Berlin Wall Escapes1961–1989

14 September 1962 – 15 September 1962 · Tunnels

Tunnel 29

Around 30 helpers, mostly students, dug a tunnel from a factory on Bernauer Straße to a cellar in East Berlin; 29 people escaped through it over two days while an American TV crew filmed.

Bronze plaque on a building wall with German text and the words 'Tunnel 29' in quotation marks in the centre.
Memorial plaque for 'Tunnel 29' at Schönholzer Straße 7 in Mitte, where the 135-metre tunnel ended and 29 people escaped on 14–15 September 1962 (plaque from 2009, photographed 2010) Photo: OTFW, Berlin. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

From early summer 1962 a group of helpers, largely students, dug a tunnel from a factory building at Bernauer Straße 78/79 in West Berlin under the border to the cellar of Schönholzer Straße 7 in East Berlin. Among the organisers were the Italian students Luigi Spina and Domenico Sesta and Hasso Herschel, who had himself fled the GDR.

To finance the work, Spina and Sesta sold the rights to film the digging and the arrival of refugees in the West to the American broadcaster NBC. Some of the diggers distanced themselves from what they saw as turning escape help into a business.

On 14 and 15 September 1962, 29 East Germans crawled through the roughly 120-metre tunnel to West Berlin, among them Hasso Herschel's sister. The escape succeeded without incident, and the number of refugees gave the tunnel its name. Work had been interrupted earlier by water ingress, and the tunnel was abandoned after it flooded.

Sources

  1. Gelungene Flucht durch den „Tunnel 29“, 14./15. September 1962Chronik der Mauer
  2. Info Panel about “Tunnel 29” on Schönholzer StraßeStiftung Berliner Mauer

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