thank you for clarifying because, yeah, we as tour guides, we have a lot of different sort of sources and facts and figures that we have to remember. And I think, obviously, you know, they come from different sources that can often be quite, sort of, you know, differing, really.
Tina Searle: There’s also—there are so many numbers out there with this kind of thing, because it’s so hard to know what.
Artie Mead: Variables are you using as well. Yeah.
Tina Searle: And East Germany suppressed, of course, stories of escapes. They very much suppressed stories of people who died trying to escape because it made the regime look very bad. Um, and so the statistics themselves are really dubious, really, really questionable. There’s actually a whole graveyard of unidentified bodies up in Denmark of people who washed up on the coastline. And it’s suspected that a significant proportion of them were, would-be escapers from Socialist East Germany.
Artie Mead: So, people who tried to escape from the coast?
Tina Searle: Yeah, they think so. Yeah. But just a stack of unidentified bodies that, over the years, washed up on the Danish coastline, and the suspicion is many of them were, would-be escapers. Escape this. And so that’s partly why we have so many, so many different numbers on this. Yeah.
Artie Mead: The number of people that were killed trying to do so—trying to escape—was about 600. Now, between 1961 and 1989—so the 28 years that the wall was up—at least 140 were killed or died at the Berlin Wall. So, in connection with obviously the East German regime: 101 people who tried to flee through the border fortifications were shot, died by accident, or committed suicide doing so; 30 people from the East and West who were shot, who were not trying to flee; and one Soviet soldier who was shot or died by accident. Now, eight on-duty GDR—so East German border soldiers—were killed by military deserters, comrades, a refugee, an escape helper, or a West Berlin policeman. And at least 251 travellers also died during or after passing through checkpoints at Berlin border crossings, and unknown numbers of people suffered and died from distress and despair that was caused to them by the Berlin Wall. So, we can put numbers on these things, but actually at the end of the day, a lot of this stuff is not something you can really measure, you know—the distress and the trauma that was caused by the Berlin Wall going up. So, well, I guess when you’re talking about escapes, I think the most kind of famous escapes that people know about are the tunnel escapes, I suppose.
Tina Searle: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Around 300 people successfully escaped through tunnels that we’re aware of. About 70 tunnels were started, and only about 19 of them were successful, which I think really strongly demonstrates how hard it is to build an escape tunnel.
Artie Mead: Well, and also especially in Berlin, because the thing is Berlin’s soil—so the composition—so Berlin is built on a swamp. So, basically, that means that the composition of the soil is primarily sandy, which is pretty unstable and prone to collapse. It has a very high water table, so it’s very waterlogged. So, it requires quite difficult engineering, and you’ve got to remember that most of the people who are digging these tunnels were not professional tunnel diggers, okay? So, yeah, I mean, I guess the most famous tunnel escape was that of Tunnel 57, okay? And that was organised by Wolfgang.
Tina Searle: Fuchs.
Artie Mead: Fuchs, yeah. So it was basically a tunnel that was built from East to West.
Tina Searle: No, built west to east. West to east, yeah.
Artie Mead: Sorry. That’s the thing. Also, most of these tunnels were actually dug from west to east because there obviously wasn’t quite so much surveillance in the west. In the east, you had a very repressive regime of surveillance, and, you know, materials that were used for digging tunnels were restricted.
Tina Searle: Even if you lived in one of the wall-adjacent neighbourhoods in East Berlin, if you weren’t politically reliable—say you had someone in the family or your friend circle who’s identified as a dissenter—often the state would actually move you. Right. You would be moved to a different neighbourhood. And there was much heavier surveillance in the wall-adjacent neighbourhoods. Your odds of pulling off the digging of a tunnel from the eastern side were so thin. Even in the west, there were still Stasi—so East German secret police—agents out and about doing lots of spying. And so, when you read accounts from these tunnel builders, the things they had to do were incredible. They had to make sure, for example, that they never emerged from the building where they were digging dirty. They had to make sure that when they came out, they looked fresh as daisies. No one would ever suspect that they’d just been digging a tunnel, because even in the west there was surveillance—and, of course, it’s a hundred times heavier in the wall-adjacent neighbourhoods in the east, which is why most of these tunnels are dug west to east.
Artie Mead: Yes, exactly. So the tunnel was built from Bernauer Straße in the west to Strelitzer Straße 55 in the east. So, 120 people were planning on escaping, and someone called Reinhard Führer guided them to the tunnel entrance in the courtyard. Now, unfortunately, among the escapees was a Stasi collaborator—a Stasi informant—who obviously said that they wanted to escape, and he actually turned up with reinforcements from the Stasi, from the police. And, um, there was a shootout, and one of the border guards was actually killed—someone called Egon Schultz. And so, the East German government decided to really make a mArtier out of Schultz and give him a big sort of state funeral and say, you know, he did his job trying to protect the sacred borders of the GDR and all of that kind of stuff, because that’s what it was. It was, it was really a big law saying, ‘We have sacred borders that you’re not allowed to violate.’
Tina Searle: We see also how East Germany really used the story of Egon Schultz’s death. He was only 21 years old, I think, when he was killed. They used it to paint escape helpers—so West Germans who would get East Germans out—as terrorists.
Artie Mead: Exactly. Yeah. And, and so really kind of made him a mArtier. Now, it was actually only then revealed after reunification that he had actually, in fact, been shot by friendly fire. So, by the fire from a fellow East German border guard or policeman. So, if you go to the Berlin Wall Memorial, you can actually see exactly where Tunnel 57 was built. And the reason it’s called Tunnel 57 is because 57 people did actually manage to escape successfully over to the west.
Tina Searle: The single most successful individual tunnel.
Artie Mead: Yeah. So of all.
Tina Searle: The 19 tunnels that actually successfully got people out, the most went through Tunnel 57.
Artie Mead: Yeah.
Tina Searle: And I think, again, it shows how tight the Stasi’s infiltration was in East Germany, that that tunnel took about 35 people six months to dig. And most of the diggers were students from the UFRI university—the Free University at West Berlin Uni. So, 35 people dig for six months, and it is shut down after two nights.
Artie Mead: Exactly. Yeah.
Tina Searle: And it gets 57 out of a desired 120 people out.
Artie Mead: Which is still not a great payoff if you ask me. But still, I guess 57 people would say those 57 people would say differently. But anyway, it shows you.
