The Berlin Wall (52 page)

On Monday 11 June 1962, Harry Seidel finished digging a tunnel from the Heidelberger Strasse in Neukölln (West) to the Elsenstrasse in Treptow (East). It was only 80 cm. (2' 7") across, just wide enough for an average human being to squirm through. The project was an act either of extreme courage or extreme foolhardiness.

Close by, on 27 March, Seidel and his team had dug another tunnel which was discovered by the
Vopos
. He and a helper, Heinz Jercha, emerged on the other side into a trap. The
Vopos
opened fire. Jercha got a bullet in his lung. Pushing the gasping Jercha ahead of him, Seidel frantically pushed earth into the tunnel entrance to block it. By the time the border police managed to find and reopen the tunnel, both men had made it back to the West. Sadly, attempts to staunch internal bleeding failed. Heinz Jercha died before expert medical help could arrive.

Undeterred, Seidel returned to the area in June. He set up his headquarters in the cellar of a pub on the Western side, and it was
from here he began burrowing at a depth of two to three metres (six to ten feet), just above the water table, shovelling the sand into a bag crammed into the space beside him. When the bag was full, he would push it back to a helper, who ferried it back to the cellar for storage.

Seidel relied on the smallness and relative shortness of the tunnel (between twenty and thirty yards) for safety. He used no prop supports, nor was there any lighting. There was not enough oxygen down there to feed a lit candle. What fresh air existed in these cramped conditions was provided by the blast from a vacuum cleaner. To make sure the tunnel would hold, Seidel had a trailer loaded with coal run over the first part of its route to see if it showed any signs of collapse. It didn’t—and according to Veigel, who worked with him on several projects, none ever did.

Once Seidel had broken through, into a private house on the Eastern side, the escapers could begin their journey. The conditions must have been unspeakably claustrophobic, the air foetid, but in the end fifty-four human beings made it through this single tunnel. Seidel’s engineering proved remarkably sound—when, forty years later, building workers rediscovered the Neukölln—Treptow tunnel, journalists and other sensation seekers could still poke their heads in and see where it led.
¹⁹

Seidel, in his short but spectacular career, brought at least two other groups out. Then, in November 1962, he was betrayed and arrested. The East German state decided to make an example of him. He was the athlete-hero, nurtured by the Communist system, who bit the hand that fed him. Or such was the regime’s view. The notorious East German Justice Minister, Hilde Benjamin (known as ‘Red Hilde’), originally proposed the death penalty for Seidel, but was overruled by colleagues nervous about international reaction. At his trial the state demanded ‘only’ life imprisonment. Seidel served four years before being freed as a result of a deal between East and West, but that was in the future.

The more elaborate tunnels, bigger and sturdier, took a lot longer and were more expensive. The 28 June 1962 tunnel between Sebastianstrasse (West) and Heinrich-Heine Strasse (East) took fifty days to dig. Many of the tunnellers were men who had wives and families in East Berlin and were desperate to get them to the West. This was a labour of love. They were betrayed by a
Stasi
double agent, a 24-year-old with the codename ‘Pankow’, who had insinuated himself into the scene by claiming he
wanted to rescue his own wife, who lived in the East. This claim was literally true, except that rather than waiting anxiously for rescue she was enjoying the benefits of ‘Pankow’s’
Stasi
salary, paid in West marks.

The
Stasi
had known about the tunnel for three weeks before its builders broke through to the Eastern side. In an elaborate ‘sting’ operation, a number of escapers and three of the tunnellers were caught. One of them, 22-year-old Siegfried Noffke, who really had wanted to bring his wife to the West, was shot when a
Stasi
man panicked. Noffke was interrogated by the
Stasi
as he lay desperately wounded on the floor of the basement in East Berlin, and died on the way to hospital.

