 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 the thirteenth night, an East Berlin family of three was scheduled for passage at nine o’clock. After paying Mueller, the father said that two friends of his, a young couple, also wanted to make the trip and had the money for the fare. He had told the couple, he said, to be at the rendezvous point—the spot where Mueller and his recruiting agent met prospective clients—at nine-thirty that evening. The family then departed for West Berlin, and a while later Mueller and his agent left for the rendezvous point, which was a rubble-strewn empty lot about three-quarters of a block from the East Berlin basement apartment. When they arrived at the lot, seven or eight pistol shots were fired—apparently by S.S.D. operatives—wounding both Mueller and the agent. They managed to get back to the basement apartment, lock the door and block it with a wheelbarrow load of rocks, and drag themselves to West Berlin. They were taken to a hospital, where Mueller died that night. The agent eventually recovered. The exact nature of Mueller’s tunnel activities and the circumstances of his death have not been reported by the German press, though one West Berlin tabloid hailed him as a martyr who gave his life to help his countrymen escape to freedom, and demanded that he be given a state funeral. That honor was not accorded him, however, and his place in the annals of die Mauer remains uncertain.
On the basis of information currently available, the position of certain other Berliners is no less ambiguous. What is one to think, for example, of a number of West Berliners who occupy apartments overlooking the wall and ask as much as twenty-five hundred dollars in return for letting the quarters be used as lookout posts by volunteers helping to spirit East Germans over the wall? Or of two East Berlin building workers, both in their twenties and with wives and children, who escaped to West Berlin by crashing a dump truck through the wall, leaving their families on the other side? “As one of the reasons for their escape,” the West Berlin newspap