 would have been the first tunnel under the wall. However, the discovery was not made until after the diggers had removed their shovels, picks, wheelbarrows, and other equipment, which they put to use elsewhere with better, though not complete, success.
Around the middle of May, a group of students went to work on another tunnel, which started within a temporarily abandoned construction site, enclosed by a six-foot-high wooden fence, at a street intersection some three hundred yards from Checkpoint Charlie. Working only at night, they devoted a month to digging a shaft more than thirty yards long, which surfaced in a nondescript four-story house at 62 Zimmerstrasse, about fifty feet behind the eastern side of the wall. They thereupon made plans to bring a group of nine East Germans—four women, three men, and two children—through the tunnel at five o’clock on the afternoon of June 18th. An hour or so before that, the leader of the tunnelling organization, who will be known here as Walter, and two other students crawled through the tunnel to manage the escape. While Walter’s two companions remained in the house, he went to meet the nine intended refugees a block and a half away. According to the plan, they were to follow him down Zimmerstrasse in two groups, the first consisting of the two children and two of the women, the second of the two other women and the three men. The first group was instructed to stay about twenty feet behind Walter, and the second about half a block behind the first. Walter was within ten feet of the entrance to No. 62 when he was stopped by a Vopo, who asked to see his identity card. Walter took out his wallet and fumbled through its contents, stalling for time. The two women and the children kept walking, and entered the house. Then one of the women in the second group apparently became panicky and started to run. The others started to run after her. This aroused the suspicion of guards in a pill-box nearby, and they opened fire. “The Vopo who had challenged me was hit and fell to the sidewalk,” Walter said later. “The firing stopped the second group. They took cover behind a parked truck. I ran for my life with bullets whizzing after me. I was not hit.” He raced into the house, locked and blockaded the door, and shouted to the two other students to get into the tunnel. The two women and two children had already been started on their way. They and the three students reached the exit safely, but the five members of the second escape group were arrested. The Vopo who was accidentally shot by his comrades died of his injuries. Other Vopos promptly closed the tunnel entrance with a charge of dynamite.
Undiscouraged, a group of students, including several engineering majors, immediately set to work on the most ambitious tunnelling project under the wall known to have been undertaken so far. (This time, it appears, some American television producers helped finance the project in the hope of making a program showing the whole operation.) Starting in the basement of an apartment house on the western side of Bernauerstrasse, they burrowed under the street, under an apartment house opposite, under the death strip behind that building, and into the basement of an apartment house beyond the strip—a distance of approximately four hundred feet. The shaft, dug at a depth of about fifteen feet, was stoutly supported and was equipped with electric lights, alarms, and a ventilating system that made considerable use of parts from discarded vacuum cleaners. The construction was plagued by breaks in water pipes under the street, but the tunnel was completed on September 15th, at about eleven o’clock at night. Half an hour later, the East Germans who had been alerted to take part in the first escape attempt through this tunnel began entering it. Soon afterward, a water pipe broke, turning one section of the passage into mud. As the refugees, who included six children, continued to enter the shaft, another water pipe broke, and then another, but the procession continued until the early hours of the morning, when floo