This year marks 60 years since the building of the Berlin Wall, appearing practically overnight on the 12th -13th of August 1961. It separated families, friends, lovers and even parents from their babies. The wall wouldn't come down for another 28 years, and during that time, at least 140 people would die trying to flee from East to West - but many more succeeded.
Tunnel 29 tells the incredible true story of a group of university students who dug a tunnel right under the feet of Berlin Wall border guards, to help a group of friends and family and strangers escape.
Journalist Helena Merriman first told the story in the hit BBC podcast Tunnel 29 and has now published a book called Tunnel 29: Love, Espionage and Betrayal: the True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall. Named for the number of escapees they helped, it was the biggest and most audacious escape mission since the erection of the wall the year before.
Photo: Supplied
The building of the Berlin Wall happened amid complete secrecy, Merriman tells Kathryn Ryan.
“I think of this as the one of the most audacious plots a government has ever carried out against its own people. It's shrouded in complete secrecy to the point where very few other government ministers knew apart from Walter Ulbricht, who is the leader of East Germany, it's very much his plan.
“And the reason he wants to build it is a very simple one, he realises East Germany is about to fall apart, because so many people keep escaping to West Germany, because they're fed up with the poor living conditions and the very controlling Stasi.”
By 1961, a fifth of the country have escaped to the West, she says.
“He comes up with this very crude plan, which is essentially just to lock people in so they can't escape.”
The wall is constructed at great speed, she says.
“It all begins on the night of a children's fair on a Saturday in the middle of the summer, Walter Ulbricht picks that date for a reason. He wants most young men to be out of the city so they don't create trouble.
“And so you have this fireworks display going off on the Saturday night, children eating ice cream, they're all out for a good time.
“But then what they don't realise is that right at that very minute, you have these tanks rumbling towards East Berlin ready to cut off anyone who might escape. And then at one o'clock in the morning, they switch off the street lights. And under the cover of complete darkness you have these soldiers driving up to the border, climbing out of trucks and uncoiling these huge coils of barbed wire and then stringing them up between all the various different border crossing points.”
Berliners woke the next morning to find their city divided, she says.
Pivotal to her story is a man called Joachim Rudolph.
“A month or so after the wall goes up, he decides to escape. One night he crawls through a field with his best friend from school and they make it into West Berlin.”
But Rudolph had a taste for adventure, she says.
“He arrives in West Berlin, and as he put it to me, he said there was freedom, but almost too much of it. And then one night, there's a knock at his door at his university where he is now studying in West Berlin.
“And these two students come to see him and they tell him that they have this plan. They want to orchestrate the largest single escape under the Berlin Wall since the wall went up. And they want his help to do it. And amazingly, he agrees.”
The tunnellers form a basic plan, she says.
“To dig a tunnel, the shortest tunnel as possible from West Berlin into East Berlin.”
There had been other attempts and it was fraught with danger, she says.
A woman is pulled out of an exit shaft on 5 October 1964 in Berlin. The shaft is part of an escape tunnel from East to West Berlin. 57 people escaped through this tunnel until it was detected on the East Berlin side. Photo: AFP / FILE
“Other people had tried digging tunnels before. And many of them had failed. The tunnels collapsed and drowned them in mud.
“Very often, they were betrayed by spies because the Stasi had spies not just in East Germany in East Berlin, but also in every part of society in West Berlin too.”
And then there was border guards patrolling above their heads, she says.
“Every metre of the way once they were under the death strip, they had border guards patrolling above their heads, and they knew that they had listening devices, which they would place on the ground.
“If the border guards heard people digging under their feet, they would rip open the ground, and they were known to throw in dynamite or even shoot into it.”
Joachim and his co-tunnellers dig under Bernauer Strasse which divides East and West Berlin. They encounter many problems, not least flooding she says.
“There's a huge leak. First, they just think it's the water from the rain, it's been a very rainy summer. And they soon realise they've somehow hacked into a pipe, and the pipe is spewing torrents of water in and they spend weeks bucketing out water from the tunnel, then they borrow a hose from the West Berlin Fire Department to sort of suck the water out. And that still doesn't do it.
"And eventually they come up with this very brave and perhaps foolish plan to go and ask the West Berlin Water Authorities to help.”
Given the Stasi had ears and eyes everywhere, this was a risky strategy, she says.
“They go to see this man, they asked for his help. And a few days later, he sends men in flat caps to come and fix the leak.
“So, they continue, they carry on going, but what they don't realise is that the problems that have beset them aren't just the physical ones of water.
"Amongst them is a Stasi spy. And that really is the biggest problem that they face.”
One of the tunnellers is a hairdresser called Siegfried and the Stasi have turned him, she says. Eventually they are betrayed by him.
The Stasi had spies everywhere, Merriman says.
“They had a higher proportion of informants than any other secret police force in history, some estimates have that as many as one in six people in East Germany, were working for the Stasi.”
Joachim and his tunnellers survive that betrayal and live to dig another day. Meanwhile, the whole escape attempt is incredibly being filmed by a US TV network.
“Reuben Frank is this hot shot American TV producer. And he's just started working in TV in the 1950s. It's very strange to think of it, but back then it was a new, untested medium, a lot of people weren't very sure of it, it seemed very cumbersome compared to the ease of radio.
“And he is looking for a story to try and help him win the ratings battle between NBC, which is the news network that he works for, and CBS in the States.”
A real time documentary on a group of people in Berlin plotting an escape is just what he was looking for.
“They film every single day, every single week of the digging of this tunnel, NBC even gives them money to do this, they give them $10,000.”
Despite the various setbacks, the tunnellers manage to help the “29” escape from the East.
“A group of people, the 29 people, includes people from vets, nurses, doctors, families, grandparents, the youngest to come through the tunnel is a six-month-old baby.”
And because of the secret filming, footage survives to this day, she says.
“There are these extraordinary emotional moments captured on film and you see these 29 people crawl through opening this door into another half of their city that somehow became a different country.”
The Berlin Wall. Photograph. Germany. 1961/62. Photo: Franz Hubmann / Imagno / picturedesk.com
Tunnel 29 is published by Hodder and Stoughton.