Tina Searle: Yes, exactly. Just how tight the regime of surveillance was.
Artie Mead: I think one of the other most, most famous escapes—I think there’ve been three films made on this that I know of. One’s actually pretty new—it’s currently on Netflix. It was released in 2018: Balloon. Yeah. And the original film on this was actually Disney. I think in 1982 there was a Disney film on this escape, which I haven’t seen—have to see. So, it was two families, eight people—so two couples and children aged between two and 15—who escaped out of East Germany in a homemade hot air balloon. Quite incredible. There were two unsuccessful attempts before they made it, round three. On the first attempt, the material they tried to use wasn’t going to do the job. Second attempt, the gondola—the basket they constructed—was too small. Only one family could attempt, and they had issues with the flight and landed still in the east. Quite luckily for them, where they landed was actually a forest where people weren’t permitted. Because also.
Tina Searle: The materials needed to make a hot air balloon were restricted. So if they were found, the authorities would then largely be able to trace their origin. And so it would be, yeah, you had the potential to be caught.
Tina Searle: Yeah. When they came to balloon number three, and this would be the successful escape attempt, one of the escapers, Quinte Vence, actually has published his own website, which also translates to English, which is great. You can read it right out of the horse’s—or escaper’s—mouth. And he detailed what they had to do to get the fabric for the third balloon, especially because eventually the Stasi had found the second balloon—its wreckage in the forest. So the Stasi knows. They’re looking for homemade balloon makers. So they had to be that much more cautious with materials for balloon round three. And they’re driving all over East Germany to get some taffeta. And I don’t know about you, but I associate taffeta with tutus. And you know, ballet, you know, you haven’t made your tutu.
Artie Mead: Is that too, too?
Tina Searle: Oh, nevermind. Okay. Carry on. So they’re driving all over East Germany to buy taffeta. They’re buying material that would normally be used for tents, umbrellas.
Artie Mead: So, like, canvas and stuff.
Tina Searle: Yeah, a variety of materials. But they’re only buying in small quantities to make sure it couldn’t bring any attention. And they’re driving to all different cities to buy this stuff because they ended up needing 1,300 square metres of material, and they had to buy it in small portions so it wouldn’t alert attention.
Artie Mead: Yeah, exactly.
Tina Searle: So, uh, they were actually successful in 1979.
Artie Mead: Yes. And they landed in Nijler near Hoth.
Tina Searle: Yeah, so it’s worth saying this is not an escape over the Berlin Wall. You know, we said there are about 5,000 over the wall itself, many more over the inner East-West German border. This is an escape over the inner East-West German border. So they went from the state of Thuringen and then they landed in.
Artie Mead: Bavaria.
Tina Searle: And funnily, they weren’t really sure when they landed if they’d made it to the West because they very quickly got disoriented up high. And so when they landed, the women and children hid and the men went kind of exploring. They ended up in a farmhouse. And when they saw the machinery in the farmhouse, they read the brand and they were pretty sure, ‘Okay, we’re pretty sure we’re in the West. That brand of tractor in East Germany is unlikely.’ But they’re still not totally sure until the two men ran into the police.
Artie Mead: Police. Yeah.
Tina Searle: And it’s the Bavarian police. And they say, ‘Are we in the West?’ And the Bavarian man says, ‘Where else would you be?’ And—success. But that’s, that’s, that’s round three in terms of—it took three balloons to successfully make it out.
Artie Mead: But yeah, you can obviously then tell that they were pretty desperate to leave. And, you know, it does kind of impress upon you like how, you know, this regime, you know, it really does have to lock its population in. And the fact that people are still willing to attempt stuff like that shows, you know, how desperately people wanted to leave. Although I do want to say, in the interest of balance, I do still meet plenty of people who did like life in the GDR. So that’s always something that needs to be made clear when you’re talking about this stuff. It’s not as black and white as we’re taught in the West that ‘Communism, bad; Capitalism, good.’ You know, there was a grey area, you know, and a lot of people I meet from the former East actually miss life back in the GDR. So, in the interest of balance, I do just want to make that clear.
Tina Searle: I’m so glad you said that. Actually, when we said we’d do this episode on escapes together, I thought we have to say this at some point—that when you look at the escapes and people willing to risk life and limb and freedom to get out, it looks like appalling. Life in East Germany must have been so terrible. And for some, it was. If you fell wrong side of the regime, the darkness of that nation was really dark.
Tina Searle: But for many—and let’s not forget that it had a population of what, around 16 million—and there were 100,000 escape attempts, if to keep this in, and in ness, kind of in perspective. Many people in East Germany had a very good, simple, stable, everyday life experience. And a lot of those people who defend it, either because they actually miss it or just because they say, ‘Hey, it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t only bad.’
Artie Mead: Something.
Tina Searle: That always references things like guaranteed jobs and housing for life, free healthcare, free education, women in the workforce compared to in the West, where a woman had to have a husband’s permission to have a job, legalised homosexuality. So I think it is—it’s really good that you mentioned that, because I think we have a lot of friends if you live in Berlin. About one-third of my friend’s parents grew up in East Germany, and often they don’t appreciate this narrative that, ‘Your mother, my life must have been so terrible.’ So, it’s, it’s good that we have tick—we can live with ourselves. Our East German friends won’t be mad at us for only painting a one-sided image.
Artie Mead: Yeah, yeah, and that’s what you always got to be. When you talk about all kinds of history, really, you’ve got to be aware of the nuances, really, because a lot of history—not all history—you know, I mean, the Holocaust, that’s not particularly nuanced. But a lot of history is quite nuanced because it’s, you know, perspective and, and how, you know, you experienced it. Now, when the Wall was built, you basically had instances where you had basically the front door in the West, but most of the house was in the East and was considered to be in the East. Yeah.
Tina Searle: So, the street is the West. Yes. They, they enter and exit through the West, but actually their house is legally in the.