The Westerners soon decided to arm themselves on a routine basis. These young men, often with good reason to hate the Communist regime, saw no reason why they should just surrender or let themselves to be slaughtered. The trouble was, their weapons were usually illegally held, and while in the early days the West Berlin and even the Allied authorities turned a blind eye, they would be forced to disown the escape organisers if anything shocking occurred.

There followed a sort of arms race. Siegfried Noffke died because a
Stasi
operative, waiting at the exit of the betrayed 28 June tunnel, had panicked. The reason, in turn, why the
Stasi
man lost his nerve was probably because of an incident that had occurred ten days earlier, on 18 June 1962, not far from Checkpoint Charlie.

Border guards went on alert when they noticed unusual activity on the Western side. Cameras were being set up on the roof of an office complex belonging to Axel Springer, the Western media mogul, which was situated directly by the Wall. The
Vopos
consequently spotted a suspicious-looking group about to enter a building on the Eastern side. The suspects—a man, two women and a child, the report later claimed—ignored calls to present themselves for a document inspection. As the guards approached, the man pulled a gun from his coat and fired. He hit one of the East German patrolmen, twenty-year-old Private Reinhold Huhn. The fugitives then quickly disappeared into the building. Later the
Vopos
discovered the entrance to a tunnel, through which the gunman and his companions had escaped to the West.
²⁰

The successful escape group in fact consisted of a man, a woman, and two children. Rudolf Müller, who had shot Huhn, was the husband of the
woman and the father of both children (one of whom the
Vopos
must have mistaken for an adult woman). Müller had dug the tunnel from within the grounds of the Springer building with the aid of his three brothers and other friends and family members. What the East German report also does not mention is that another group of escapers had been arrested at the time they first challenged Müller and his family. On the other hand, Huhn had not actively threatened or pointed a weapon at Müller. He had simply demanded he identify himself.

The unlucky Private Huhn was immediately transformed by East Berlin into another martyr. The Jerusalemer Strasse, where he had been killed, was renamed the Reinhold-Huhn-Strasse, and schools, factories and other institutions were also dubbed in his honour. He was buried with full state honours in his Thuringian home town.

The East German state’s campaign was aided by the fact that the fiercely anti-Communist Springer, and possibly Western intelligence, may have been involved in Rudolf Müller’s escape project. The media had been forewarned. Hence the cameras that appeared on the rooftop of the Springer building before the escape.

The case of Reinhold Huhn became a
cause célèbre
of the Cold War. It was claimed by the West Berlin authorities, and widely believed in West Germany, that Huhn had been killed by a bullet from one of his own comrades. Interviewed shortly after returning safely to the West, Müller none the less admitted having fired his pistol at least once.
²¹
Even those who—rightly in view of ballistic evidence that later came to light—acknowledged that Müller shot Huhn, argued a case for self-defence.

But again the question appeared: where did Müller get the gun? According to Allied occupation law, which remained valid in West Berlin, unauthorised possession of weapons by German civilians was a serious crime—technically, in fact, punishable by death. Was the serious offence of illegal gun ownership and use justified under such circumstances? At the height of the Cold War, most people on the Western side thought so, but this was not a morally straightforward case.
²²

As the summer of 1962 wore on, whatever scruples observers may fleetingly have harboured were effectively neutralised by the most clear-cut and cruel atrocity of the Wall’s entire existence. The killing of Peter Fechter.

The East German regime anticipated the first anniversary of the Wall with deep misgiving. A state of ‘heightened alert’ was enforced among the border troops on 13/14 August 1962. On the day itself, there were a number of political meetings in West Berlin, accompanied by noisy and sometimes violent protests by mostly youthful crowds of up to 1,500 ‘hooligans’ (as the East Germans always referred to Western demonstrators). The West Berlin police was ordered not to let such crowds within twenty yards of the border. None of the events got seriously out of hand.
²³

The real crisis came four days later, on 17 August.

Peter Fechter, eighteen years old, belonged to a circle of rebellious Eastern teenagers, who decided they would make a mass break-out to the West. As the planned day approached, predictably, most lost their nerve and dropped out, leaving just Fechter and a close friend.

