The Abandoned Sigridshorst Tunnel
A train driver and his wife dug 17 metres of tunnel from their cellar before realising the border was hundreds of metres away; a later balloon plan was betrayed and both were imprisoned.
In September 1981 a 29-year-old train driver and his wife, two years younger, began digging a tunnel from the cellar of their house in Sigridshorst near Teltow, hoping to reach West Berlin. They scattered the spoil around the neighbourhood and drove large amounts away in the boot of their car.
After three months the professionally shored tunnel, only two and a half metres deep, was 17 metres long. But the border was several hundred metres away, which would have meant at least two more years of digging. Exhausted, the couple gave up in December 1981 and applied to emigrate with their ten-year-old son; the application was rejected in February 1982.
They then planned to escape by hot-air balloon and sewed together 110 metres of fabric, but a distant relative they asked for fuel gas betrayed them. On 22 April 1982, while they were being told their second application had been rejected, the Stasi searched their house and found the tunnel. Both were arrested and in July 1982 sentenced to three years and two and a half years in prison.
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