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 newspapers said of the young men, “they cited the catastrophic food situation in the East.” One hopes that they had better reasons, and, as the director of a West Berlin publishing firm remarked to me when the subject was referred to one day at lunch, it is quite possible that they did have. “Let us beware of casting the first stone at refugees who left their wives and children behind,” he said “How can we know what situation they found themselves in? Perhaps they were in imminent danger of arrest. Is it better to stay and rot in an East German jail or to escape and be free to try to do something from here for those they had to leave? Until we know the circumstances, it is dangerous to pass judgment.”
A West Berlin lawyer advised the same policy in considering the case of a young Vopo who shot and killed his partner on sentry duty and then escaped across the border. The West Berlin authorities decided to arrest the defecting Vopo and put him on trial—either for manslaughter, which carries a penalty ranging up to fifteen years in prison, or for murder, for which the maximum penalty in West Germany is life imprisonment. His defense, the lawyer told me, will probably be that he was forced into service with the Volkspolizei, that such service was not consistent with his political beliefs, and that since border guards are under orders to shoot any person who tries to flee, he was forced to kill his comrade in self-defense. I said that this struck me as tortuous reasoning. “The world induced by the wall is a tortuous world,” the lawyer said.
One set of inhabitants of that world upon whom it is quite unnecessary to defer judgment are a large group of university students. On the night the wall came into being, a half-dozen students at West Berlin’s Free University got together to form an organization to rescue fellow-students who had been trapped behind the wall. (Before August 13th, the two universities and four academies in West Berlin had a total enrollment of approximately twenty-four thousand students, and of these some th