In Berlin you can play and go to hundreds of escape games - as we talked on a previous post Gaming for Grownups - but for 28 years, it wasn't any game in this city. Many people lost their lives looking for freedom, but some others did manage to cross the wall successfully.
There are many interesting stories, one currently in the big screen "The Balloon", and we cannot list them all, but we wanted to make a small selection of the most impressive and creative ones.
15th of August 1961: Conrad Schuman
It is the first border police to escape. His escape is not the craziest ever remembered, but it would become famous in the end because of its political significance.
If you have visited Berlin or live in the city, you have probably seen the mural in your honor in front of the U-bahn station of Bernauerstrasse.
March 1962: Brothers Horst and Karl Müller with their families
The brothers Horst and Karl Müller want to meet in West Berlin with Rudolph, the eldest of the 3.
To do this, they devised the following plan: stop an U-Bahn, which passes in one of its sections through the eastern part.
To access the U-bahn, they slip through a subway shaft. Once they reached the road, they saw the subway approaching and Klaus made signs with the flashlight to stop. The driver stopped the machine and let both families get in.
The passengers of the wagon noticed the situation and helped the fugitives, sitting them in different places and leaving them clothes to change their appearance.
Unfortunately, they could not rescue the wife and children of Rudolph, because they were heavily guarded. Later they would rescue their family through a tunnel they dug from West Berlin.
October 1964: The Tunnel 57
The evasions through tunnels were a constant until the fall of the Wall. These were cataloged with numbers, which referred to the number of people who had escaped.
The most famous of these was tunnel 57, not only because of the number of brave men who managed to escape but because it was the deepest and longest built until then. Two engineers, Reinhard Furrer and Wolfgang Fuchs, made good on their promise to rejoin their wives and together with a brigade of 34 collaborators created this escape route. The tunnel was 145 meters long and 12 meters deep, which forced them to use a pulley system to overcome the last section.
Of the 120 men, women and children who planned to flee, they only managed 57, because two members of the Stasi found the tunnel at midnight and called the border guard to stop the evasion.
There is also a movie about this tunnel and we also recommend to do the Tour of Tunnels with Berliner Unterweltenn (Underground Berlin)
Do not miss the parts 2 and 3 in future blog posts where we will make a special mention to the Bethke brothers, who organized 3 different escapes in different years and with different methods ...
Check also:
Stand off at Checkpoint Charlie
Everyday Life in the GDR: Exhibition at the Kulturbrauerei
DDR Museum: An experience in the past
