How people got across

How the Escapes Changed as the Border Was Built Up

The Berlin Wall was never one structure. The Landesdenkmalamt describes a border changed and extended throughout its 28 years,¹ and several of those changes closed routes people had been using. This page follows those routes in that order, with records from this site as examples; the method pages linked below hold the full lists.

August 1961: wire, a low wall and the house fronts

In the night of 12 to 13 August 1961 the GDR sealed the line through the city with barbed wire. The first wall followed within days:² about two metres high, built of large blocks and hollow blocks topped with concrete beams.³ An essay in the US National Archives calls these first barriers slap-dash and full of holes: people went over, under or through them, used sewers and underground railway tunnels, swam the Spree, dropped from windows and drove through the traffic barriers.⁴

On 13 August a VW Beetle drove through the single roll of wire at Ackerstraße. That evening the police counted about eighteen people crossing the Teltow Canal; eleven days later Günter Litfin was shot in the Humboldthafen, the first refugee killed by aimed fire at the Wall.

On Bernauer Straße the border ran directly in front of the houses on the East Berlin side of the street.⁵ Ida Siekmann died after jumping from the third floor on 22 August; Frieda Schulze, 77, was held from inside and helped from outside on her window ledge on 24 September, the first day of the evictions. Most of the window jumps on this site date from August to December 1961: a few weeks after the Wall went up the houses were evacuated and their windows and doors bricked up.⁵

Some of the men guarding the line fled too. The West Berlin police counted 5,075 people through the Berlin barriers between 13 August 1961 and the end of 1989, 574 of them members of the GDR's armed organs.⁶ Conrad Schumann jumped the wire on 15 August, and the largest group of guards who fled on this site is from the first weeks, when police and militia units were still building the barrier.

Autumn 1961: plugging the holes

The archives essay lists the GDR's first countermeasures: gratings in the sewers, sealed underground railway tunnels and bricked-up windows.⁴ Student helpers had been leading people through a sewer under the Alte Jakobstraße, the "Glockengasse 4711" route, from 13 September; on 24 October three people still got out by sawing through a grate in the yard of the Walter-Ulbricht-Stadion. On 5 December engine driver Harry Deterling drove a passenger train past Albrechtshof into West Berlin; the Chronik der Mauer says the line was cut the next day. The later train records here are mostly attempts around Friedrichstraße station and jumps from trains near the border.

The crossings were used with someone else's papers. Hasso Herschel left on a Swiss passport in October 1961 and Joachim Neumann on another in December; both went on to dig tunnels. The Chronik der Mauer lists forged passports among the helpers' tools and shows prepared West German passports.⁷ False papers and disguises were tried until 1989, though most of the cases here from the 1970s failed.

1962 to 1964: under the Wall

In 1963 a border area was established behind the Wall and largely fenced off, and in the mid-1960s the GDR tore down several buildings to make a uniform strip with an unobstructed view and a clear field of fire.² The archives essay counts 70 known tunnels, 19 of them believed successful, about half attempted in 1962, most dug from West to East because starting on the safe side was thought less dangerous.⁴ Most of the tunnels on this site date from 1961 to 1964. The Becker family dug the Becker tunnel from their own cellar on the border, and 28 people went through in one night in January 1962; Tunnel 29 ran from a Bernauer Straße factory in September 1962; Tunnel 57 brought out 57 people in October 1964 and ended in an exchange of fire in which border guard Egon Schultz was killed. At Kiefholzstraße in August 1962 a courier was a Stasi informer, and dozens of would-be refugees were arrested.

1961 to 1963: driving through

The first wall was only 30 centimetres thick and, the bpb notes, would not have withstood breakthrough attempts with lorries.⁸ Five people drove an armoured pre-war Opel through the Chausseestraße crossing under about 100 shots in November 1961; on Boxing Day 1962 two families in a bus fitted with steel plates and a snowplough broke three barriers at Drewitz; in April 1963 Wolfgang Engels drove a stolen armoured personnel carrier into the Wall.

