Breaking the Law: Berlin Wall Fugitives
30th IMISE International Conference, Rome.
Ordinary people become criminals simply by attempting to fulfill desires to live somewhere else. Crossing a national frontier without official documentation can transform a common family into felons. In the contemporary world human mobility often is a crime.
On 28 June this year, the United Nations opened an international conference on migration. The estimate is that there were 191 million migrants globally in 2005; and there is expectation of a substantial rise in forthcoming years. In response to this flow of people coming their way many countries have raised bans or walls to stem the human tide.
With a “paperless” immigrant having little or no rights in the host country, the United Nations’ undersecretary general for economic and social affairs Jose Antonio Ocampo pleaded: “International immigration is both a positive force for development, both for the country of origin as well as the country of destination.”2
Currently the general argument in developed countries runs counter to that notion, for it is the country of the immigrant’s entrée that has placed bans, limitations or walls to prevent access to its territory.
During the years of the Cold War 1945 to 1989, the argument was against human mobility as well but from the opposite direction: it was not the country of entrée that put up bans or walls, rather it was the country of origin, particularly in the Soviet bloc, that refused exist. [i]
Constructed during the political tensions of the Cold War on 13 August 1961, the Berlin Wall lasted 28 years, limiting the mobility of East Germans by preventing their freedom of movement.
Yet from 1961 to 1988, 40,000 East Germans managed to escape through the fortified frontier, and 4,975 of the escapees breached the Wall in West Berlin, whereas 753 met their death at the East German frontier and 239 died trying to cross in Berlin, the last in April 1989 a mere six months before the Wall fell. Another 30,000 East Germans imprisoned for attempted escape were purchased by West Germany, and several hundred thousand senior citizens of the East resettled in the West. 3
As early as 1957 East Germany criminalized unofficial migration as “flight from the republic” (Republikflucht) even if the motive for departure was private or economic and not political. With the border between the divided Germany closed with wire fence and concrete blocks, the divided Berlin still had 277 crossing points before construction of the Wall, and was therefore the “big hole” through which East Germans slipped to enter the West. Alone in November 1960 one million and a half East German migrants were registered in the West Berlin immigration center Marienfelde.5
Only with the Berlin Wall, its fortified frontier, and the imprisonment of its people, could East Germany survive in its “real, existing socialism.” However, the Wall could not prevent determined migrants from fleeing the East for the West. Furthermore, this unnatural barrier that hindered urban mobility and prevented freedom of choice, stimulated people in the West to assist escapees. Escape organizations were born and with them Westerners out of idealism, emotional ties, revenge, profit or a mixture of all those motives risked their freedom to bring freedom to East German migrants.
Human Cargo: Heroic Action or Ugly Trade
The first escapes across the Berlin Wall were spontaneous, frequently desperate actions taken by people grasping an opportunity or a straw in their determination to evade their imprisonment, an imprisonment of an entire population. A mere twelve days after the construction of the Wall, the division of Berlin was complete, and escape to the West became difficult and dangerous, requiring knowledge of frontier barriers, patrols or security measures. Whereas some East German border guards assisted escapees in the beginning, the possibility to do so became more difficult, and so did spontaneous flight.
Students of the Free University of Berlin organized the first groups to assist East German migrants to enter the West. Motivated by humanitarian concerns and protesting against the injustice of the Wall, these students sought in their first projects to assist their fellow East German students, who had studied at the Free University before the Wall, to reenter West Berlin to finish their studies. 6
The “Girmann Group” consisted of Detlef Girmann, Dieter Thieme and other students who assisted in bringing their East German fellow students back to the Free University of Berlin. In their first efforts the Girmann group used West German identification papers based on photographic similarity to bring circa 50 East Germans to the West. That modus operanti was no longer possible when East German security introduced different visas, distinguished by date, color, and number of entrée. The escape organization responded by using foreign passports, called “exotic passes.” Foreign students in West Berlin obtained Swiss, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Belgian or Austrian passports to allow East Germans to escape.
With the Girmann group engaged in a noble cause, others assisted East Germans to reach the West once payment of passage was made. In the early years of the Wall, the payment for a “save passage,” the advertisement used, was anywhere from several to a thousand or more Deutsch Mark. East Germans paid gladly to obtain freedom; protest of payment was registered only if the passage failed and the migrant’s initiative ended in East German prison, rather than in West German freedom.
