ign was addressed to him. It read, “Turn around! Your enemy is behind you. He lost the last war. Now you are supposed to march and die for him again. Turn around! “ “You see those everywhere up and down the border,” one of the policemen said. “The idea is to try to demoralize us and keep us from doing our duty. Ulbricht must think we haven’t got all our cups in the cuphoard. Nobody has to tell us who the enemy is.”
After we had walked on another quarter of a mile or so, the colonel stopped and told me that it was here that the student had been killed last December. His name was Dieter Wohlfahrt, he was twenty, and he was enrolled in the West Berlin Technical University. He had managed to get his fiancée, a girl named Elke, who was also a university student, out of East Berlin with a faked passport. A few weeks later, Elke’s mother sent word that she, too, wanted to flee. Since it was no longer feasible to arrange escapes with the use of false documents, Dieter impetuously decided to rescue her in a Commando-type operation. He got word to Elke’s mother that she should make her way to a farmhouse, owned by a family with whom Dieter had connections, that then stood just beyond the third barbed-wire fence. According to the plan, she was to be at the side of the house nearest the fence at seven o’clock on the night of Saturday, December 9th. The operation began on schedule. Dieter cut a passage through the first fence and was crawling toward the second when he was sighted and shot by a Vopo. The colonel said that evidently somebody had informed, because several other Vopos were at the scene. They arrested Elke’s mother. A West Berlin police patrol arrived a few minutes after the shooting and turned searchlights on the area, but the policemen were held back by the Vopos, brandishing their submachine guns. Since this part of Berlin is in the British Sector, the British Military Police were summoned; they were also prevented by the Vopos from giving assistance. As a result, Dieter, like later casualties at the wall, died while West Berlin police and Allied soldiers looked on. It was nearly two hours before a truck arrived to remove the body. The farmhouse was levelled the next day. The colonel and I turned around and walked back to the main road, where we were again taken under surveillance by the Vopo at the checkpoint. “I see Junior still has the glasses on us,” the colonel said. He thumbed his nose at the Vopo, and with that we got into the car and headed away from the Zone of Peace.
The colonel’s annoyance interested me, because it indicated that he had still not become accustomed to being watched. The tactic irritated me, too, but I had been in Berlin only a few days, and had thought that in time one would get used to it. My German friends and acquaintances apparently had, and seemed somewhat amused when I showed my displeasure, as I did for the first time a couple of days after arriving in Berlin. I was talking to a West Berlin Polizeimeister, or police captain, in a wooden shack overlooking the wall, and was being watched through binoculars by a Vopo standing on a raised platform about ten feet on the other side. After a while, I borrowed the policeman’s binoculars, and trained them on the Vopo. He put his glasses down, turned his back, lighted a cigarette with studied nonchalance, and didn’t train the binoculars on me again until I started to leave. (I played this childish game a few more times, usually with much the same result, though not if the Vopos were officers; the officers glowered but didn’t turn away.) “It shouldn’t bother you,” the Polizeimeister said with a smile. “You must remember that everything the Vopos do is calculated to intimidate us, or to try to. They want to give us the feeling that we’re being watched and that we’re helpless to do anything about it.” Later that day, he took me out to a suburban neighborhood on the sector border, where the wall consisted mainly of barbed-wire fencing. On the West Berlin side, workmen were noisily constructing a new housing development. The East Berlin side was seem