Peter Hertel's forged BEWAG order and a gas worker's ladder

Peter Hertel, born in 1938 in Magdeburg, lived with his mother in East Berlin and worked as an electrician in the West. After the border closed he was given a job at the East Berlin electricity company BEWAG, in its inventions department. Seeing Bernauer Straße on television, he decided to get into one of the border houses.

He forged a work order to remove electricity meters from the evacuated houses on Bernauer Straße and put a rope in his briefcase; his mother, whom he had told the evening before, packed a pair of gloves with his sandwiches. At the corner of Swinemünder Straße he found a suitable house. He chatted loudly with the caretaker about her electricity tariff so that a soldier of the National People's Army at the front building would hear him. The soldier asked for a pass, but the forged order convinced him, and he asked Hertel to be quiet because his comrades were up in the attic.

The flats on the first and second floors were locked and their windows bricked up; on the third floor he found an open window. Onlookers on the western pavement noticed him. Doubting the window frame, he wound the rope round a stove door as well as the window cross, which left it too short: it reached only to the first floor.

A worker of the gas company GASAG was at a street lamp below with a ladder. He propped it at an angle against the wall and Hertel climbed down onto it, knees shaking. People gave him cigarettes and some money, and he went to the nearest police station.