Artie Mead: East. And so, obviously, people had to, when they woke up in the morning of the 13th of August, they had to kind of make a sort of snap decision whether they were going to, you know, stay in the East, or if they were gonna, you know, move out to the West, because they probably knew that it wasn’t going to stay like that for much longer. So obviously, if you lived on the ground floor, that was fine, because you could just, you know, put your stuff out of the window and then just step out onto the West. But obviously, if you lived in a higher floor, that might be a bit more problematic because eventually the authorities got wind of this, and they started bricking up the windows. And so people had to jump from higher and higher and higher. And this is actually how the first death at the Berlin Wall happened. Someone called Ida Ziegmann, days after the Wall was built. So, on the 22nd of August, she was getting ready to jump out of her window. And basically, what would happen is the person who was going to jump—they would write a note on a piece of paper saying which window they were going to jump out of and at what time, and they’d throw it down into the West. And then the West Berliners would get the fire brigade to come and pull out a safety net for them. And you can see videos of this on YouTube—stock footage. And basically, she was getting ready to jump, but the Stasi stormed her apartment before she was ready, before the fire brigade had basically had a chance to pull out the safety net. So she actually jumped to her death.
So, yeah, that was actually the first death at the Berlin Wall. And then very soon after, there was some ambiguity about this, but there was eventually a shoot-to-kill order given by the East German authorities to border guards. So, basically, anyone who tried to flee over the border was eligible to, was liable to be shot. And I think it was actually there since before, but it actually wasn’t explicitly ordered, I think, until October 1961. However, you did have, 11 days after the Wall was built, the first person shot at the Wall, so on the 24th of August 1961, someone called Günter Litfin. Now, people like him were a major part of the reason why the GDR government wanted to seal this last hole in the Iron Curtain, because he lived in the East with its generous social subsidies, its cheap rent, its cheap food, but then he actually worked and got paid in the West. And I think he was a tailor.
Tina Searle: Yeah. So, Günter Litfin had already been working in West Berlin as a tailor, and he had got an apartment in the West. It makes sense, right? You get housing where you have your work. And given the nature of his work, he was working near Bahnhof Zoo, if anyone knows it, in the West of Berlin, and he hadn’t registered that address. Because, of course, had he ever registered a West Berlin address, he’s now outed himself as someone who’s committed the crime of fleeing the Republic. So, actually, living in the Republikflucht was actually a crime of leaving—sorry, Flucht, not.
Artie Mead: Flüge.
Tina Searle: And so he was actually living in West Berlin, but not registered there. And he’d spent a Sunday with his family in the East. And they wake up in the morning and hear on the radio that the border is sealed. And poor Günter Litfin is expected at a job on the other side of the Wall. And he’s paying rent in an apartment on the other side of the Wall.
Artie Mead: And so then, 11 days later, on the 24th of August, he tried to swim the Teltow Canal, which is a bit of canal with one part being on the—one side being on the West, one side being on the East—tried to swim to the West, but he was shot dead in the water. So he was the first person to get shot at the Wall.
Tina Searle: He was only 24 years old.
Artie Mead: 24 years old. Yes.
Tina Searle: And of course, a lot of people in East Germany knew once the Wall was up that the regime would very quickly come for the “border crossers,” which is what they’d called those people who were working in the West while living in the East. So the people like that, like Linfen, could expect—it’s uncertain what would have been done with them. Worst-case scenario, they’re jailed in East Germany. More likely, they’d have been given really unpleasant jobs, and then their life opportunities forever will be, will be limited.
Artie Mead: Yeah, exactly. So that’s.
Tina Searle: The position that poor young man found himself in. And I think for Linfen, like many East Germans—Germans full stop—they just couldn’t believe that guns would be used.
Artie Mead: Yeah. And the thing is, a lot of West Berliners saw it happen, and they saw his body get taken out of the water. And obviously, that was a bit of a PR disaster for East Germany, but actually, the worst PR disaster came a year later, in August 1962. And this was probably the most famous death at the Berlin Wall—someone called Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old bricklayer, whose sister lived in West Berlin. And he had obviously been split off from her when the Wall went up a year earlier. And he decided that he wanted to flee to the West. And his friend, someone called Helmut—Helmut K.—that he was doing his apprenticeship with also wanted to escape. So, on the 17th of August 1962, Peter and Helmut went along the Wall at Zimmerstraße near Checkpoint Charlie, and they found an abandoned workshop that actually was on the Wall, backed onto the Death Strip, which was the strip of land between the inner and outer border walls in Berlin where you weren’t allowed to be. And if you were there, you were liable to be shot.
So, they snuck into the workshop, and they basically kept lookout out of the window to see, I guess, a good window to try and escape. And then, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, they decided to seize their chance. They jumped out of the window into the Death Strip, ran out to the outer Wall. I think they were actually seen pretty quickly by the border guards, who fired a warning shot to let them know that they’d seen them. Now, his friend Helmut ran to the Wall and climbed up and over into the West with quite a bit of ease, with no difficulty really. But unfortunately, Peter Fechter actually froze at the Wall momentarily, and then when he tried to climb up and over to the West, he was shot in the hip and fell back into the Death Strip.
Now, the thing about that is that it happened in full view of a load of West Berliners on the other side. They saw the whole thing happen. And so, they were obviously very distressed by it, and they tried to get the West Berlin police to intervene. But obviously, there wasn’t really a whole lot they could do because he was trapped in the Death Strip. I think they just threw over some bandages, and he was crying out for help. He was obviously bleeding out, and there was a Western photographer at the scene, someone called Wolfgang Behrer, and he ran to Checkpoint Charlie, very nearby, and said to the American soldiers, ‘We have a young East German at the Wall who’s been shot. We need to try and get him into the West; otherwise, he’s going to bleed out.’ And reportedly, the American soldiers said, ‘That’s not our problem.’ And the West Berlin police obviously didn’t want to get involved because they knew that they would have retaliations from the East German border guards. But also, the East German border guards were then worried that they would have retaliation from the West. So, you have this kind of classic, I guess, Cold War situation with this poor young man stuck in the middle.
And then the photographer, Wolfgang Behrer, he goes back, and then he gets a ladder, climbs up the ladder, and sticks his little handheld camera through the wire and takes pictures of the scene—Fechter lying in the Death Strip—because he decided that he wanted the whole world to see it. And so, those images of Fechter bleeding out in the Death Strip were then splashed across Western newspapers the next day.
Tina Searle: And this wasn’t over quickly. This was—he spent quite some time bleeding to death. And for a period, he’s screaming, he’s—and this is, this is in full public view—and then it’s broadcast all over the world. This is the ultimate PR nightmare for Socialist East Germany.