The first trials in East Berlin against West German youth who had assisted in escapes were as early as 22 August 1961 with the charged receiving 4 to 7 years imprisonment for “trade in human beings.” In September the same year four more West Berlin youths were sentenced to two years in prison, a leaner sentence as the East German courts distinguished between “organizational escape assistance,” a harsher sentence, and “individual escape assistance.”7
Even before the Wall, East German law determined a 3 years prison sentence for “flight from the republic” and a harsh 15 year prison sentence for those “initiating departure from East Germany,” meaning persons assisting escapees.
Sentence varied as well if the charged was a non-German. In the East German trails of escape assistants, foreigners—on trial Brits, Dutch, Americans, Africans or Arabs—although convicted to prison were usually released several weeks later as the East German state sought international recognition and avoided bad press throughout the world.
Foreigners engaged in the business of human cargo took advantage of the East German quest of international recognition and organized the “exotic tours.” Exotic tours consisted of using automobiles with faux corps diplomatic license plates or using equally false diplomatic passes to smuggle East Germans to the West.
Authentic diplomatic privilege was used as well. For example, a Swedish minister, attached to the diplomatic corps, transported East Germans to the West in his car with diplomatic plates. When discovered by East German security, he was forbidden to return to East Germany. However, his accomplice an East German minister ended in prison for several years.
The financial burden of escape assistance finally prompted the students around Detlef Girmann to sell their escape stories to the popular press. In March 1962, the newsweekly The Spiegel broke the sensational news of “organized escapes through the Wall” to a readership hungry for stories that showed the Wall as porous and vulnerable and at the same time discredited the builders of this “Wall of Shame” as it was then known in the West. 8
The Girmann group also engaged Allied military personnel for an honorarium to assist in escapes. Known as the “Allied tour” safe passage of an escapee from the East to the West was nearly assured as Allied military personnel were not subject to East German controls. However, if suspicious of the Allied personnel at the control point, the East German border guards could call on the Soviets who in turn would request Allied military police to open the vehicle. That rarely happened, but it always existed as a possible threat.
As early as 1962 escape organizers emerged who demanded payment for their tours. Although East German migrants were more than happy to finance their freedom, the commercialization of the escapes would eventually discredit the escape organizations in the eyes of the public. The East German secret service—the Stasi—would mount massive propaganda and misinformation offensives to discredit the escape organizations as “slave traders” or “merchants of human cargo” who jeopardize East/West relations with their commerce in people.
Human Consignment and Cold War Politics
To halt the flow of migration, the East German state increased prison terms from two to eight, to nine or even ten years in 1962. Although the Berlin Wall did arrest the migration tidal wave, however, those who escaped to the West now were mostly professional people with advanced degrees. Hard hit especially was the East German medical profession with young doctors having received a free East German education headed westward to realize its economic potential.9
The political climate of the Cold War influenced sentencing as well as trials of the unsuccessful escapees or their helpers. Although a normal trial was common there were also secret and show trials, depending upon the objectives of East German politics at the time.
Since the unsuccessful escapees were living proof of the desperate determination of East German citizens to abandon their state, and therefore a political embarrassment, trials were frequently held in secret or if normal trials East German border guards were praised for preventing malcontents from violating the border and thus signaling to the public that the Wall was impregnable.
There were also show trials were heavy prison sentences were meted out and political lessons were propagandized by East Germany to influence political debates in the West.
Such a show trial took place 4 July 1962 when three West Berlin escape helpers and two East Berliners were sentenced from 5 to 15 years in prison. The East German government was at the time following Khrushchev’s proposal that Berlin become a “neutral city” with the Four Powers removed. Acceptance of Khrushchev’s proposal by the Western Allies would have doomed the freedom of West Berlin, and, therefore, the German political leaders, Adenauer and Brandt, rejected it. Consequently, the East German judge declared at the trial that the German political leaders were the “intellectual source of this crime,” i.e. the escape attempts, for they “hindered the settlement of the West Berlin question.”
In another show trial a few months later with five accused, three West Berlin escape helpers, the heavy prison sentences of 7 to 12 years with condemnation for espionage, were meant to discredit the Allied and West German intelligence services, charged with building the escape tunnel.
