Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall

by Helena Merriman

Women have drawn crimson-red lipstick-crosses on bedsheets, hoping the Russians will respect the international sign for the Red Cross and spare them, but instead the soldiers come for them. As the soldiers take the city, they take its women, raping over a hundred thousand – grandmothers, mothers, children. The lucky ones are only raped once or twice. Others are gang-raped multiple times, horribly mutilated, and thousands of women kill themselves – for fear of being raped, or shame after it happens. (These mass rapes are still denied by many in Russia, even by veterans of the war.)

After just one month, West Berliners began to run out of food. What saved them was one of the most ambitious operations in history: the Berlin airlift. For a year, British and American pilots flew food, clothes, medicine and cigarettes into West Berlin. In the busiest period, a plane landed at Tempelhof airport in West Berlin every sixty-two seconds.

That evening, he watches from his window as tanks drive up and down empty streets, monitoring the newly announced curfew. Tuning his radio to the West, Joachim discovers what had happened at the square after he left: three hundred people killed. The following week, thousands are thrown into secret prisons and hundreds executed after show trials. And so ends the first anti-Soviet uprising in Eastern Europe. There won’t be another in East Germany for thirty years. People have learnt the limits of what they can do.

People who criticise the government lose jobs, disappear in the night. Never seen again. There are whispers about the organisation behind these disappearances, these arrests. No one knows much about it or the people who run it. Just the name. Stasi.

THERE ARE VARIOUS ways of describing the Stasi. East Germany’s ‘internal army’. Or ‘the Firm’, as some called it. But perhaps the best way to explain it is to start with the man who ran it for thirty-two years, a man whose name came to be synonymous with the Stasi: Erich Mielke.

The construction workers lay slab after slab, many of them horrified by what they’re doing. For they are building the walls of their own prison. Eventually, one of the East German construction workers takes a risk and calls over to an American Military Police Officer. ‘Lieutenant!’ he says, ‘Look how slowly I’m working! What are you waiting for?’

most walls in history have been built to keep enemies out. This is one of the only walls built to keep people in.

In Hitler’s Germany, there was one Gestapo agent for every 2,000 people; in the Soviet Union, there was one KGB agent for every 5,830 people; in East Germany, there was one informant for every sixty-three people, and if you include part-time informers, some say there were as many as one informant per six people.

The party newspaper had left out the details: how the tunnel was dug by men in West Berlin who’d been separated from their wives in East Berlin, how one of them – a twenty-two-year-old who hadn’t seen his baby since the Wall went up – had crawled through into the East only to find Stasi agents waiting. They shot him, interrogating him as he lay dying. Their wives were all arrested. The Stasi informant who betrayed them was the brother of one of those women. His reward – a small bundle of cash.

People who live closest to the Wall describe feeling constant anxiety and fear, and East German psychiatrists will soon invent a new word to describe this: Mauerkrankheit, which translates as ‘Wall-sickness’.

zersetzung – ‘decomposition’.

This was a historic moment: never before in the Cold War had American and Soviet soldiers faced each other at point-blank range. American helicopters and Soviet MiG fighter planes buzzed overhead. Journalists from West Berlin, who’d heard that something dangerous was happening, scampered round the edges, taking photos.

No one knows exactly what was agreed in that meeting, as the material is still classified, but at 10.30 a.m., after a sixteen-hour stand-off, Khrushchev pulled back his Soviet tanks. Thirty minutes later, American tanks withdrew. And so ended what many describe as the most dangerous moment of the Cold War.