Under, over and through the Berlin Wall
For 28 years a wall split Berlin in two. Thousands of people found a way across it anyway: through tunnels, on ziplines, in hidden compartments, by train, by boat and on foot. At least 140 people died at the Wall. Here are their stories, each one pinned to the place it happened and backed by published sources.
574 documented events so far, in which at least 876 people reached the West.
A Berlin Experiences project
The border strip at Bernauer Straße, corner of Ackerstraße, in 1989, seen from West Berlin over the graffiti-covered Wall: an East German army Trabant patrols past a watchtower. Photo: Gerd Danigel, ddr-fotograf.de. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The map
The amber line is the Wall as it stood in 1989. Click a pin to open the story. Filter by method, outcome or years to follow a thread.
574 of 574 escapes
The Wall, as surveyed in April 1989 Dashed pin border: location approximate Several escapes at one spot: click or press Enter for the list
Where to start
Six of the best-documented escapes: each is confirmed by several independent sources.
5 December 1961
The last train to freedom
Locomotive driver Harry Deterling drove a passenger train at speed through the terminus at Albrechtshof and across the border into West Berlin.
8 June 1962
The excursion ship "Friedrich Wolf"
Young East Berliners commandeered the passenger steamer "Friedrich Wolf", locked up its crew and swerved under heavy fire into West Berlin's Landwehrkanal.
14 September 1962 – 15 September 1962
Tunnel 29
Around 30 helpers, mostly students, dug a tunnel from a factory on Bernauer Straße to a cellar in East Berlin; 29 people escaped through it over two days while an American TV crew filmed.
9 September 1964
Fifteen people behind the pig carcasses
A trusted meat-transport driver took his wife, their eight children and his brother-in-law's family of five through the Heinrich-Heine-Straße checkpoint hidden among pig carcasses.
3 October 1964 – 5 October 1964
Tunnel 57
57 East Berliners crawled through a 145-metre tunnel dug by West Berlin students under Bernauer Straße. The escape ended in a shoot-out in which border guard Egon Schultz was killed; records opened after 1990 showed the fatal shots came from a fellow GDR soldier.
26 July 1973
The Klein Glienicke Family Tunnel
Two brothers, their wives and five children escaped from the GDR exclave of Klein Glienicke through a 19-metre tunnel dug with a child's spade during a heatwave.
Read in depth
Long reads on the numbers, the tunnels, the helpers and the guards who ran, and a walk past the places where it happened.
The numbers
How Many People Escaped the Berlin Wall?
The figure of 5,075 comes from a West Berlin police count. Here is where it comes from, how it fell year by year, and what several hundred documented escapes add to it.
Tunnels
The Tunnels Under the Berlin Wall: Who Dug Them, Who Got Out
Students dug in from the West, families dug out from the East, and the Stasi waited at the far end of many. How the tunnels worked, why most failed, and where you can still see one.
How they did it
The Most Ingenious Berlin Wall Escapes, and How They Worked
A cable from a ministry roof, a train that didn't stop, a bubble car with a person behind the seat. Eleven escapes that were engineered rather than lucky, with the measurements and the places the sources disagree.
Ways out
Year by year
Most escapes came in the first years, before the border was fully fortified. Choose a year to see everything that happened in it.