e a few words about—sports, personal matters, and such. Of course, they were all youngsters— eighteen or nineteen—and still are, so there’s never been any point in talking politics with them. What do they know about politics? How old were they when the war ended? One? Two? Three? You might mention, for instance, that some friend of yours had just made a trip to the Tyrol on his vacation. They’d say, ‘Sure, capitalists can take vacations.’ And you’d say, ‘He isn’t a capitalist. He’s a locksmith.’ But you couldn’t make them believe you. They might ask about the potato ration, and you’d tell them there wasn’t any ration—you could buy all you wanted. They’d say, ‘Oh, yes, in West Berlin, but in West Germany your people are starving.’ They just wouldn’t believe anything. It was useless.”
All the same, fraternization led many Vopos to defect, and in order to eliminate it the East Germans began, around the first of this year, to transfer the Berliners on duty at the wall and the zonal border—some two thousand, all told—to other units, and to replace them with young Vopos from rural areas, mainly Saxony. The changeover has been completed, and the boundary is now guarded solely by outlanders, who are referred to by some East Berliners as “the fifth occupying power.” The political indoctrination of these generally rough country boys has been stepped up, and the various units are kept isolated from one another to discourage the exchange of subversive ideas. Each company is assigned to Berlin for only six months, on the average, and a company that loses as many as ten men is replaced immediately. For the most part, the Vopos now on the borders of West Berlin are reliable, sternly disciplined, and tough. At least, they try to look and act tough. One day a while ago, Ernst Lemmer, the Bonn Minister for All-German Affairs, paid a visit to the wall with a small group of West German journalists and made a gesture of greeting to two Vopos standing sentry. He got no response. “You don’t have to look at us so angrily,” he called to them. “Remember, all of us are Germans. And I hope we will all get out of this dilemma by peaceful means.” One of the Vopos laughed; the other spat.
According to a knowledgeable member of the United States Mission in Berlin, there used to be a number of places on the border where one could arrange an escape by bribing the Vopos, but pay-as-you-leave exits now seem to be a thing of the past. Today, a person who tries to buy his way across the border runs a grave risk, as the East German press likes to point out every so often in stories about Vopos who have covered themselves with glory by spurning bribes. Not long ago, for example, Neues Deutschland, the principal East German newspaper, reported that one night four Vopos on guard duty at an outlying section of the wall were approached by two young women, who offered them four thousand marks to let them and their families through to West Berlin. The Vopos agreed, took the money, and set the time and place for the planned escape. Then they reported the details to the Staats Sicherheitsdienst, or S.S.D—the State Security Service—and when the young women and eight of their relatives turned up as planned, before dawn the following day, agents of the S.S.D. put them under arrest. Each of the Vopos was decorated with a medal and given a reward of a hundred marks. Rewards are also given to children for informing against East Germans who they fancy are trying to escape. Recently, the East German newspaper Das Volk published a long article praising members of the Young Pioneers (the Communist organization for children between ten and fourteen) who had “assisted the police in their task of defending the rampart against aggression.” Heidi Mallowitz was congratulated because “as soon as she noticed a stranger walking near the border, she reported to her father, and he alerted the police, who arrested the criminal border violator.” As a reward, Heidi received a track suit. Another Young Pioneer, Horst Bratke, detected a stranger in the fog and immediately called the border gua