ight of the guards has not been stopped. As a rule, those who defect are of no more than average intelligence, and their defection is less ideological than personal. They complain of having been shunned by the civilian population and of having found it very difficult to get dates with respectable girls. Furthermore, they say, they felt cut off from their own comrades, unable to find a companion whom they believed they could trust. “I had not a single friend in the whole company” is the way they often put it. The border guards’ suspicion of one another, which is deliberately cultivated by their officers, leads would-be escapers among them to think more than twice before making the attempt. When two Vopos who went over the wall together recall the occasion, each of them almost always speaks of his fear of being betrayed by his comrade at the moment of departure. Another deterrent to defection, former Vopos say, is the constant repetition by their officers of warnings about the treatment that “Socialist soldiers” receive in the West. First, the Vopos are told, such soldiers are arrested, put in the cellar of a rat-infested jail, and given the third degree; then they are impressed into the French Foreign Legion (which, as the Vopos know, is made up largely of Germans) or are forced to return to East Germany as secret agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. The official horror stories also have East German girls being lured across the border by Western spies and sent to brothels. “We thought some of those things might be lies,” a former Vopo has said. “But when you hear them all so many times, you can’t be sure. You begin wondering if they might not be true after all.” With scarcely an exception, the Vopos who have come to the West have given as one of the primary reasons for their action the order requiring them to shoot at would-be refugees. Last June, one defecting Vopo described the feeling succinctly when he said that he had fled “because if someone had violated the border in my sector, I would have had to use my weapon, and I did not want to become a murderer.”
While in Berlin, I had a chance to talk at some length with a former border guard named (for present purposes) Rudi Hermann, who defected last March and now drives a delivery truck for a West Berlin department store. Rudi came to my hotel room one evening and, over coffee and cognac, told me how he had happened to flee to the West. A sturdily built young man who stands about five feet seven, he has blond hair, light-blue, half-hooded eyes, noticeably white and regular teeth, and a manner that is assured. He was wearing slacks, a short-sleeved sweater, loafers, a gold signet ring, and a handsome wristwatch that tells many things besides the time of day. The watch, he said, was the only thing of value that he had been able to bring across the border with him. After he had sat down and lighted a cigarette, he told me that he was twenty-three and was born in a rural district of East Germany. His father was killed on the Eastern Front in 1943, and his mother was killed two years later by the invading Russians. “They tried to rape her,” Rudi said. “She resisted, and they shot her. I had an uncle, and he took us in—my three sisters and me.” The uncle, Rudi went on, was then in the S.S. and is now a fairly important functionary in the S.E.D. Rudi said that his mother had been a religious woman but that the uncle had forbidden the children to go to church and had also made them join the Young Pioneers and, later, the F.D.J.—the Freie Deutsche Jugend, or Free German Youth. At sixteen, Rudi went to work in a factory; eight month later the young employees there were canvassed for “volunteers” for the Vopos, and he joined. “It was not what you might call voluntary duty,” Rudi said. “You are expected to join. You are told that it is your duty to join, to protect the country from the imperialist warmongers, and, of course, to save the Frieden [peace]. Everything is for the _Frieden_. Besides, you know if you don’t join you will get no promotions where you work. Or, say, you 