Under the Berlin Wall
Escape tunnels, underground films, and daring adventures before the fall
It didn’t take long for East Germans trapped behind the Berlin Wall, after it rose in their already divided city in August 1961, to attempt to flee their rigidly Communist state, seeking freedom (and greater economic opportunities) in the West. They swam across canals and rivers, navigated subway tunnels, used fake passports to slip through border checkpoints, climbed over the cement Wall or tried to crash through it in trucks. Before long, however, East German police and military figured out how to halt most of that.
So a large number of young West Berliners, most of them students, turned to the most risky operation of all: digging lengthy tunnels under the Wall to free friends, lovers, family members and strangers.
What was perhaps most amazing was that unlike in nearly every other example of escape tunneling in history, they were already free and digging in the direction of imprisonment, not from it. Their obsession would be my subject, in word (for my new book, The Tunnels) and image, over the past two-plus years.
Most of the early tunnels failed due to water leaks, ceiling collapses, or discovery by the notorious East German secret police, the Stasi. Some diggers were arrested, at least one was shot and killed by police. Yet in March 1962, three students in West Berlin launched what they hoped would be the longest and most dangerous tunnel yet, to bring out one of their friends, his wife and baby, and others. It would reach, in their plans, over 400 feet, most of it running under the “death strip” on the other side of the Wall patrolled by soldiers and guard dogs, with snipers in towers at the ready, and then somehow come out in the cellar of a tenement two blocks away.
But where to dig from? They found a nearly abandoned factory building just off Bernauer Strasse, a wide street that ran along the Wall in the West, broke through the basement floor, and with little more than a few shovels and a makeshift dirt cart and pulley system, pointed their way West.
The tunnelers made slow progress, even after recruiting a few other daredevils to the project and motorizing their cart, and recognized they would need an infusion of funds to complete the dig (for wood for supports, food, and other supplies). So they looked for a media partner. Soon they found one: the NBC network in New York, whose Berlin correspondent, Piers Anderton, and a small camera crew, were eager to film under the earth for weeks for a landmark scoop.
Despite a long layoff due to a serious water leak, the digging and the filming made progress. It remained top secret, however, as the network accurately surmised that U.S. officials, from local diplomats to President John F. Kennedy back in Washington, D.C. were not exactly thrilled about mass escape attempts. While the Americans publicly offered support for the brave individuals who tried to assist those in East, they privately opposed actions that might spark a confrontation with the Soviets in this hottest of all global hot spots — where a limited shooting incident at the border might quickly threaten to provoke a nuclear crisis. One murder at the Wall of young East Berliner sparked international condemnation of both the Soviets and the Americans. The White House and State Department, we now know thanks to declassified documents cited in my book, had already bullied CBS into killing a tunnel escape program planned by newsman Daniel Schorr.
Yet the young men funded by NBC kept excavating. Their target: the basement of a battered apartment building at 7 Schonholzer Strasse.
Finally, on the evening of September 14, 1962, the tunnelers were ready to break through into the basement, not knowing what awaited them on the other side: police? Stasi? or a tenant they might have tie up in the cellar until the escape was accomplished? For what seemed like an eternity they waited behind a door off the lobby, guns at the ready. Finally the first refugees, tipped off by a courier, arrived — the husband and wife (with baby) who had inspired the dig in the first place.
That night, and the next day, a total of 29 escaped to the West without a shot being fired or an arrest made. And NBC captured it all on film.
But the drama, for NBC, was only beginning, as once again the State Department, under Dean Rusk and with the approval of the President, attempted to get the network to cancel its primetime tunnel special. NBC postponed the program, and its producer planned to quit over the suppression. Then, after a few weeks, NBC slipped the show on the air — and it riveted millions of viewers (such as the deputy director of JFK’s Peace Corps, Bill Moyers), and would prove to be a landmark in television history, winning three Emmy awards.
Today, along Bernauer Strasse, a very moving memorial site, several blocks long, passes right over the route of the “NBC tunnel.” In researching my new book, The Tunnels, I spent many hours there over the past three years, facing the legacy of the tragedy, trying to contemplate, absorb it in some way. From a viewing platform one can overlook the old death strip, and remnants of the Wall, or stroll the haunted grounds, where so many were killed, but where a few others made their way to freedom, below the earth.
Greg Mitchell is the author of The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill, out now from Crown.
