ers 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 thirty-five hundred had their permanent residence in East Berlin. Only about half that number, however, were caught there when the barrier went up.) Word of the planned underground railroad got around quickly, and some fifty other students—Americans, Dutch, British, and Scandinavians among them—joined up. They called their operation Das Reisebüro (the travel bureau), and referred to one another, in the underground tradition, by fictitious names. Though most of the Bureau’s undertakings have been kept secret, a few of its agents, including one known as Der Lange Heinrich (Big Henry), who is a husky, six-foot-two engineering student from Munich, told me something about their methods. In the beginning, the operation was conducted mainly with the use of borrowed passports. A West German student would make a trip into East Berlin, get in touch with one of the trapped students, and return with his photograph. The Bureau would then hunt around for a West German student bearing a passable resemblance to the one in the photograph. If such a look-alike was found, he was asked to assist in the enterprise. Requests for such assistance were seldom refused. The double’s task consisted of making one trip into East Berlin, to secure an entry permit; this was issued at a border checkpoint and was good only on the day of its issuance and only with the passport presented. Having secured the permit, the look-alike would make a quick round trip, and, back in West Berlin, would turn his passport and the entry permit over to the Bureau. Another of its operatives, also able to cross the border legally, would then deliver these documents to the waiting East Berlin student, who would use the borrowed passport and permit to cross the border. When a satisfactory look-alike could not be found, the Bureau took a West German student’s passport, removed the photograph, and substituted a passport photograph, taken in East Berlin, of the student to be brought out. The necessary stamps on the passport were forged by an art student (code name: Herr R