ited late last January by a twenty-seven-year-old East Berlin chauffeur named Erwin Becker, his two younger brothers, and two friends of the family—an engineer and a mechanic—who collaborated in digging the first successful tunnel under the wall. The shaft started in the basement of Becker’s home, a two-story stucco house situated on the border in the East Berlin suburb of Glienicke; ran for eighty-seven feet; and came out in the West Berlin suburb of Frohnau. For most of its length, the tunnel was barely three feet below a street patrolled around the clock by Vopos. Because of the greater danger of being heard at night, Becker and his colleagues took turns reporting sick for work at their places of employment, so that they could dig by day. As a further precaution, Becker’s sister maintained a constant lookout from a second-floor window; at the approach of a Vopo patrol, she warned the diggers to stop work by flipping a switch, which turned off a string of electric lights that had been installed in the tunnel. The burrowing, through sandy soil and clay, progressed rapidly; the earth taken from the tunnel was packed into the basement, and filled it practically from floor to ceiling. Becker and his fellow-diggers completed the tunnel in nine days. Shortly after one o’clock on the morning of January 24th, they and a number of other relatives and friends—twenty-eight people in all, ranging in age from eight to seventy-one—began crawling through the narrow shaft. Within three hours, all were safe in West Berlin. They had staged what was up to then the largest group escape since the erection of the wall.
The success of the Becker tunnel, which was discovered and sealed by Vopos the next day, started a trend. In May, an eighty-one-year-old neighbor of the Beckers led eleven relatives and friends, all but two of whom were over fifty, to West Berlin through a tunnel that the elderly gentlemen had dug in sixteen days. Over the three-day Whitsun holiday, in June, fourteen more East Berliners escaped by tunnel. (In general, the number of escapes rises on weekends and holidays, during good weather, and directly after paydays.) The first tunnel from West Berlin to East Berlin was also dug in June. It was the handiwork of a stonemason named Siegfried Noffke, who received help from two friends. Before the wall went up, Noffke, who was married and had one child, had been a “boundary walker.” Caught behind the wall on August 13th, he had succeeded in crossing the border two days later, and had then put in repeated requests for an exit permit for his wife and child. These were perfunctorily turned down by the East German authorities, and, at length, he decided to build a tunnel to rescue his family. Exactly four weeks after starting it, he and his friends broke through into the cellar of an East Berlin photographer’s shop. As they emerged, waiting Vopos shot and killed Noffke and wounded his two friends.
It has been said that some tunnels have been built and run for profit. There seems to be no doubt that one was. This enterprise, which came into existence a few months ago, was directed by a twenty-six-year-old West Berlin truck driver, who will here be called Jacob Mueller. With three other risk-takers, who had previously been engaged in various occupations that included some gray-market activity, he dug a shaft from a basement apartment in West Berlin to a basement apartment in East Berlin; the occupant of the former was given a small cut of the tunnel profits, and the occupant of the latter was paid off with free passage for himself and his wife. One of the four tunnel-for-hire operators was a West German and was therefore able to travel legally into East Berlin. He was put in charge of recruiting customers, and he did well. Twelve days after opening for business, the entrepreneurs had sent twenty-seven refugees through the tunnel for a fee equivalent to two hundred and fifty dollars per person. Payment was made in advance to Mueller, who crawled through the shaft on nights when it was to be used, in order to oversee the operation. On 