July 1978 · False papers and disguises
Three students disguised as a border patrol climb the Wall on folding ladders
Three East German students got into the death strip in a car with military markings; the two men, disguised as border guards, climbed the Wall on folding ladders they had brought, and the woman had come in hidden in the back of the car.
On 24 July 1978 the West Berlin government said that two East German medical students, men aged 21 and 22, had fled to the West by climbing over the Berlin Wall disguised as border guards. Wearing home-made uniforms and driving a car with false military markings, they had deceived the guards into letting them enter a forbidden area. A third medical student, a 20-year-old woman, was smuggled past the guards in the back of their rented car.
A week later a New York Times report named the three as Andreas Puttich, Michael Hutter and Ricarda Wagner. Posing as an army patrol, they entered the death strip on the East Berlin side of the Wall on a dark night, with the woman hiding in the back of the car and the men disguised as border guards. They drove up to the Wall and climbed across the eight-foot structure on folding ladders they had brought along. The paper wrote that this escape was considered one of the most ingenious in the 17-year history of the Wall.
Puttich, who was 21, told reporters at the Marienfelde refugee camp that they had had no outside help, but that he knew all the tricks from his military service with the border troops. He said he had planned the escape since serving with the border guard unit at Babelsberg two years earlier, knew the military markings and the army code signals, and, as they approached a watchtower, flashed signals suggesting they were on a special patrol to inspect the Wall.
'Once we had passed the unsuspecting guards on the tower, we knew we had made it,' Hutter said. 'We stopped at a dark corner, slipped across and pulled the ladders along.' Hutter and Wagner had been students at the pre-medical school of Humboldt University in East Berlin. Puttich said they had never applied to leave legally, because they knew they would not get a visa and would only be placed under police surveillance.
Sources
- 2 East Germans Climb Over Wall In the Disguise of Border Guards (25 July 1978)The New York Times (Reuters)
- A Few Slip Through East Germany's Net (31 July 1978)The New York Times
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