idewalk,” 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 flooding finally filled the tunnel and made it impassable. By then, twenty-nine refugees had reached West Berlin—the largest group escape since the wall was erected, and, as far as is known, the students’ most successful single operation.
Up to now, it is estimated, the university students of West Berlin have made possible the escape of at least a thousand East Germans. Part of the known cost of this achievement has been the arrest by the East Germans of more than a hundred students, including at least three and possibly four Americans. Most of those arrested have been sentenced to prison terms ranging up to three years. (Two of the Americans were released after serving four months; the third, arrested last January, was sentenced in July to a twenty-one-month prison term; the fourth disappeared in East Berlin shortly after August 13, 1961, and is apparently still being detained there.) In July, Heinrich Albertz, a member of West Berlin’s Senate, delivered the principal address in a ceremony paying tribute to the victims of the abortive anti-Hitler plot of July 20, 1944, and took occasion to compare “the resistance fighters against the Nazi regime to those courageous young people who, since the erection of the wall, have sacrificed their lives to save others from oppression and dictatorship, which does not differ from Hitler’s.” “Since August 13th,” he added, “things have happened in Berlin of which we will be able to speak frankly only many years from now.”
From what we do know of events since August 13th, it is evident that while Ulbricht has succeeded in turning East Germany into what West Berliners call a concentration camp (Konzentrationslager, their abbreviation of which—KZ—they have painted on the wall in letters two feet high), he can never make it escape-proof. As soon as one escape route is discovered and closed, another is found. When the Vopos were keeping an increasingly vigilant lookout for tunnels, fourteen East Germans commandeered a five-hundred-ton excursion boat, after having got the captain and eng