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, so you can help the fight for peace if you work certain questions into your conversation, and make a note of the answers, and tell us.’ My brother-in-law said, ‘I don’t like to be a spy.’ They said, ‘Oh, no, not spying. We only want you to help protect our country. You don’t have to make a decision now. Think it over. We can meet next week.’ They called him in again the next week, and said, ‘Have you decided to help your country?’ He explained that he wasn’t any good at getting information out of people. ‘You have a son who is doing well in school, haven’t you?’ they said. ‘You want him to go to the university, don’t you?’ Naturally, he answered yes to these questions. They also asked him if he wanted to keep his shop or have the state take it over. They made it harder and harder. Then they said that one of the workers in his shop was already helping them protect the country and was keeping an eye on him. My brother-in-law has a family. What was he to do? It was difficult. Finally, he had to give in. My sister told me it made him sick. They wanted to leave, but they had waited too long.”
Whatever misgivings Rudi may have been developing at the time were not apparent to his superiors in the Vopos, who, in 1960, sent him to a school to be trained as a noncommissioned officer. He emerged a corporal and returned to his old post, but now as a supervisor, in charge of ten soldiers. Not long afterward, he met a girl from West Berlin, named Monika, and began to see her frequently. The political officers in his unit disapproved strongly. They said it was “not decent” for a Socialist soldier to have a capitalist girl friend. Rudi listened, but refused to promise to give up Monika; he continued to see her—though they avoided public places—until the wall went up. After that, he often wrote to her, signing his letters with fictitious names. He told her not to reply, and hinted that he might see her before long. “Everything changed after the wall,” Rudi said. “It was no longer a pleasure to be a soldier. I began thinking more