Sealed van of the Mierendorff escape organisation stopped at Staaken

On the evening of 16 July 1976 Klaus-Dieter Precht, a wholesale merchant from Wedel near Hamburg, was to pick up three East Germans at kilometre 144.2 on the transit route from Lauenburg to Berlin and take them to West Berlin through the Staaken crossing in a customs-sealed Hanomag-Henschel van (registration HH-CX 519). He had been promised 6,000 marks. At 21.30 he pulled off onto the verge at the agreed spot. A man came out of the bushes and fetched his wife and a child who had been given sleeping pills. Using a hex key, Precht removed a prepared metal bracket together with the customs seal, so the van could be opened without breaking the seal. The three climbed into the load space among junk stacked there as cover; it took less than five minutes.

A few kilometres on, two East German Wartburg cars began following him and then drove one ahead and one behind the van. At the Staaken checkpoint GDR border guards waved the Hanomag into a special lane that was closed off behind it. An officer asked whether he had picked anyone up on the way; a customs officer told him to open the door. Precht tore off the seal and the van was surrounded by border soldiers with Kalashnikovs.

On 13 September 1976 the Potsdam district court sentenced Precht to three and a half years for 'hostile trafficking in human beings'. He served 18 months in Rummelsburg prison and was released to the West on 20 January 1978 with about 50 other prisoners bought free by Bonn. According to Der Spiegel it was Kay-Uwe Mierendorff, a former West Berlin car dealer who, the magazine wrote, was regarded as the secret king of the commercial escape business, who had talked Precht into the trip and shown him how to open the sealed van; weeks earlier another of his drivers had been caught with the same door system. Precht said he was ready to testify on oath about this.