 so you can help the fight for peace if you work certain questions into your conversation, and make a note of the answers, and tell us.’ My brother-in-law said, ‘I don’t like to be a spy.’ They said, ‘Oh, no, not spying. We only want you to help protect our country. You don’t have to make a decision now. Think it over. We can meet next week.’ They called him in again the next week, and said, ‘Have you decided to help your country?’ He explained that he wasn’t any good at getting information out of people. ‘You have a son who is doing well in school, haven’t you?’ they said. ‘You want him to go to the university, don’t you?’ Naturally, he answered yes to these questions. They also asked him if he wanted to keep his shop or have the state take it over. They made it harder and harder. Then they said that one of the workers in his shop was already helping them protect the country and was keeping an eye on him. My brother-in-law has a family. What was he to do? It was difficult. Finally, he had to give in. My sister told me it made him sick. They wanted to leave, but they had waited too long.”
Whatever misgivings Rudi may have been developing at the time were not apparent to his superiors in the Vopos, who, in 1960, sent him to a school to be trained as a noncommissioned officer. He emerged a corporal and returned to his old post, but now as a supervisor, in charge of ten soldiers. Not long afterward, he met a girl from West Berlin, named Monika, and began to see her frequently. The political officers in his unit disapproved strongly. They said it was “not decent” for a Socialist soldier to have a capitalist girl friend. Rudi listened, but refused to promise to give up Monika; he continued to see her—though they avoided public places—until the wall went up. After that, he often wrote to her, signing his letters with fictitious names. He told her not to reply, and hinted that he might see her before long. “Everything changed after the wall,” Rudi said. “It was no longer a pleasure to be a soldier. I began thinking more and more about leaving.” From time to time, he withdrew money from his savings account and bought cameras and binoculars, which he planned to sell once he had reached the West, in order to get established there. In October, 1961, his unit was transferred to the border near a suburb of East Berlin, where, on a day off, he met two young friends of his, who said they were having a hard time getting jobs in East Germany, because they had worked in West Berlin before August 13th. They indicated that they planned to go back. Rudi saw the two friends several more times, on his days off, and the three presently began working out plans for a joint escape. After devising three schemes that had to he discarded because of changing conditions on the border, the group, which had been enlarged to include the fiancée of one of the friends, settled on a plan that they considered feasible.
According to this plan, the escape attempt would start at exactly 8 P.M. At that hour, Rudi’s friends were to drive up to the border-patrol office in an automobile. The girl, wearing a man’s hat and coast, was to be sitting in the back seat with her fiancé. The other man, at the wheel, was to ask for Unteroffizier Hermann, who would be on office duty that night. Rudi was to get in next to the driver, and the car would then proceed swiftly to the control post at the first barrier, a barbed-wire fence. Rudi was to announce to the sentries there in a loud voice that the other occupants of the car were from the S.S.D. (a term that, he told me, inspires about the same reaction that “Gestapo” did in the past) and that he had to accompany them to the border. “I thought this would work,” Rudi explained, “because one of the soldiers on duty that night would be brand-new, and wouldn’t know what my authority was, and the other fellow was lazy and stupid.” Rudi and his friends planned to be armed, and they had reason for not expecting trouble at the second barrier, which was also a barbed-wire fence. “If something went wrong there,” Rudi said, “we weren’t 