Sixteen years earlier, Germany had been defeated in the second World War and the country had been carved into four sections administered by the victors: France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Upon speaking, he reveals himself as impishly avuncular and unapologetically clear-sighted.Īs a 21-year-old civil engineering student in the East German city of Cottbus, around 125 kilometers southeast of Berlin, Neumann was only a few credits from earning his degree when decided to escape. He favors conservative but practical attire in plain hues, with understated glasses anchored on a substantial nose.
Neumann is the sort of man who, under normal circumstances, strikes one as nothing other than unremarkable. During the two days it operated, it was the single most successful escape in the history of the Berlin Wall. The passage later became known as Tunnel 57. With many of the same students, he set out to build another tunnel – beginning in a derelict bakery in the West and burrowing underneath more than the length of a football field. Gruhle was one of those caught and was sentenced to 16 months in prison. Neumann’s first tunnel project failed: someone informed the Stasi, the East German secret police, who arrested hopeful refugees as they tried to escape. Only around 300 people escaped over the course of nearly 30 years through tunnels that took months to dig and were, more often than not, discovered before being employed for their intended purpose.īut repeated failures rarely amounted to all-out dejection. Secret compartments were built into cars, documents were deployed to obscure train stations, and tunnels were built underneath the looming battlements of the wall.ĭepending on the mode of accounting, this last method was not particularly successful. The methods exercised ranged wildly in many ways the brazenness of attempted endeavors escalated in proportionality to the East German police’s desperation to stop them. The students’ plan, harebrained and quixotic as it was, was only one of many employed during the course of the Berlin Wall’s existence to bring people from the east to the west. Most of his co-conspirators shared a similar intention: to reunite with loved ones, separated by the 155-kilometer barrier that surrounded West Berlin from the GDR. When he had escaped in 1961, using the borrowed passport of a Swiss student, he left behind most of his family and friends, including his long-term girlfriend, Christa Gruhle. Among them was a young man named Joachim Neumann, who had fled from East Germany, officially referred to as the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, just a few years earlier. In 1963, a group of West German students set out to dig a tunnel underneath the Berlin Wall.
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