The Berlin Wall (48 page)

None the less, the regime could not relax. In September it started rallying loyalist forces, especially the young enthusiasts of the Free German Youth, encouraging them to spy on and direct the thoughts of family and friends. The FDJ youngsters were organised in a campaign, ‘Blitz against NATO broadcasts’, meaning all Western television and
radio stations, Kids would clamber on to roofs and redirect the aerials to stop them receiving signals from the West, Adults known to watch or listen to Western broadcasts were pilloried by youthful fanatics. In some cases, miscreants were reported to the authorities and radio or TV sets confiscated.

The regime’s nerviness was to some extent justified. Western subversives of various kinds, particularly foreigners and West Germans, could still pass pretty freely between West and East Berlin so long as they didn’t make their status too obvious.

Western intelligence services, which had been caught napping on 13 August, managed to rebuild skeleton agent networks within a fairly short time. The CIA’s Berlin Operations Base (BOB) reported on 6 November 1961 that despite new border controls it had managed to keep or regain contact with twenty-five agents operating in East Berlin. Judging that access might be restricted at some point, canny BOB officials had already begun supplying agents with two-way radios or letter-drop arrangements, to replace the face-to-face debriefings that had been standard while the border remained open. However, there were still some who had to be contacted in person. It was true, as the 6 November report suggested, that despite the substantial numbers of Westerners still crossing back and forth since 13 August, this traffic was now coming under increasingly thorough physical and documentary control.
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Although the CIA’s activities were curtailed by the Wall, BOB was none the less well aware of the mood in East Berlin, of the economic situation, and of the police actions being conducted by the Communist regime, and therefore able usefully to supplement the Allied military missions’ reports. Within a year of 13 August, BOB had published 262 field reports based on two-way communication with thirty sources in the East, and carried out fifty missions in support of these agents without losing any operatives to the
Stasi
and KGB counter-espionage networks.

One thing was clear: the CIA could no longer actively build up any kind of ‘resistance’ network in the East. This had always been a slightly dubious concept, but with the Wall in place it became impossible. The best BOB could do was to maintain assets, and use the information those assets supplied in cleverer ways; for instance, to influence the propaganda war. A German-speaking BOB representative was added to the team that
interviewed East German refugees, especially army and border-police deserters like Conrad Schumann. The BOB man’s job was to quickly digest the material thrown up by the interviewers, detailing the escaper’s reasons for leaving, disillusionment with the regime, and so on. Without having to wait for the full interrogation report, by which time the story might have gone ‘cold’ he would turn it all into punchy copy. This material would be rapidly fed to the press in West Berlin and the rest of the world, using the CIA’s excellent journalistic connections.

But how much could and would West Berlin and the Allies do to help those imprisoned behind the recently built Wall?

The Allied and West Berlin authorities were in a quandary. No one wanted to provoke the East Germans or the Russians into cross-border interventions, so violent demonstrations by West Berlin civilians were discouraged. On the other hand, the West Berlin police could not resist becoming involved in escape attempts, helping refugees as far as they could, and even providing covering fire. They were, technically, forbidden to do such a thing, but the rules could be stretched. The West Berlin law-enforcers could plead that they had been shot at from the East, and so their weapons had been fired in self-defence. Since many escapes took place under cover of darkness, it was hard to prove otherwise.

Mayor Brandt himself was similarly torn between his heart and his head. At the beginning of December, he declared at a meeting:

In the long run we cannot prohibit anyone, not just from saying what they feel about the Wall, but from giving a stronger expression to that feeling. Let no one believe it is easy for us to send in our police against young people when they demonstrate against inhumanity.

A few days later, he put it even more clearly: ‘Our police force…is there to protect order in West Berlin, but not to protect the Wall.’
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The West Berlin Senator for the Interior, Joachim Lipschitz, had been forced to leave East Berlin in 1949 because of his commitment to the SPD. He had become passionately involved in training a new paramilitary police force to defend West Berlin from overt or covert attacks from the East. Lipschitz, a courageous leader of the socialist underground during the war years and a proven man of action, may even, if British
official reports are to be believed, have been involved in a plan to blow up part of the Wall as a protest on New Year’s Eve 1961/2. The senator’s unexpected death, aged forty-three, on 11 December 1961, means we shall probably never be sure.

