16 May 1964 · False papers and disguises
The borrowed identity card: a wife crosses on a stranger's papers
A man who had fled the GDR in 1963 took a young woman from Holstein on a trip to East Berlin, kept her papers 'for safety' – and his wife, who resembled her, left through Friedrichstraße on them.
The Stasi called it the 'Ähnlichkeitsprinzip', the look-alike principle: escape organisations collected West German or foreign papers from visitors who resembled someone in the East, and that person then left East Berlin on the borrowed documents, while the real owner later reported them lost.
On 16 May 1964 a commercial apprentice from Lunden, born in 1946, in Holstein entered East Berlin through the Friedrichstraße crossing with a man from Meldorf she knew. Right after passport control he asked her to give him her documents because they would be safer with him. In a café at Frankfurter Tor he ordered two coffees, paid, said he was going to visit a friend, and never came back. At about 8 p.m. she reported her papers lost at the Friedrichstraße checkpoint; someone had already left on them.
According to the Stasi's later findings, the man was in reality a construction engineer from Leipzig who had fled the GDR on 20 July 1963 and was travelling on an altered West German identity card; for months he had been looking for a woman who looked like his wife. His wife, from Dahlwitz near Berlin, left home on 16 May 1964, saying she was going to Brandenburg, and a telegram to her mother confirmed that she had left the GDR. The Stasi concluded that she was the woman who had crossed on her papers. She was held; her father came to East Berlin with a reporter from the Hamburger Morgenpost to seek her release.
Sources
- Jahrgang 1964: Festnahme einer westdeutschen Bürgerin – Einzelinformation Nr. 427/64, 27 May 1964Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv (DDR im Blick)
Spotted an error, or know more about this story? Email us a correction or addition
Related escapes
19 May 1964
A 'lost' Danish passport at Friedrichstraße
Fifteen minutes after someone had left East Berlin on her passport, a young Danish woman turned up at the Friedrichstraße crossing to report her handbag stolen.
6 October 1961
Sewer escape helper Carl-August von Halle walks into a Stasi trap
A West Berlin architecture student who had helped East Germans escape through the sewers was lured into a trap by a Stasi informer and arrested at Friedrichstraße station.
21 December 1961
Joachim Neumann's Swiss passport
Engineering student Joachim Neumann dyed his hair, filled his pockets with Swiss odds and ends and played an aloof Swiss tourist to pass the Friedrichstraße checkpoint on a Swiss passport supplied through West Berlin student escape helpers.
7 May 1963
Fake UN diplomats: the taxi driver's 'CD' car caught on Karl-Marx-Allee
A West Berlin taxi owner posing as a Swiss diplomat had already driven 16 people through Checkpoint Charlie in cars with 'CD' plates and forged UN diplomatic passports. His seventh trip ended in arrest.