Tunnel 71 – The Last Tunnel under Bernauer Straße
Hasso Herschel's team lived underground for nine weeks digging a tunnel beneath Bernauer Straße, but came within ten metres of their goal before GDR border troops dug it up.
In late 1970 Hasso Herschel, a veteran of Tunnel 29, started a new tunnel with six friends from the tenement at Brunnenstraße 137 in West Berlin. Civil engineer Ulrich Pfeifer handled the surveying. The tunnel, up to nine or ten metres deep, was planned to run about 115 metres under Bernauer Straße and the border strip to Brunnenstraße 141 in East Berlin, where 17 East Germans were to escape.
Instead of sinking a vertical shaft, the helpers dug a sloping ramp to make removing the spoil easier. For security, no one left the site during the roughly nine weeks of work; the diggers lived in the tunnel.
In February 1971, only about ten metres from the target, an excavator of the border troops appeared in the death strip and began digging exactly where the tunnel ran. The helpers withdrew. The tunnel was dug out and mostly filled with concrete. Herschel and Pfeifer believe an informer betrayed the project; the border troops had also installed listening devices in the ground along Bernauer Straße.
The association Berliner Unterwelten rediscovered the tunnel with laser measurements and, in 2019, opened a visitor tunnel that crosses it, making a section of the original escape tunnel visible.
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Related escapes
7 August 1962
The Betrayed Kiefholzstraße Tunnel
Several escape-helper groups joined forces on a tunnel to a small house on Kiefholzstraße for a planned mass escape, but a Stasi informer among the couriers betrayed it and dozens of would-be refugees were arrested.
14 September 1962 – 15 September 1962
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.
3 October 1964 – 5 October 1964
Tunnel 57
57 East Berliners crawled through a 145-metre tunnel dug by West Berlin students under Bernauer Straße. The escape ended in a shoot-out in which border guard Egon Schultz was killed; records opened after 1990 showed the fatal shots came from a fellow GDR soldier.
May 1970
The 85-metre tunnel from Bernauer Straße 80, dug out by the Stasi
Eight years after Tunnel 29, a new tunnel was begun at Bernauer Straße 80; after a tip-off and listening probes the Stasi exposed it by cross-trenching in May 1970, when it was already 85 metres long.