Having dodged the guards who patrolled the restricted area behind the sector border, the two young men found themselves, early on the afternoon of 17 August, hiding in a disused building near the Wall. This was now a much more formidable barrier—or set of barriers—than it had been a year earlier. They were in sight of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous American border post.

Gathering their courage, they finally left cover and made their high-risk dash. As they mounted the first wire barrier on the Eastern side, his friend going first and Fechter following two or three yards behind, border guards opened up with automatic weapons from a distance of around fifty yards. They ran on. His friend reached the final eight-foot-high wall that marked the border with the American sector, managed to scale it, and vaulted over with bullets thudding into the cement inches from him. He made it safely to the West with some superficial injuries.
²⁴

Peter was not so lucky.

As he tried to follow his friend over the final barrier, Fechter was hit in the leg and slid back into no man’s land. There he lay, moaning and crying for help, at first loudly, then in an increasingly weak and desperate voice.

The bullet in his leg had severed an artery. A heart-rending photograph shows the teenager sprawled, half dead, in his tight jeans and with
his fashionable little quiff still intact, motionless and with blood—his life blood—seeping into the ground.

An angry crowd of West Berliners quickly gathered. No one arrived from East or West to save the wounded escaper. The Easterners would later claim that, with the deaths of Privates Göring and Huhn still fresh in their memories, they feared being shot by hotheads on the Western side. The Western police, meanwhile, were under strict orders not to trespass on to Eastern soil.

The GIs from Checkpoint Charlie also did nothing. One of them was reported to have shrugged and said: ‘Not our problem’. His alleged remark would be endlessly quoted and become a source of increased anti-Americanism in West Berlin and West Germany.

Peter Fechter was unconscious and may have already died by the time a senior East German officer arrived and galvanised the guards into action. Fechter was manhandled from the scene. An unsuccessful attempt was made to obscure the operation from Western observers by means of a smokescreen. Another photograph, taken from the West, shows an East German soldier, part of the furtive little cortège, as he turns to glare into the Western photographer’s lens, his face a strange combination of fear, shame and defiance. Peter Fechter was pronounced dead on arrival at the police hospital a few minutes later. Around an hour had passed since he was shot. The patrol commander and two of his men were granted bonuses for their achievement.

The Fechter tragedy was followed by the most violent demonstrations since 13 August 1961. Every morning, a Soviet bus entered West Berlin, carrying the soldiers who mounted guard at the Soviet War Memorial, a few hundred yards inside the British sector from the Brandenburg Gate. On 18 August, a large crowd blocked their way and began to stone the vehicle. The Soviets threatened to open fire on the rioters. The West Berlin police were forced to disperse the crowd with water cannon. After the demonstrations against the Soviet honour guard had continued for three successive days, the British provided a military escort.

Here were the makings of an international crisis. East German brutality, Russian pride, and West Berlin anger. In Washington, Kennedy discussed the situation with his National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy. They agreed to look into the possibility of providing
first aid for cases such as Fechter, but there was the problem of encroaching on East German/Soviet territory in order to do so. The feeling was therefore that they ‘just had to ride this one’. There was irritation, as usual, with the West Berliners, who were ‘of course…not very generous…to us’. The priority was to stop it all blowing up into a confrontation.
²⁵

The East German authorities had rewarded those responsible for killing Fechter. None the less, they were appalled at the bad publicity, and steps were quickly taken to avoid such incidents in future. These steps did not stretch to a ban on shooting to kill, but they did include new standing orders for the patrols of the First Border Brigade, on whose patch the Fechter killing had occurred. Communications between individual patrols and brigade HQ were to be improved (so perhaps the fatal inaction after the Fechter shooting was in part due to failures in the chain of command), and above all measures were taken to ensure that the sighting, apprehension or shooting of any fugitives occurred in the parts of the border defences preceding the actual barrier Wall with the West.