 on border duty with another soldier who is considered in any way doubtful. “The instructor has the answer ready,” he added. “He says that anybody who is trying to cross the border is a criminal, or else he is working for the C.I.A. The capitalist countries are all warmongers, and they are so bloodthirsty they make spies out of children, six, eight, ten years old. And, of course, they give them arms. So if you see one of them trying to escape, you have to know that he is armed. He may shoot you—therefore you have to shoot first.”
Off duty, Rudi went on, the recruits spent most of their time playing soccer and other games. Their pay was the equivalent of thirty dollars a month, at least a third of which they “volunteered” to put into so-called Reconstruction Savings, a government savings plan that pays interest of two per cent. “What was left went for cigarettes and drink, and those things are expensive,” Rudi said. “Some things are cheaper there—movies, sports events, books—but not food and drink.” Still, the life, taken as a whole, did not seem too bad, Rudi continued. He had never before been away from the region around his birthplace, and he enjoyed seeing new sights. As a recruit, he didn’t have to worry about food or clothing or a place to live, and he found it easy to meet the various requirements. In the final examinations, he scored high on both military and political questions. If a recruit fails the political examination, he has to repeat the entire three months’ program; if he fails a second time, he is given a routine job, like guarding a shoe factory somewhere in the interior.
After basic training, Rudi was transferred to a unit in a suburb of East Berlin, where he was assigned to border duty. Starting about four months before his enlistment was due to end, he was called almost daily by his company commander, who urged him to reënlist. After he had been promised a chance to take a course in passport control, he decided to stay on. On completing this training, which took three months and included the usual large proportion of political education, he began checking passports at a railroad control point in Berlin. “At that time, it was still a pleasure to be a soldier,” he said. “The border was marked only with signs. There was a friendly spirit between the East and West border guards. They gave us cigarettes, and we all talked about the latest football matches. We had a good comradeship. I could go anywhere I wanted to in the Zone during my time off, except on Sunday, when we usually worked on a farm. That was voluntary, of course. If you didn’t do it, you got extra heavy duty from your sergeant.” He withdrew enough money from his savings account to buy a good Czech motorcycle, and on his leaves he made trips to visit his sisters, all of whom had married.
During these exposures to civilian life, Rudi said, he began to see and hear things that, for the first time, created some doubt in his mind about the regime. He found that his relatives were generally short of food and that their lives were coming under increasingly close control. The husband of one of his sisters was a hairdresser, who owned his own shop. “One day, he was asked to call at the police station,” Rudi said. “The S.S.D. has a section in every police station. In every post office, too, for that matter. Well, my brother-in-law was called in by the S.S.D., and they asked the usual questions: ‘Are you in favor of the peace? ‘ ‘Would you like to have another war?’ Naturally, my brother-in-law said he was in favor of the peace and against another war. ‘You know,’ they said, ‘that the Fascist-capitalist countries are planning a war against the freedom-loving countries. And you are convinced that our workers’ and peasants’ state is first in the interests of peace?’ And so on. My brother-in-law gave the right answers, and then they said, ‘Well, if you are for all these things, you can help us. In your shop, you have lots of people coming and going—you are in touch with the public all day long. We don’t always know exactly how they feel about many things,