Artie Mead: Exactly. And, uh, well, and also for the Western Allies, because eventually—well, it actually causes quite a lot of outrage in West Berlin, because obviously they heard about what the soldier at Checkpoint Charlie said. And this actually led to rioting in West Berlin, because West Berliners thought, well, you know, if the Western Allies are not going to, you know, try and protect the freedom of every German, then why, then why are you here? Why are you still in West Berlin? What, what good is you being here? So, yeah, it actually caused a lot of anger.
Tina Searle: It’s tricky. Of course, with Fechter being in the Death Strip, the Death Strip was legally still Socialist East Germany. So, for an American or any Western soldier or force to have gone in there, they’re technically crossing the border.
Artie Mead: So, basically, he was left for 55 minutes bleeding out. And then eventually, the Eastern border guards went to get him, took him away. And you can actually see pictures of him being carried away as well. And he died later on in hospital, and his family were put under surveillance. Obviously, they had a lot of—even though, you know, he had died, and it was pretty tragic—they were actually then put under surveillance by the East German authorities.
Tina Searle: That’s something really incredible in all the escape stories, whether failed or successful, is that it’s not over then. The Stasi keeps going.
Artie Mead: So.
Tina Searle: For example, deaths at the Berlin Wall, or someone who’s injured at the Wall, and then—the bodies weren’t dealt with in the normal way. The issue of a body of someone who’s been killed at the Wall goes straight to the Stasi. So, the East German secret police actually take over the details of their estate, their possessions, their property. And also, for example, often deaths were hidden, the families were told fake stories. And even people who were successful—for example, the families who made it into West Germany through the hot air balloon—the Stasi put spies into their lives. And they actually had an operation, I think it was called Operation Pear, which was to make their lives in West Germany miserable. So, that’s the other incredible thing is that even after the escape, even if you lose a loved one in the escape, that’s not over yet.
Artie Mead: Yeah.
Tina Searle: And for those East Germans left behind, either by loved ones who successfully escaped or tried to escape, they were therefore considered unreliable socialists.
Artie Mead: Yes.
Tina Searle: By virtue of the fact that someone in their circle has escaped. So, they’re now under surveillance, and very likely that their life opportunities were restricted in East Germany.
Artie Mead: Exactly. And that’s exactly the case of what happened in one of the most successful escapes that was also caught on camera—a very, very famous image of an East German border guard called Conrad Schumann. I’m sure probably most people have seen the image. I feel like it’s probably one of the most iconic images from the Cold War. So, basically, it was taken on the 15th of August 1961—so two days after the Wall went up. Now, Schumann had just completed his training to become a border guard because in the East, you had to do two years of military service—much like you had to in the West as well, actually. A lot of people don’t know that. And he decided to work for the border service.
So, he then gets stationed at the kind of corner, which was on the Berlin Wall—where the border was—and he was assigned to take control and protect the border from the “enemies of socialism.” Because also, let’s remember when the East German government built the Wall, they called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier to keep capitalism and fascism out. Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that Schumann—remember, he was, you know, only 19 years old, so pretty young. He and his unit found themselves pretty unprepared for the task because I think they thought they were just gonna oversee the building of the Wall, but I think they weren’t really prepared for the psychological and mental anguish of people that was being suffered by those separated from friends and family.
So, throughout the morning, Schumann faced quite a lot of verbal abuse from people on the Western side. People on the Western side could approach the Wall—no problem. They could go up to the wire. And at that point, it was just a roll of barbed wire whilst the main Wall was being built. And so, he was being hurled with insults by West Berliners. But it’s actually when he saw the real effect of the Berlin Wall—the division of communities, families, and friends. He saw a young woman approach from the East Berlin side and an older woman approach from the Western side. The younger woman on the Eastern side had some flowers, and she passed them over to the older woman and said, “Happy birthday, Mum.” And she got visibly very upset and was pointing at Schumann, saying, “It’s because of him that we can’t be together.”
And I think this really kind of made him rethink his loyalties. So, a crowd of West Berliners on the other side started changing tactics. They could see that they’d got a chink in his armour, and they started trying to persuade him to come over, saying, “Come on, come rüber, come rüber, come over.” And, because so many building materials were arriving for when the actual Wall was being built—it started with just barbed wire, and then they built the actual Wall—he basically went up to the barbed wire and flattened it with his boot, and he said to the West Berliners on the other side, “Stay away,” but then whispered to them, “I’m going to jump.”
So, he does visibly get quite nervous, and you can actually see some of this on stock footage. On the Western side, they got the West Berlin police to bring up a van, open the door ready for him, and someone started filming him. He’s visibly very nervous. He’s pacing back and forth. He’s smoking loads of cigarettes, obviously waiting for the right moment. And then suddenly, he flicks away a cigarette, turns, runs, jumps over the barbed wire, drops his weapon, his gun, and lands in the West, jumping into the back of the police van. West German photographer Peter Leibing captured the iconic moment, which is called The Leap to Freedom. Then he was taken away and interrogated to make sure he wasn’t working for the Stasi, and eventually, he resettled in Bavaria. He had various jobs, including working at an Audi factory.
Now, you might think, oh yay, that sounds like a really nice story, you know, a really kind of inspirational story, but unfortunately, it didn’t have a happy end. And it’s partly because of what you were just saying. Basically, he never really felt safe in the West. Because of what Miss Tina said, you could always have reprisals. He always had this kind of thing hanging over him, because it was well known that you could be kidnapped and taken back to the GDR, or you could have these kinds of reprisals. And he said he never felt actually safe again until the Wall fell.
But even after the Wall fell in 1989, he went back to Saxony to see his family, and they rejected him. The reason is because they were put under surveillance by the Stasi. They would have had all kinds of opportunities and stuff taken away from them. So, it had an actual tangible effect on their family’s life. Basically, him escaping ruined his family’s life, and they were very cold to him. After that, he fell into a deep depression, turned to alcoholism, and committed suicide in 1998 by hanging himself from an apple tree.
Tina Searle: There’s such a sad story. Quite often on tours to Bernauer Straße in Berlin, the Berlin Wall Memorial, I show people this photo—it’s huge, on the wall in the corner. And everyone says, “Oh, The Leap to Freedom,” and everyone’s smiling, and they’re taking photos of it. And then I ruin their days by telling them the whole story. But I think it’s such a powerful story to show that this is complex.
