Escape helper Hartmut Richter caught at Drewitz with his sister in the boot

Hartmut Richter had himself escaped by swimming the Teltow Canal in August 1966. After an amnesty in 1972 he was allowed to enter the GDR again, and the transit agreement of the same year made it easier to hide refugees in West German cars on the transit routes.

In 1973 an acquaintance asked him to find an escape helper for a woman in the GDR. Richter did it himself: his home village of Glindow lay right beside the Hannover–Berlin transit autobahn, and he picked the woman up from a shed on his parents' land and drove her to West Berlin in his car boot. Further escapes followed. When he realised that the man giving him jobs treated escape help as a business and charged fees Richter found disproportionately high, he stopped taking commissions and instead helped friends and acquaintances, collecting them in Glindow or at a bus stop near Finkenkrug. In total 33 people reached the West with his help.

During the night of 3 to 4 March 1975 he tried to bring out his own sister and her fiancé in the boot of his car. At the Drewitz crossing the car was stopped for a search on suspicion, and all three were arrested and taken to the Stasi remand prison in Potsdam.

On 12 December 1975 the Potsdam district court sentenced Richter for 'anti-state trafficking in human beings' to the maximum term of 15 years. He was held in Bautzen II from 1977; on 2 October 1980 West Germany bought his release and he returned to West Berlin.