REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Lars HANEBERG.: Living beside the Berlin Wall 61
The patrols on the eastern side were constantly composed of new members avoiding that
any friendships between the soldiers could have been established.
One night in summer 1988 we heard some shooting, dog's barking and loud
complaining of GDR soldiers just behind our garden. From my room in the attic we could
see how a young man with raised hands (behind him various members of the People's
Police with pulled weapons) was led away after a failed attempt to escape across the wall.
The police alarmed by us and an American military patrol twitched only helplessly the
shoulders. Three months later the arrested refugee was redeemed by the west.
This was by far not the only attempt to escape from eastern neighbors of our street.
Karl-Heinz Kube, only 17 years old, was shot on December 16 th 1966. In total four
persons died in our adjacency trying to escape to freedom.
Fig. 3: Memorial to the Victims of the Wall at Neuruppiner Straße
»In October 1962, a group of five men started to dig a tunnel from Neuruppiner Straße
157 over to a house in Kleinmachnow in order to allow a few families to escape to the
West. But the escape plans had been betrayed to the East German authorities. One of the
diggers was captured by the Stasi and faced a show trial where he received a life sentence
for committing "most severe crimes against peace and freedom for the German people".
After 4 years in prison he was released to the West on the basis of some buy-out
arrangement with the West German government. Until today it is not known how the
escape plan could have been compromised and by whom. But there remains another
puzzle. The East German secret service Stasi had planned to blow up the tunnel and to pin
the blast to the diggers blaming them to carry out sabotage acts in the East. But at the
moment when the sole digger knocked at the Kleinmachnow house and the last was being
ordered, it turned out that the firing cable had been cut. Could it be that there has been
another kind of traitors within the Stasi or rather a secret hero?« [6]
From the foundation of the GDR in October of 1949 until the opening of the borders on
9th November 1989, nearly 3 million citizens of the around 17 million citizens fled from
East to West. A total of 95.000 people escaped between the building of the Wall and
September 1989. Approximately 900 GDR citizens paid with their life for their attempt to
escape over the internal German border. [7]