Artie Mead: Yes, exactly.
Tina Searle: That it’s really complex. It’s not just these incredible stories of hot air balloons and tunnels and the guy who made his own homemade submarine and did make it to Denmark. It’s also this complexity of the layers that come with leaving an oppressive state. Who do you leave behind? Do they follow you into the new state? I think Conrad Schumann’s Leap to Freedom and the suicide that came, what, 40 years after it, is the ultimate example of how complex this really is.
Artie Mead: Exactly. Yeah. So, talking about other successful escapes, what have you got for us, Miss Ernestina?
Tina Searle: So, this is one of my favourites. This is a real crowd-pleaser on tours. This is the story of a young man named Wolfgang Engels. And one of the reasons I love using this story on tours is because it really shows that element we were talking about earlier, about the level of surveillance close to the Wall in East Germany.
Yeah. So, Wolfgang Engels, as a young man, had spent much of his life in Düsseldorf, but then he was living in the East. And he wasn’t really that disenchanted with it, from my understanding. Although, he was one of the young men deployed to build the Wall, and as he was building it, he certainly had moments where he thought, ‘I might never see those friends in Düsseldorf ever again.’
Artie Mead: That’s interesting. I didn’t realise he was originally from the West.
Tina Searle: I’m pretty sure, yeah. The moment for him, which was a real break with East Germany, was that he and some mates had a night out in East Berlin. They stumbled out of a bar, really unknowingly stumbled too close to the Eastern side of the Wall. And suddenly, they’re being treated like criminals. Their own police is checking their papers and interrogating them and searching their bodies, treating them like criminals because they wandered too close to the Eastern side of the Wall. And it was a true accident. And he was so disenchanted with this—so really disgusted by this—that it fermented the idea of getting out.
So, this is April 17th, 1963. So, the Berlin Wall’s about one and a half years old. Wolfgang is 19 years old, and he’s working as a car mechanic and as a civilian driver for the National People’s Army. And the National People’s Army connection will be his way out. He gets wind that the new tanks are coming into East Germany, which I think were actually just Soviet hand-me-down tanks at this time. And he buddies up to the guys in the new tank battalion and just pretends to be super fascinated by vehicles and everything on wheels, and asks all of these questions about the tanks, with the kind of cover story being that he’s just super tank-fascinated. But actually, he’s gathering the information that you would need to steal one.
So, he steals the tank with the information that he gathered from the boys. And he drives it through Berlin, and he literally bulldozes it through the Berlin Wall.
Artie Mead: And also, before he did that, he said he stopped, and he said to a crowd of people, ‘I’m going to the West. Anyone want to join me?’ I just think that that’s probably not a very clever thing to do.
Tina Searle: It’s not stealth. No, it’s not stealth.
Artie Mead: Exactly. And no one did go with him. No one—everyone kind of looked at him like, ‘Wait, what?’ And so, yeah, he just carried on by himself. So, yeah, smashed on through the Wall.
Tina Searle: He’s incredibly lucky he lived. So, this is April 1963, right? Again, the Wall’s only one and a half years old. Had he tried this in the early seventies—you’re looking at that structure you guys talked about in your podcast last week about two walls, Death Strip in the middle—even a tank’s not going through that, actually. Because of Wolfgang Engels, they built anti-tank barriers into the Berlin Wall. And I always think, imagine telling your grandkids, ‘You know the anti-tank barriers in the Berlin Wall? Yeah, that’s for me.’
Artie Mead: They did that because of me. Yeah, exactly. Your claim to fame.
Tina Searle: So, basically, when he bulldozes the tank through, the tank gets trapped in the Wall itself. He manages to get onto the bonnet of the tank, and shots start coming from behind. And he actually gets shot through the lung in this process. And in an interview, he said that at one point, when he’s on the bonnet of this tank, he’s thinking, ‘If I live, today was a good day. If I get out of this alive, that’s been a success.’
And he was lucky because, technically, the bullets of East German border guards were not to penetrate into West Berlin, right? That’s literally East German guards. Brother nation of the Soviet is now shooting into the West, which is occupied by America. This kind of thing is exactly what could have made that Cold War go hot. So, it wasn’t allowed. And as soon as an East German bullet entered West Berlin, West Berlin forces had permission to shoot back.
So, lucky for Wolfgang Engels, when he bulldozed the tank through the Wall, there were West Berlin police at that location. And when the East German border guards—their bullets chasing Engels—started entering West Berlin, the West Berlin police could shoot back. And that gave him the cover to make it off the bonnet of the tank, through the barbed wire, and into West Berlin, where I believe he stumbled into a bar.
Artie Mead: Oh, really?
Tina Searle: I believe he stumbled into a bar.
Artie Mead: Okay, right. It sounds like he likes bars. But yeah, no, that obviously shows that that was a very—that could have turned pretty nasty, you know, having an exchange of fire between these border guards. That could have, you know, spiralled out of control. He was rushed to a hospital in West Berlin, and he underwent surgery for his wounds, but he made a full recovery.
And, yeah, he became a teacher of biology and history in the town of Soltau. But again, this was after the effect of him escaping. Yeah, he lost touch with his mother in the East, and she actually viewed him as a traitor and didn’t want anything more to do with him. Now, one of the most daring escapes took place from a famous building in the government district called—well, back then it was the House of Ministries. It’s this huge Nazi building, which was originally built to house the Ministry of Aviation. So, it was the headquarters of the Luftwaffe. This very typical sort of Nazi architecture. And if you go there, you can tell it does impress upon you this kind of, you know, idea of Nazi grand kind of architecture.
Tina Searle: Monumental, monumental.
Artie Mead: Intimidating.
Tina Searle: Yeah.
Artie Mead: Exactly.
Tina Searle: Very appropriately, today, it houses the tax office.
Artie Mead: Exactly. Because it’s the perfect thing to put in a Nazi building.
Tina Searle: Exactly.
Artie Mead: I always say that it just went from one evil to another. That always elicits a few laughs.
Tina Searle: This building is too good a joke. It’s just—it makes our lives very easy, that building, really.
