, they stopped. One checked his wristwatch and wrote something in a notebook; the other raised his binoculars. The colonel and I also stopped. Like most Vopos, these two were young—probably nineteen or twenty—and neither cut a very smart figure. Their uniforms seemed a size too big, they were loaded down with gear, which included steel helmets hanging from their belts (they were wearing forage caps), and they presented a lumpy aspect, as if all their pockets were overstuffed. “They don’t look too sharp,” the colonel said, “but everything they’ve got is the best Ulbricht can give them—the best cloth, best leather, best of everything all the way down the line, including food. Those submachine guns were manufactured in Czechoslovakia. They’re first quality, too.” I decided to get a picture of the Vopos, and took a Minox camera from my pocket. The minute I raised the view finder to my eye, both turned their backs. A few feet away was a fruit tree with low branches (one of the very few trees that I saw left standing anywhere near the East German border); the Vopos camouflaged themselves behind the foliage, and as one again raised his binoculars, the other slid his submachine gun from his shoulder. “They’ll stand there as long as we stand here,” the colonel said. “They think it’s some kind of a game. We might as well go on.”
About a quarter of a mile farther down the road, we came to a wooden shack the size of three telephone booths put together, which provides shelter for the two West Berlin policemen on border duty in the area. They were sitting nearby on the grass, listening to a transistor radio; M-2 carbines, manufactured in the United States, lay across their knees. Opposite the police shelter, another garishly painted metal sign could be seen through the barbed-wire fence. This one showed Death in the uniform of a Nazi S.S. officer, standing amid a sea of skulls and skeletons labelled “Stalingrad.” To the right of this figure was a drawing that supposedly represented a West Berlin policeman. The message on the sign 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