21 October 1961 · False papers and disguises
Hasso Herschel leaves on a Swiss passport
Weeks after the Wall went up, the later tunnel builder Hasso Herschel left East Berlin on someone else's Swiss passport and immediately began looking for a way to get his sister out.
Hasso Herschel, born in Dresden in 1935, had studied in West Berlin before the Wall and had already served a prison sentence in the GDR for alleged economic crimes. When the sector border was closed in August 1961, he was cut off in the East.
In October 1961 he crossed to West Berlin using a Swiss passport that was not his own. NPR gives the date as 21 October 1961 and says the forged passport came from a West Berlin student; the NZZ writes that he passed through Checkpoint Charlie.
Once in the West, Herschel looked for escape helpers who could bring out his sister Anita and her family. He found the students who were planning what became Tunnel 29, joined the digging in 1962, and went on to help around a thousand people leave the GDR over the following decade.
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