Artie Mead: Yeah. So, basically, during the GDR, it was used as the House of Ministries. They had various ministries housed in there, and you had a guy from Leipzig—I believe from Leipzig. Yeah, he didn’t live in Berlin, but he basically came to Berlin twice a month as part of his work. And because he worked for the Communist PArtie and part of his work involved coming to Berlin every so often.
So, he wanted to escape to the West—this is in 1965. However, he had a nine-year-old son and a wife who he didn’t want to leave behind. So, he actually started planning the escape two years before—in 1963. And he basically decided to use his bi-monthly trips to Berlin to bring his family there and try to escape over the Wall. Because basically, the way the Wall was built, the House of Ministries actually jutted out onto the Death Strip. And so, the roof—it would be very easy to get over to the West. The distance from the East to the West was not that big.
Tina Searle: This is abnormal anywhere in the Berlin Wall to have a building this close to the Wall. Normally, anything that close to the Wall is bulldozed, knocked down, so they’ve got that big, clear Death Strip that you guys talked about last week. They made an exception for this building, partly because it’s so well-built—it survived the Second World War—and because it’s being used by the government, by the Socialist Unity PArtie. And of course, no reliable socialist members of the government would ever want to escape, so this building’s an exception. There’s nowhere else in East Berlin where you’re in the Death Strip that close to the Wall to the West.
Artie Mead: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, basically, he brings his family in and hides them in a bathroom on the top floor while he’s there for his meetings and what have you. At the end of the day, when everyone has gone home, he then goes to get them and brings them out onto the roof, so up over the Death Strip. And he has various escape tools—he has carrying straps, a handmade rope pulley, padded socks, and a hammer wrapped in foam rubber.
Basically, this is at 9:45 p.m. They climbed up onto the roof, and they threw a hammer attached to a nylon rope over the Wall to family members that were waiting in the West for him. And the family members waiting for him on the other side connected the nylon rope to a 120-metre steel cable. And basically, they then pulled the steel cable onto the roof and attached it to a flagpole. The flagpole’s not there anymore, but there was a flagpole on a corner of the roof there. The helpers in West Berlin on the other side of the Wall then stretched the cable with a truck, and the family basically just zip-wired over the Death Strip, okay, from East to West.
And the thing about this escape is that it happened in full view of a border guard. He was watching the whole thing happen through binoculars. And I believe they interrogated him later, and the reason he said he didn’t say anything is because he thought it was the Stasi doing a covert operation to get their operatives into the West, which is either really good thinking on his feet or stupidity.
Tina Searle: I think for me, the way I always interpreted that soldier’s failure to shoot or failure to arrest—he’s watching this whole thing happen. And this wasn’t quick because they sent their son and the wife first, and Heinz himself went last. But they had issues whereby the angle wasn’t what they needed it to be. And so Heinz was actually having to manually hold up the cable so that his son and his wife could get over.
And then Heinz himself is sitting on that roof for quite some time—I think maybe nearly an hour.
Artie Mead: Oh, really?
Tina Searle: Yeah. Trying to figure out what the plan is until he comes up with a solution for how he can adjust the angle so he can zip-line over the Wall like the two before him. And so, the guard—the Soviet soldier who was watching this—I don’t know why it wasn’t an Eastern border guard, it was a Soviet soldier. And he had time to think about this. And so, I’ve always interpreted his failure to shoot or to alert anyone else as just how bold this was. This is a zip-line escape off an East German government building. I really think he probably just looked at that and thought, ‘It’s gotta be our boys, you know. There’s no way this can actually be a spontaneous escape.’
Artie Mead: So, you think he did genuinely think that?
Tina Searle: I think so. I mean, who knows? I’d love to ask him. But this is quite a bold escape. If you’re out there listening to this, get in touch with us. We would love to hear what you were genuinely thinking at the time when you saw this family escaping to the West.
Tina Searle: Yeah. Please write us on the History Buff. I’d be like…
Artie Mead: Yeah, we’re waiting for you. So, yeah, that was obviously a pretty daring escape, and yeah, they made it across and they settled in Munich. And so, yeah, they were one of 5,000 people who fled East Germany between 1961 and 1989.
Tina Searle: If you just Google ‘zipline escape over the Berlin Wall,’ you can actually find newspaper articles that had the family in it. And you see the apparatus which they put their son in so that he could zipline over. It’s like, basically, overalls. They basically put this adorable little boy in overalls, connected the overalls to the wire so they could push him off the roof.
Artie Mead: Yeah. Yeah.
Tina Searle: And that sense of going public once they were in the West was really quite clever because it helps to be somewhat of a protective factor.
Artie Mead: Yes, exactly.
Tina Searle: If the Stasi are going to try and kidnap you out of West Berlin and bring you back to East Germany, put you in jail—if you’ve become overnight celebrities in the Western world, that really ceases to be an option.
Artie Mead: Yes, exactly.
Tina Searle: They can still spy on you. They can put operatives into your life to make it very difficult. But they can’t really kidnap you and take you back to East Germany and put you in jail.
Artie Mead: No, exactly. Yeah, they were covering their tracks. Cool. Okay, well, I think we should finish with what is probably my favourite escape—well, escapes. Okay, it actually involves the separate escapes of three brothers. Okay? They were the Betka brothers. Okay? And you had three of them. Okay? You had Ingo, Holger, and Egbert.
Tina Searle: Those are great German names.
Artie Mead: Yes, I know, right?
Tina Searle: After Wolfgang Engels, we’re really on fire with the German names in this podcast.
Artie Mead: Ingo—Ingo Betka. So, Ingo was seven when the Wall was erected, and he actually served in the National People’s Army—so actually guarding the border. So, on the 26th of May 1970, he and a friend—so Ingo and a friend—cut through the border fence, and they dodged detection measures and actually then managed to cross the Elbe on an air mattress.
Tina Searle: Let’s also say this is not normal, that someone could cut through and dodge all the—The reason he was able to do all of that is because he’d served his time in the National People’s Army. It’s compulsory military service at the border there because his parents were pArtie faithfuls. Both mum and dad were members of the Socialist Unity PArtie, working for the—
Artie Mead: Ministry of the Interior.
