erlin men and two women roared through the Chausseestrasse checkpoint in an Opel sedan. Several bullets hit the car, but none of the passengers were injured; the refugees had lined the sides and the rear of the car with steel plates and had put a sievelike piece of armor over the windshield. Since then, some two dozen other East Germans who have attempted to break through the checkpoints in vehicles of various kinds have been either arrested or killed. The checkpoints have now been made virtually impregnable; they consist of a series of three or four concrete barriers, five feet high and a yard thick, arranged in a slalom pattern; each barrier has two opening—a narrow one, to accommodate pedestrian traffic, and one that is just wide enough to permit the passage of conventional civilian and commercial vehicles. Each opening is barred by a lift gate and is guarded by four sentries equipped with submachine guns. The checkpoints can, however, still be negotiated by wile, as has been demonstrated by, among others a young East Berlin couple who escaped on November 7, 1961—the forty-fourth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. That morning, five Soviet buses filled with Russian soldiers and officials crossed into West Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie and proceeded to the Soviet Memorial in the Tiergarten for the traditional wreath-laying ceremony. Shortly after the Russian delegation had passed out of sight, the young couple pulled into the checkpoint in their Volkswagen, on the roof of which they had tied a tremendous homemade wreath. The Vopos waved them on.
Since the wall went up, approximately one out of every twelve refugees—or more than a thousand in all—has been a member of the East German police or armed forces. The great majority of this group consists of Vopos, and, to judge by typically concise items (“Four members of the border police fled into West Berlin on Friday while engaged in clearing the terrain at the zone border in Spandau”) that continue to appear quite regularly in the West Berlin newspapers, the flight 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