Then the crossings were rebuilt. On 5 May 1963 an Austrian drove a low sports car under the closed barrier at Checkpoint Charlie; the chronicle records that the barriers were then fitted with vertical iron rods.⁹ A week later a stolen bus tried to slalom around the concrete blocks at Invalidenstraße and crashed just short of the last barrier;¹⁰ the chronicle counts 138 shots.⁹ The breakthroughs on this site cluster at the two ends of the Wall's life, 1961 to 1963 and 1986 to 1989.

From 1964: hidden at the checkpoints

The Chronik der Mauer lists hiding places built into vehicles among the helpers' methods and says that by 1962/63 it was not unusual for refugees to be charged between three and five thousand Deutschmarks.⁷ Checkpoint Charlie was reserved for Allied military personnel, diplomats and people from abroad.¹¹ A friend was smuggled out in a BMW Isetta in May 1964, and in September 1964 a meat-transport driver took fifteen people through Heinrich-Heine-Straße behind pig carcasses. Heinz Schöneberger was shot at the same crossing on 26 December 1965 after one of his two hidden passengers was found. On 28 July 1965 the Holzapfels slid on a steel cable from the roof of the Haus der Ministerien, one of only three zipline cases here.

The 1970s: the transit routes

From 1971 the Berlin border was guarded by the 11,500-strong Grenzkommando Mitte, with posts about 320 metres apart by day in the city centre,¹²¹³ and in the 1970s a second, inner wall closed the strip off from East Berlin.² The 1972 transit agreement between the two German states gave escape help a temporary new momentum; the Stasi tried to stop it with ever closer surveillance of the transit routes, informers and murder attempts on helpers.⁷ In January 1973 a couple and their baby were hidden in crates on a lorry through the Drewitz crossing; the parents got through and 15-month-old Holger H. suffocated. Hartmut Richter, who had helped 33 people escape, mostly in his car boot, was caught at the same crossing in March 1975 with his sister and her fiancé in the boot, and sentenced to 15 years. Nearly every hidden-vehicle record from the 1970s here is at a checkpoint; in 1979 the US ambassador's chauffeur drove his own family out through Checkpoint Charlie in the official car.

1975 to 1989: Grenzmauer 75, and the ladders

From the mid-1970s the fourth-generation "Grenzmauer 75" went up: L-shaped concrete elements about 3.60 metres high and 1.20 metres wide, topped like the wall before it with a round concrete pipe meant to make climbing harder. The strip behind it was typically about 70 metres wide.³ By 1983 the GDR had removed the metal gratings, bunkers and vehicle obstacles from the strip; the new wall and closer surveillance had made them less essential.² From 1984 it also approved more exit applications, and that and the exodus that followed largely removed the basis for escape help.⁷

Ladders still got people over. On 19 November 1986 Dieter H. cut the signal fence at Brunnenstraße and got over the 3.6-metre wall under twelve shots. In September 1986 two men climbed into the Bornholmer Straße checkpoint and walked across the bridge, taken for diplomats who had already been checked. Over the wall is the one method with records here in every year from 1961 to 1989.

There were flights and swims as well. An 18-year-old flew a light aircraft from Potsdam to RAF Gatow in July 1987; Winfried Freudenberg died when his gas balloon came down in Zehlendorf on 8 March 1989, the last refugee to die at the Wall by the Chronik's count;¹³ on 26 May 1989 two brothers flew microlights over the Wall to collect the third from Treptower Park. Most of the aircraft and balloon records are from the 1980s. In August 1988 four people swam the Spree at the Reichstag while a patrol boat followed without firing. Most swimming records date from 1961 to 1964, with a second cluster in 1986 to 1989; the boats are few and spread across the years.

The last change came in the orders. On 5 February 1989 Chris Gueffroy was shot dead at the Britzer Zweigkanal; on 3 April Honecker ordered that firearms no longer be used to prevent border breaches,¹² and on 5 July guards ordered a 24-year-old to halt as he scaled the Wall, and held their fire. The planned "Grenzsicherungsanlage 90", with sensors, infrared barriers and automatic searchlights, was never built.³ On 18 August 1989 a teacher and his seven-year-old daughter crossed Checkpoint Charlie in an American's car boot, as a woman had on the first day at Heinrich-Heine-Straße.