embrandt), who used only sharpened wooden kitchen matches and marking ink to ply his special trade. This system worked well for nearly four weeks, and scores of East Berlin students arrived in West Berlin, courtesy of Das Reisebüro.
In the second week of September, the East Germans changed the procedure at the border. West Germans who had gone into East Berlin were now required to turn in their entry permits at the checkpoint on leaving. To counter this difficulty, Herr Rembrandt quickly turned out a supply of forged permits. But within a week the border authorities created a further difficulty by changing the color, numbering, and stamping of the permits every day. The Bureau then turned to the use of foreign passports, since persons with such passports, unlike those with West German passports, were not obliged to secure entry permits. Foreign passports were in sufficient supply, too, since the Free University alone had some seven hundred foreign students. However, the problems encountered in disguising East Berlin students in alien dress, language, and habits convincingly enough to fool the border guards turned out to be excessive. Though a few successful crossings were made with foreign passports, there were many more failures and consequent arrests. The whole scheme was abandoned when, some weeks later, the East Germans began requiring any person travelling on a foreign passport to apply for a permit to enter East Berlin.
The Bureau, however, keeping a little ahead of the times, had meanwhile been exploring a new escape route—through Berlin’s sewer system. After studying street maps and charts of the intricate network of sewer pipes crisscrossing the city, the Bureau’s operatives laid out possible routes under the wall, and then, at night, went below to test them. The initial aim of the Bureau’s sewer experts was to find the shortest possible route—that is, a route whose East Berlin entrance was situated as near as possible to the wall. Later, they worked out longer routes. Some of the channels were so small that it was necessary to crawl through them; others were as much as five feet high. Some were used for the disposal of rain water, others for waste. (The latter, known as mixed-water channels, were referred to by agents of the Bureau as Glockengasse 4711, after a popular German eau de cologne.) At intervals, all the sewers contained wheel-shaped metal barriers, whose spokes generally extended around the entire circumference of the channel and blocked passage through it. In some rain-water channels, there was a space eighteen or twenty inches high at the bottom of the barrier, which allowed persons of average size to crawl under. Ordinarily, however, the students sawed off one or more of the spokes to allow the Bureau’s clients a more comfortable passage.
The first successful underground route opened by Das Reisebüro ran through a mixed-water channel. The entrance was less than two thousand feet from the eastern side of the wall, and the trip could be made in about half an hour. When the Bureau was arranging an escape, it alerted one of its East Berlin contacts, who notified a certain number of students on the waiting list that they should be in the vicinity of a specified corner at a set time, usually around midnight. They were told to proceed separately to the rendezvous point, and, after arriving, to keep out of sight as much as possible by staying in shadows or by taking cover in the vestibules of buildings. At the appointed time, a Bureau agent appeared and lifted the manhole cover, and, one by one, the students emerged from their hiding places and disappeared into the sewer. They were guided either by one of their own number, who had been briefed on the route and had committed the briefing to memory (“Proceed thirty-two metres straight ahead, take left channel at junction, proceed forty metres to barrier, remove spoke nearest left side of wall, replace spoke . . .”), or, more often, by a Bureau expert who had come from the other side to shepherd the party. After the last student had disappeared, the manhole 