The most highlighted show trial was against Harry Seidel, a former East German bicyclist celebrity, who had escaped to the West and crusaded against the injustice of the Wall, foiling numerous East German attempts to capture him. Falling into East German hands, Seidel was sentenced to life imprisonment on 29 December 1962. The Stasi propaganda machinery put out the word that the real culprit in the case was West Germany, where “atomic weapons” nested on her territory thus undermining disarmament and violating the borders of East Germany. Recognized internationally only as the “SZ” or Soviet Zone of Occupation until 1971, the East German position was an attempt to argue for national sovereignty. Furthermore, given today’s international political climate, the East German political system was perhaps ahead of its time by labeling the accused a “terrorist” who had violated an international border with the intention of unleashing hostilities between nations and disturbing global peace. 10
One major thaw in the Cold War politics was the Pass Agreement of 1963, allowing West Berliners to visit relatives in East Berlin. Between 19 December 1963 and 5 January 1964, 1.2 million West Berliners traveled to the other side of the Wall for a brief 18 days. During that period 82 escapees were captured and 8 West Berliners for escape assistance. Immediately the East German government used these incidents to undermine the escape movement arguing that future Pass Agreements were in jeopardy if the West did not stop escape organizers. Indeed, West German politicians were in a dilemma: Up to the Pass Agreement there was universal moral and individual, covert logistics support for the escape movement by the West German government, but the grand success of the 18 days visit pleaded for another pass agreement from East Germany and thus outweighed support of escape organizations, which could not match quantitatively the brief joy of more than a million in comparison to the permanent pleasure of a few thousand East German migrants in the West.
Although pass agreements were ended by East Germany in 1966, the West German government moved to another phase of the Cold War, the period of accommodation with the Eastern bloc began with Brandt’s Ostpolitik, recognition of the status quo in Europe, and preparing the ground for international acceptance of East Germany sovereignty half a decade later. This West German shift in Cold War politics jeopardized the escape organizations, for they were now viewed in the West as a possible hindrance to peaceful co-existence with the East.
The Official Human Trade
Cold War headlines on 10 February 1962 divulged the successful exchange of the US U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers in Soviet captivity with the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in US custody. This high profile trade of spies took place on the Glienicke Bridge, an iron span crossing the Spree river, straddling the divide between East and West Berlin. The central arbitrator was the East German attorney Wolfgang Vogel, whose successful negotiations launched his career as the East German trader in the business of state sanctioned human commerce.
Vogel’s next client was the Protestant Church in negotiation with the West Berlin Senate to purchase the freedom of the East German minister who served prison time in aiding his Swedish colleague to bring East German migrants to the West.
These successful negotiations by Vogel convinced the East German political elite to engage West Germany in the human trade of political prisoners, including the sale of those who were caught attempting illegal border crossings to the West. Vogel’s career was assured as the whiff of West German lucre was inhaled deeply by the East German government, bringing wealth way beyond the pale of “real, existing socialism” to the worker’s state.
Vogel’s counterpart, the West Berlin attorney Juergen Stange and his superior the West German minister for inner-German affairs, Rainer Barzel with his assistant Ludwig Rehlinger had tough choices to make, selecting the prisoners for purchase out of 12,000 available inmates. Beginning with the purchase of 8 prisoners for 340,000 DM or 170,000 euros in 1963, the sale of human cargo would expand to 884 prisoners sold by East Germany in the following year.11
Ultimately, East Germany’s human trade would permit West Germany’s purchase of 31,775 East German prisoners to East Germany’s profits of more than 3.5 billion Deutsch Marks or 1.75 billion euros from 1963 to 1989.12
A break-down discloses that West Germany paid approximately 40,000 DM or 20,000 euros per head in the years 1963 to 1976, and approximately 96,000 DM or 48,000 euros per person to East Germany between 1977 to 1989, an enormous supplement to its failing economy.
In comparing the official purchases of human cargo to the charges asked by escape organizations, only the most commercial of Wolfgang Loeffler or Horst Dawid came close with fees of east-west migration ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 DM or 5,000 to 15,000 euros.13 Clearly, the East German state could charge more as it had an advantage by holding its desperate human cargo in cages, whereas escape organizations found theirs on East German streets where certain freedoms still prevailed.
East Germany’s sale of prisoners, hidden at the time from its population, reveals in retrospect the sheer hypocrisy of its system of justice, which condemned West Berlin escape organizers as dealers in human cargo, whereas the real, truly profiteering merchant of human cargo was the East German state.
1 International Herald Tribune, June 29, 2006, p.3.
2 Ibid.
3 Alexandra Hildebrandt, The Wall, Figures, Facts. (Verlag Haus am Checkpoint Charlie,; Berlin, 2002, p.75
5 Marion Detjen, Ein Loch in der Mauer. (Siedler, Muenchen, 2005, p.53.
6 Detjen, p. 18-21.
7 Detjen, p. 181.
8 Ibid. p.119.
9 Alexandra Hildebrandt, p. 59.
10 Detjen, p.181-2.
11 Detjen, p. 188.
12 Hildebrandt, p. 66.
13 Detjen, p. 150.
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