There were several such attacks on the Wall from the Western side, using high explosives, in the last weeks of 1961 and well into 1962. The largest was on the Potsdamer Platz in July 1962, after which the Western authorities were forced to take action for fear someone would get killed. These detonations were almost certainly staged by members of the ‘Girrmann Group’ a student escape-and-subversion organisation based in the Free University of West Berlin. None seems to have achieved much beyond a certain protest value. They did, however, cause a special kind of panic among the control-fiends who ran the GDR. Lengthy reports were sent to Ulbricht on such incidents. S-Bahn trains, which passed through West Berlin but were still operated by the Eastern authorities, were also favoured with several small bombs. These were a kind of violent complement to the boycott of the S-Bahn network by Westerners, which continued throughout the 1960s and into the 197os.

But what really frightened the SED bosses, and encouraged Berliners and their sympathisers all over the world, were the escapers. The people who proved the Wall was not impregnable, who offered hope to the trapped millions of the GDR.

Heroism and tragedy were never far removed from each other in those early days. Hundreds escaped but hundreds more were arrested for trying and often sentenced to long prison terms. Thirteen human beings died trying to escape from East to West Berlin between 13 August 196I and the end of the year.

Of the Wall’s first martyrs, four fell to their deaths while trying to escape from windows and rooftops in the Bernauer Strasse, between August and October. After this time, the buildings skirting the West were purged of their tenants, and windows and doors systematically bricked up.

Six more people died trying to swim to the West, including two in the Teltow Canal, one across the Humboldthafen, two across the Spree river, and one across the Havel between Potsdam and West Berlin. The three
killed by shooting-including Günther Litfin and Roland Hoff in August-were equalled by those who simply risked too much and drowned.

The victim who died in the Havel was a nineteen-year-old private in the ‘Readiness Police’ patrolling the border with Potsdam. He made a vain attempt to swim across the numbingly cold river to the Wannsee shore in West Berlin, but was retrieved from the water and placed under arrest. However, by this time he was barely alive, and died from exposure and waterlogged lungs on the way to hospital.

Udo Düllick, a 25-year-old engineer with the East German railways, was sacked after expressing anti-Communist sentiments during a political argument with colleagues. A few days later, on 5 October 1961, he tried to swim the Spree river between Treptow in the East and Kreuzberg. He came under fire from a border patrol, but was not hit. In the event, the exertion, the currents, and perhaps the terror were what killed him. His lifeless body was fished out of the water by West Berlin police.

Düllick carried no papers, and for days remained the ‘unknown victim of the Wall’. Then his brother, who lived in Switzerland, arrived in West Berlin and identified his body. Only then were the worst fears of Udo’s anxious parents in East Berlin confirmed. Their son was given a highprofile burial in West Berlin. The parents, pious Catholics, were permitted to hold a quiet memorial service at the chapel of rest in the Rehfelde cemetery, a few kilometres outside East Berlin. With typical cynicism, the
Stasi
imposed one condition: the priest who delivered the eulogy for Udo must not mention the cause of his death or any of the surrounding circumstances. Such enforced silence became the rule at services in the East for victims of the Wall.

The very last death of 1961 was one of the most heart-rending. The previous year, Ingo Krüger, twenty-one years old, had become engaged. His fiancée lived in West Berlin, and Ingo in the East. A mere inconvenience until 13 August, when they were caught on different sides of the border. Luckily, his fiancée had a West German passport, and could visit him in East Berlin, but the situation was unbearable.

Ingo Kruger’s secret resource was his skill as a champion diver. He decided to don a wetsuit and breathing apparatus and swim under the water to the West. Several friends were let in on his plan, as was his
fiancée. On 10 December 1961, a Sunday, she visited him before crossing back to the West. She would wait in the chill of the winter’s night to receive him there. Everything had been arranged.

