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"All the Ways People Escaped Across the Berlin Wall"

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"All the Ways People Escaped Across the Berlin Wall"

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Ida Siekmann had been holed up for days. Nine days earlier, workers had sealed the border to her country by dead of night. Three days earlier, the front entrance to her apartment had been blocked off by police.

She had committed no crime, but Siekmann was in the wrong place at the wrong time: August 1961. Her apartment building was located in what had become East Berlin, while the street, including the sidewalk in front of her building entrance was now part of West Berlin.

Siekmann wanted out, so she took a chance. She shoved her bedding and other possessions out of her window and jumped. She died on the way to the hospital. She had just become the first fatality of the Berlin Wall.

Between 1961 and 1989, thousands of East Germans made risky border crossings. Around 5,000 of them crossed over the Berlin Wall at great personal risk-and their attempts to do so ranged from sneaky to suicidal.

German Democratic Republic officials decided to close the Berlin border for good in 1961, spurred by a spate of defections from refugees who used Berlin's relatively permeable border to escape East Germany. By August 1961, when officials abruptly sealed the border, up to 1,700 people a day were leaving through Berlin and claiming refugee status once they reached the west. On the night of August 12-13, 1961, workers erected barbed wire and temporary barriers, trapping East Berliners.

As Barriers Intensify, So Do Escape Efforts

At first, people used structures like Siekmann's apartment building to escape west. These border houses had doors and windows that opened into West Berlin, and people used those buildings to escape. West German emergency personnel and others waited on the west side and helped people as they climbed through windows or jumped off of roofs. Soon, though, East German troops forced residents to move and sealed the apartment buildings along the border.

They soon erected a more permanent barrier through Berlin. The 27-mile-long wall was actually two walls with a no-man's-land known as the "death strip" in between. Armed with landmines, attack dogs and barbed wire and regularly patrolled by East German troops ready to shoot and kill any would-be escapee, it intimidated most East Berliners into staying put.

But some were determined to leave at any cost. Two days after the wall was built, Conrad Schumann, an East German border guard, was photographed leaping over barbed wire toward freedom. Train engineer Harry Deterling stole a steam train and drove it through the last station in East Berlin, bringing 25 passengers to the west and prompting big changes to the railroad lines. And Wolfgang Engels, an East German soldier who had helped build the barbed-wire fences that initially separated both Berlins, stole a tank and drove it through the wall itself. Despite getting caught in the barbed wire and shot twice, he managed to escape.

Dozens Cross the Border in Tunnels

Tunnels were another daring mode of escape, and people on both sides attempted to dig them. Many were left unfinished when their makers were ratted out; others failed because of difficult conditions. But a few were successful.

In 1962, a group of West German students assisted by an East German refugee received funding from NBC as they built a 131-foot-long tunnel beneath a factory. As part of the deal, NBC planned to broadcast a special about the tunnel and escapees. Twenty-nine people escaped through it before it was discovered. The subsequent NBC News' documentary, "The Tunnel," was originally scheduled to air on October 31, 1962 but the air date was postponed after NBC came under pressure to not escalate tensions with the Soviet Union after the Cuban missile crisis.

Another student-dug tunnel sparked the most successful escape attempt in the wall's history- 57 people escaped over the two days it was open. The well publicized escapes so shook East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, that they installed listening devices across the death strip and monitored the ground for tunneling activity 24/7.

Desperation drove creativity as others tried to get over the border. Hartmut Richter swam across the cold Teltow Canal that separated the East German region of Brandenburg from West Berlin. It was a four-hour ordeal-and then he returned again and again to take friends west in his car trunk. Acrobat Horst Klein got over the border on a tightrope; Ingo and Holger Bethke used a complex zip line, then flew ultralight planes back over the wall to pick up their brother, Egbert.

HISTORY Vault: Declassified: Rise and Fall of the Wall

Deaths at the Berlin Wall

But others weren't so lucky. According to the Berlin Wall Memorial, 140 people died at the Berlin Wall or were killed there in connection with the border. Another 251 travelers also died during or after passing through border checkpoints. And "unknown numbers of people suffered and died through distress and despair in their personal lives as a consequence of the Berlin Wall being built."

Ingenuity and desperation drove individuals and small groups to make their escapes, but it would take a massive movement to bring down the wall itself.

In August 1989, the Spitzner family became the last East Germans to escape across the wall. Three months later, massive pro-democracy protests and confusion among East German officials prompted a rush on the border and the wall that had divided Berlin for nearly 30 years. The wall was finally breached on November 9, 1989, and Germany reunited in 1990.

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All the Ways People Escaped Across the Berlin Wall | HISTORY

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Desperation drove ingenuity among East Germans determined to reach West Berlin.

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Blakemore, Erin. All The Ways People Escaped Across the Berlin, 2019, www.history.com/news/berlin-wall-crossings-east-germany.

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Summary and Similarities and Differences

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Summary and Similarities and Differences

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Elie Wiesel was a teenager when his family was abducted from their home in Sighet, Transylvania, in 1944 and sent first to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. This book is based on a true story about Ellie Wiesel's experience of losing her family and her innocence. Wiesel battles internally about his religion and people overall. Some similarities between the two books are that they are set in the past and around the same time periods: and the setting is Germany. One difference is the type of genre because Escape From East Berlin is historical fiction, while Night is a memoir.

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Kurt and Marta are both people on the east side of the Berlin Wall. Marta's brother, Stefan Dietrich tried to escape but was shot and killed. Marta's relative named Harry has a plan to escape East Berlin. Kurt is a boy who plays chess and has a best friend named Lina. His grandfather is in the Stasi but he gives him climbing gear to get over the wall. When Kurt is about to escape, his brother shows up and shoots his grandfather while Kurt escapes.

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"If Lina won't come, then you're going alone, he tells himself. But it doesn't feel right. He has to convince her. The two of them, escaping together, never coming back" (Marino 71).

"'Have you heard from our parents, Grandfather?' Kurt asks, Your son and your daughter-in-law, he thinks. If Lothar Muller was hurt by his only child's banishment, he has never betrayed any emotion about it one way or another" (Marino 77).

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Burrows, James, director. Friends. NBC, 1994.

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This article is about how people escaped across the Berlin Wall. People were escaping so security started to tighten and the desire of escaping grew more. People swam and even ziplined and tight-roped to escape but a popular way was through tunnels. People would dig their way through the ground even one spending 131 feet beneath a factory. A lot of people escaped but there were many deaths. The way the escapes were portrayed in the book was historically accurate to what actually happened.

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Friends is about a group of people who are friends and who go through everything you can think of together throughout the series. This show shows how relationships affect people because a lot of the actions that were taken in this show were based on friendships and other relationships they had with people. Some could be positive things, such as being able to rely on each other for decisions, so some took more risky decisions, which could also be bad. You can be more open to people because, if that relationship is strong enough, you can trust them with things that have happened in your life. They had opened up about divorce and other personal things. Some negative ways that reality affects people are personal views.

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Flash is a show about how some scientists and friends come together to make a crime-fighting team. It connects to the essential question because the relationships between the characters affect the plot and the people in positive and negative ways throughout the 9 seasons of the show. For example, when Barry becomes the Flash in the first season, his relationships with Iris and Joe bring them into the world of Meta-humans, which changes their lives forever. Another example of how this show connects to the question is how when one of the characters changes how they act, it affects the people around them. An example of this is when Caitlin Snow changes to Frost.

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Marino, Andy. Escape From East Berlin. Scholastic, 2022.

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Nutter, David, director. The Flash. CW, 2014.

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Wiesel, Elie. Night. Hill & Wang, 2006.