The Betrayed Kiefholzstraße Tunnel
Several escape-helper groups joined forces on a tunnel to a small house on Kiefholzstraße for a planned mass escape, but a Stasi informer among the couriers betrayed it and dozens of would-be refugees were arrested.
Harry Seidel and Fritz Wagner first tried to tunnel under Kiefholzstraße in Treptow in January 1962 but gave up because of groundwater. In summer 1962 the project was revived: from a former small bunker on the West Berlin side, a tunnel of over 60 metres was to end in the house of a carpenter couple at Kiefholzstraße 388.
The student Girrmann group and part of the team that had been working on Tunnel 29 joined in. Plans grew into a mass escape of about 80 people, who were to be brought to the tunnel by lorries from several pick-up points in East Berlin. One of the couriers, Siegfried Uhse, was a secret Stasi informer who had known about the plan since 8 July 1962 and reported everything.
On 7 August 1962 Hasso Herschel, Ulrich Pfeifer and Joachim Rudolph broke through into the house, where the owner shouted at them to leave. Warned by radio that the Stasi was already on the property, they crawled back to the West. Stasi officers arrested refugees at the pick-up points; one lorry driver escaped with his passengers, and some walkers noticed the danger and turned back. No one reached the West through the tunnel.
According to TF-Mapping more than 70 people were arrested in connection with the tunnel. Uhse's role as an informer only became public after German reunification.
Sources
- Tunnel Kiefholzstraße 388TF-Mapping (Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt-Universität Berlin)
- Liste der Fluchttunnel in Berlin während der deutschen Teilung (after Marion Detjen)Wikipedia (de)
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