Tina Searle: Thank you. The Ministry of the Interior. In German, it would be “Ministerium des Inneren.” And I think his dad was a major; mum was a lieutenant colonel. So, partly because he’s got such a good socialist record, he was allowed to serve right on the border, and he used his time at the border to study it. He memorised every stone, every link in the chain, and that’s how he was able to stage this escape. Otherwise, just making it through the border fortifications…
Artie Mead: Well, and so, he manages to get over…
Tina Searle: On a blow-up mattress. Let’s say that again because it’s excellent.
Artie Mead: Exactly. Yeah, on a blow-up mattress. So, that’s one out of three. So, then you have Holger. And so, Ingo actually kept in contact with his family after the escape, I think through coded messages and all of this.
Tina Searle: Yeah. People often ask me, “Could you still have communication?” Yeah, there were letters. Normal homes in East Germany didn’t have telephones, but there were public telephones. Communications were possible, but of course…
Artie Mead: You would know that it would be tapped and watched.
Tina Searle: Yeah. Especially if you’re someone who escaped out of East Germany into West Germany, any communications that you have with your family back home are being monitored by the Stasi.
Artie Mead: No, exactly. So, he kept in contact using kind of secretive means. So, his time comes in 1983. On the 31st of March, Holger escaped, also using a zip wire. So, zip wires were actually, I think, quite a popular way of escaping. It’s because, I think, just the height—the fact that it’s above. And obviously, a lot of the border guards probably just didn’t think to look above.
And so, I think a lot of people—and also because the distance of the Death Strip in Berlin was not actually that long in certain areas—it really wasn’t that long.
Tina Searle: I think it also really cleverly shows how well fortified this thing was. You know, they’ve shut down all the sewage systems. They’ve got spies in every potential escape network, which largely shut down tunnelling. And what didn’t shut down the tunnelling through spying, the Stasi actually built a tunnel running almost…
Artie Mead: Yes, exactly—the Stasi tunnel.
Tina Searle: Yeah, the tunnel to dissect all other tunnels.
Artie Mead: That goes diagonally, like, underneath the Death Strip.
Tina Searle: Yeah, to intercept other tunnels. And then, of course, the Death Strip itself makes it almost effectively impossible to escape on ground level. And so, this thing is so well fortified that, at a certain point, going above ground—overhead—is one of the only options available to you.
Artie Mead: Because also by 1965, people stopped building tunnels because the Stasi had built tunnels to intercept other ones, the Death Strip was too wide, and it was just too dangerous. Lots of tunnels collapsed, and it just wasn’t safe enough. So, that’s why then eventually most people went over.
So, yeah, Holger actually practised archery. He scouted the Wall and fired an arrow connected to a cable over the Wall. So that’s how he managed to get the cable over the Wall. He and a friend actually had to wait in a house at the border for 13 hours to find the perfect time to shoot the arrow. And they had three arrows. The first two failed, okay, they didn’t actually get over the Wall or to where they needed to shoot the arrow. So, they had one chance left, okay? But this one, they managed to get it over to the West and into the place where they needed it. They had someone waiting for them on the Western side who pulled it taut. However, when they ziplined over, the dip was too—it wasn’t big enough. So, they actually got stuck halfway, and they then had to crawl on the wire over to the West. But it was still successful.
So, two out of three. The only one left in the East is Egbert. I don’t know what I would think if my brothers kept abandoning me. You know, I’d kind of feel a bit hard done by, I think, if I was Egbert. But anyway, so he was left in the East. The others, Ingo and Holger, decided to get him out themselves.
Tina Searle: So, I think let’s jump to the end of that story because it’s so good, and then we’ll work backwards. So, then we come to 1989, which actually is the year that the Berlin Wall will fall. Obviously, they didn’t know that. No one can know that, right? Even when people woke up that morning, no one’s thinking, ‘The Berlin Wall is falling today.’ That was quite the surprise. So, certainly in—I think it was May when they staged the…
Artie Mead: Escape.
Tina Searle: Certainly, no one could know that the Wall is falling this year. In May 1989, there are two light aeroplanes parked in front of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliamentary building, just on the big field in front of parliament. Well, I mean, it wasn’t parliament at the time—it wasn’t used as parliament by West Berlin—but in front of the Reichstag building, there are two light aircraft. And basically, who’s been flying them? The Betka brothers. And where have they gone? They’ve gone to drink a beer. So, let’s track that story back as to how the two first brothers who escaped—Ingo and Holger—
Artie Mead: Ingo, Holger, and Egbert, yeah.
Tina Searle: Yeah. How Ingo and Holger got Egbert out. So, basically, they got the idea from the Playboy helicopter, which actually, for me, is kind of disappointing. I’m like, ‘Can we not have Playboy as an inspiring element of this escape?’ But we do. There’s the truth. History’s not always elegant.
Artie Mead: Yeah.
Tina Searle: So, basically, they got the idea of a flight to get out Egbert from the Playboy helicopter. They had to sell their pub to have the money to buy two light aircraft.
Artie Mead: Yeah, microlights. They’re called microlights.
Tina Searle: They got a bit of a discount on the sale because they openly told the West German aircraft seller what they were going to do with the planes. So, they bought these two light aircraft, learned how to fly, and found someone who was willing to get the planes from West Germany in a truck along the highway access routes into West Berlin—which wasn’t an easy feat because recreational flying…
Artie Mead: Because you have to go through East Germany as well.
Tina Searle: Mm-hmm. And recreational flying is forbidden in West Berlin. But they found a truck driver who was willing to play along. They got the planes into West Berlin, had someone smuggle over a walkie-talkie to Egbert, and gave him code words. The code would be, ‘Eureka is healthy.’ So, when Egbert got a call saying, ‘Eureka is healthy,’ he would go to the agreed location in Treptow…
Artie Mead: Park.
Tina Searle: And the whole thing took about 15 minutes, right? Because, I mean, Berlin’s a big city, but it’s still just a city. They’re flying from the west of Berlin into the east of Berlin. Egbert was hiding in the bushes with the walkie-talkie. They let him know when they were coming. So actually, Holger was…
Artie Mead: Ahead, keeping a lookout.
Tina Searle: Yeah. Ingo was the one…
Artie Mead: Ingo lands in Treptow Park. And obviously, Egbert is waiting behind a tree and jumps in, and they take off again. They did actually try to do it a couple of weeks before, on the 11th of May, but the weather wouldn’t allow them. The weather was really bad, so they had to put it off. And also, something clever they did—they painted Soviet symbols on the sides of the light aircraft. So, it would just make them look like they were Soviet aircraft doing exercises.
