s wife and daughter so that the three of them could live near their relatives. The Vopo agreed, and, while his comrade stood aside, helped the family make their way through the barrier. Then the older Vopo said to the younger one, “Let’s follow them,” and they did. To outwit border guards who were not so obliging, some East Berliners devised ingenious stratagems. A photographer named Horst Beyer convinced the East German authorities that a good stunt to help publicize the twelfth anniversary of Ulbricht’s regime, on October 10, 1961, would be to publish pictures of a few shapely members of a Communist women’s sports club in the act of presenting the guardians of the wall with bouquets. He accordingly took a few athletic beauties to Checkpoint Charlie, and, as the girls presented their flowers to the Vopos, snapped one photograph after another. In posing his group, Beyer moved closer and closer to the white line on the pavement marking the border, and when one of the Vopos helpfully called out, “Be careful that you don’t step across the line!” Beyer turned and ran Into West Berlin. Late one evening, a couple of weeks later, a young East German artist named Fritz Berger put on khaki work pants, a G.I. shirt, tie, and forage cap, and a khaki tunic that had originally been part of a Czech uniform; on the buttons of the tunic he had engraved the letters “U.S.” with a pocketknife, and on the sleeve he had sewn a Second World War shoulder patch of the 15th United States Air Force. He then proceeded to Checkpoint Charlie, gave the Vopos a friendly wave, and strolled on across the border.
Meanwhile, a few East Berliners managed to force their way across the border. At two-forty-five one morning in September, 1961, a young man driving a delivery van approached the Brandenburg Gate at seventy miles an hour and crashed through the barrier before the Vopos had a chance to fire a shot. Within the next three days, two heavy trucks carrying five more refugees rammed through other crossing points. Not long afterward, three East Berlin men and two women roared through the Chausseestrasse checkpoint in an Opel sedan. Several bullets hit the car, but none of the passengers were injured; the refugees had lined the sides and the rear of the car with steel plates and had put a sievelike piece of armor over the windshield. Since then, some two dozen other East Germans who have attempted to break through the checkpoints in vehicles of various kinds have been either arrested or killed. The checkpoints have now been made virtually impregnable; they consist of a series of three or four concrete barriers, five feet high and a yard thick, arranged in a slalom pattern; each barrier has two opening—a narrow one, to accommodate pedestrian traffic, and one that is just wide enough to permit the passage of conventional civilian and commercial vehicles. Each opening is barred by a lift gate and is guarded by four sentries equipped with submachine guns. The checkpoints can, however, still be negotiated by wile, as has been demonstrated by, among others a young East Berlin couple who escaped on November 7, 1961—the forty-fourth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. That morning, five Soviet buses filled with Russian soldiers and officials crossed into West Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie and proceeded to the Soviet Memorial in the Tiergarten for the traditional wreath-laying ceremony. Shortly after the Russian delegation had passed out of sight, the young couple pulled into the checkpoint in their Volkswagen, on the roof of which they had tied a tremendous homemade wreath. The Vopos waved them on.
Since the wall went up, approximately one out of every twelve refugees—or more than a thousand in all—has been a member of the East German police or armed forces. The great majority of this group consists of Vopos, and, to judge by typically concise items (“Four members of the border police fled into West Berlin on Friday while engaged in clearing the terrain at the zone border in Spandau”) that continue to appear quite regularly in the West Berlin newspapers, the fl