Ep7: Tunnel 29 - The Interrogation

Intrigue

BBC

True Crime, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.6 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2019

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“That’s the first time I saw her again.” Wolfdieter's show trial begins. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Helena Merriman tells the extraordinary true story of a man who dug a tunnel into the East, right under the feet of border guards, to help friends, family and strangers escape. The series is based on original interviews with the survivors as well as thousands of documents from the Stasi archives and recordings from the tunnel. Producer & Presenter: Helena Merriman Sound Design: Eloise Whitmore Translation and additional research: Sabine Schereck Editor: Richard Knight Joachim Rudolph's original interviews voiced by Mark Edel Hunt #tunnel29

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:22.0	And suddenly the tall operand ends a man's head.
0:27.0	You are a liar. Tell the truth.
0:31.0	One of them said, my pistol isn't working.
0:34.0	The machine gun should be passed to him.
0:36.0	We didn't want to give up, but eventually we had to.
0:39.0	We knew we couldn't go on.
0:40.0	And then I went along to a room, and then the interrogation began.
0:51.0	From BBC Radio 4, this is Tunnel 29. I'm Helena Mariamann.
0:55.0	Chapter 7, the interrogation.
1:00.0	The stars were good at a lot of things, recruiting people, cataloging their files.
1:05.0	But there's one thing, perhaps above any other, that they wanted to become masters of.
1:10.0	Interrogations.
1:12.0	In the 50s, they'd got a bad name for themselves.
1:15.0	People had come out of prison with terrifying stories about the stars' beatings, torture.
1:20.0	And believe it or not, they cared. They didn't like the bad press.
1:24.0	So they start writing these manuals for bidding physical torture.
1:28.0	And while you get lots of renegade officers who'd still do it,
1:32.0	most of them didn't have to resort to physical torture.
1:35.0	Instead, they become masters of psychological torture.
1:39.0	And they don't use any old starsy officers to do this.
1:42.0	They create a special university in Potstam, which is a town not far from Berlin,
	...

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