At eleven that evening, Ingo and three friends stepped on to the Schiffbauerdamm, which ran along the eastern side of the Spree below Friedrichstrasse station. They said their farewells. Ingo stripped off the coat that concealed his wetsuit and launched himself into the water. He did not plan to dart straight across from East to West. The point where Ingo dived under the surface was quite some way from the border itself. The idea was that Ingo would swim, helped by his wetsuit and breathing equipment, under the surface of the river for abour 500 yards. He would negotiate an entire curve of the Spree, still in East Berlin, and pass under another bridge before finally reaching a point where he could move over to the Western bank and clamber ashore on to the Reichstagufer, hard by the old German national parliament and a few yards inside West Berlin. In this way he could avoid the attentions of border guards, who would be looking for escapers entering the water at the nearest point to the West.

It was a bold plan, but not foolhardy. Ingo was a sportsman, an excellent swimmer, with all the right equipment. So his fiancée, clothed to beat the December weather, waited anxiously bur hopefully for him on the Reichstagufer.

At around 11.30 p.m., an East German customs launch found the body of a young male in the,water by the Marschallbrücke, the last bridge before the border. Ingo Krüger’s fiancée was forced to watch from 200 yards away in the West as, in the floodlit distance, a corpse was recovered from the river. Soon the launch disappeared again into the darkness.

The appalled young woman must have known the truth, but still she hoped. She wrote repeatedly to Ingo’s mother, daring to believe that the body might be someone else’s, that perhaps the man she loved had been arrested. He might be in prison, but he would be alive. No reply. Only in the early days of 1962 did she finally learn that her lover’s mother had been prevented from writing to her. Frau Krüger had identified her son’s remains on 12 December, less than two days after the escape attempt. His body bore no marks or signs of injury. Ingo had simply underestimated how icy the Spree could be in December, and overestimated his resistance to cold.

Of course, there were spectacular successes too. Several trucks managed to crash through into the West before the anti-vehicle barriers were strengthened in the late autumn of 1961 and ‘no-go’ areas extended.

On 5 December, an engine driver, 27-year-old Harry Deterling, drove a scheduled passenger train at full speed against the barriers that since August had blocked the line at the border station of Albrechtshof. He continued boldly on, travelling several hundred yards along the still-extant railway line and into the safety of Spandau, in West Berlin. Of the thirty-two people on board, twenty-four, including seven members of Deterling’s own family and his fireman, Hartmut Lichy, were privy to the escape. Deterling had carefully recruited them for what he called the ‘last train to freedom’. All cowered on the floor of the wagon as the train powered through the final border defences and a hail of bullets swept over them. Seven other passengers, including the train conductor, had known nothing of Deterling’s plans, and dutifully returned to the East. One other unwittingly involved passenger, a seventeen-year-old girl separated from her parents by the Wall, spontaneously decided to stay in the West.

Such escapes were lucky or carefully planned, or both. Even before the Wall was fully fortified, to approach the border head-on and alone was a perilous business. Between 13 August and 31 December 1961, according to
Stasi
figures, a total of 3,041 people were arrested as a result of failed escapes to the West. The greatest number—2,221 of these (73 per cent)—had tried to flee on foot. Another 335 (11 per cent) had made the attempt by rail, 244 (8 per cent) in motor vehicles, 114 by sea (the Baltic) (4 per cent), 96 by swimming rivers, canals or lakes (3 per cent), and crawling through the sewers 31 (1 per cent).

Was it surprising, therefore, that a need for expert help quickly arose, and that this help was in great demand?

Escape organisations came into being from the first hour. The early ones were built on idealistic foundations, as practical protests against the division of Berlin, and most originated among West Berlin’s large student population. One such organisation was founded on the very evening after the border closure, on 13 August 1961, at the Eichkamp international student hostel of the Free University (FU) of West Berlin.