Tina Searle: Very clever. Ingo, having done his military service, said there is no way East German soldiers will shoot at something with a Soviet star on it. No way.
Artie Mead: Exactly. That’s very smart. Very clever. So, Egbert is waiting for them, gets out from the bush, gets into the aircraft. They take off again, fly back over the Wall, and land back at the Reichstag in the park in Tiergarten in West Berlin. And yeah, it was all over in 16 minutes. Crazy, really. And the thing about that escape is that they actually filmed it all on home video, and you can watch it on YouTube. Really, really cool. Really, really cool.
Tina Searle: They came under quite a bit of fire for that. This was quite a topic at the time—the taking of money to help someone escape. Some people said, ‘Well, it’s expensive.’ These young men had sold their pub, bought aircraft, and I think one of them paid for flying lessons and then quit as soon as they could get the plane off the ground or something. There are a lot of costs associated, especially with tunnelling—that’s very expensive. And of course, you risk your life and your freedom. But some people really did try and make a business out of this. The prices became sometimes ridiculous.
And so, there was a lot of moral and ethical discussion about those who took money to help someone escape. The Betka brothers were also, from some people, under fire for the fact that they sold the footage of their brother’s escape. But of course, again, they’d had to sell their pub and buy two aircraft and learn to fly. So, and the perk for us is that there’s incredible footage of this escape. You can see it in real time—it is amazing. Of the two brothers helping the third escape out of East Berlin by plane. And they’re obviously aware of the drama—they parked in front of the Reichstag and then wandered off for beers.
Artie Mead: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tina Searle: Which one of them, in interviews, described as ‘freedom beers.’
Artie Mead: Oh, no, but it’s a great story. And, and, and yeah, watching it—I mean, watching them fly through the air on the footage that you can see on YouTube—it just, it all happens so quietly and so calmly. It definitely belies the kind of enormity of what they’re doing. Although one should remember, actually, by that point, the order to shoot to kill had actually been rescinded. It was rescinded in April 1989.
Tina Searle: I did also want to say something about the Schiessbefehl, or the order to shoot. And it’s interesting. We use that word Schiessbefehl. The word Befehl is literally command. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when politicians and border guards were sometimes being put on trial for shots and deaths at the Wall, a lot of the political leaders and the legal apparatus of East Germany hid behind the, I would say, technicality, that it apparently wasn’t actually an order to shoot, but a permission to shoot. But that is, for most accounts, not how it was communicated to the young men who were working on the border. It’s communicated to them that you need to stop escapes, and if you can’t stop it through a method other than shooting, then you can shoot, and you have to stop that escape.
Artie Mead: And actually, also, border guards got commended, and they got awards and incentives for shooting people trying to escape.
Tina Searle: Yeah, there were medals, there were financial incentives if you shot an escapee at the Wall. And I actually found an article—and again, I’m trying to only state reliable sources—I found an article that said that not a single case of shooting at the Wall was, at the time, by East Germany, actually examined for whether the shots were necessary.
Artie Mead: Oh, okay.
Tina Searle: Yeah, so this kind of cop-out, I would say, that many in East Germany used after the fall of the Wall, saying, “Oh, well, it wasn’t an order to shoot, it was permission to shoot,” is certainly not how it was communicated to young men at the border. I actually even found some interviews by former East German border guards who said that before they would go out to work at the border, they were told that border violators must be apprehended or vernichtet. And if you translate the word vernichtet, it’s destroyed. And then after the fall of the Wall, to say, “Oh, well, it wasn’t a Schiessbefehl, it wasn’t a command to shoot, it was a permission to shoot,” is really unfair against the young men who were deployed on that border.
Artie Mead: Yeah, because it puts it more on them.
Tina Searle: Yeah.
Artie Mead: Yeah, so we’re out of time now, but I think we can wrap up just by sort of saying that, yeah, it’s obviously a very dramatic story, a very tragic story of deaths at the Berlin Wall. Obviously, you do have some amazing stories—obviously, the Betka brothers, Heinz Holzapfel, ziplining above the Death Strip. So, you have all of these stories, some tragic, some happy, and I guess some in between. But yeah, what’s constant is just how fascinating it is that this city was divided for 28 years. And you see, I think, just something very human, really, which is people’s desire for freedom, people’s desire to see loved ones. You know, and that’s, I think, really the story that comes out from the escapes, escape attempts, and all that kind of stuff that we’ve been talking about. What about you?
Tina Searle: Yeah, so to recap, the Wall stands for 28 years, and from the time they complete a first generation of Wall, there are about 5,000 successful escapes. And that’s just talking Berlin. There are some really spectacular Hollywood-material escapes, like the homemade hot air balloon, zipline attempts, the Betka brothers, where all three in a family get out, aeroplane cable ziplining, paddling across the Elbe River on a blow-up mattress. There’s some really spectacularly cool, fascinating stuff that happens. They’re really brave and inspiring.
Behind that, there are also 140 deaths at the Wall. There are people like Günter Litfin, who, at the age of 24, have their light gone out by shot—
Artie Mead: At the age of 18.
Tina Searle: —bleeding to death, not quickly, in full public view, showing the real inhumanity of which the Wall and that regime was capable. Ida Siekmann, at 58, who falls to her death from her own balcony window because, from one day to the next, she’s not allowed out of her house door. And her sister lives three blocks away.
So, behind these incredible stories of the escapes, there’s also this incredible sadness of what happens when you slice through a living city and the people in it with the knife that is a border.
Artie Mead: Exactly.
Tina Searle: Dividing a population of people.
Artie Mead: Very nicely put. Guys, that’s all we have time for today. But Miss Ernestina, thank you so much. Thank you. It’s been wonderful talking to you. So much fun.
Tina Searle: Yeah, loved all your insights, all your information, your passion. That’s what we love here at The History Buff.
Artie Mead: Thank you.
Tina Searle: So, I can tell that you are a history buff.
Artie Mead: Yeah, well, guys, thank you very much for listening. I hope you found it interesting, and please join us next week when we talk about life on either side of the Wall and how Berlin actually became a bastion of counterculture. Cool. Okay, guys, well, thank you very much and, yeah, see you next time. Bye!