Escaping from East Berlin
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How a young West German student helped East Berliners escape communism at the height of the Cold War. Volker Heinz told Robin Lustig how he worked with a Syrian diplomat to smuggle people across the Berlin Wall in the boot of the diplomat's car. From March to September 1966 the pair managed to help more than 60 people to make the crossing.
This programme is a rebroadcast
(Photo: East German border guards in 1966 scanning the Berlin Wall. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. |
| 0:30.9 | This is the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:39.2 | And all this week to mark 60 years since the building of the Berlin Wall, we're bringing you programs about |
| 0:44.4 | East Germany during the Cold War, and about the city of Berlin, which came to symbolise a |
| 0:49.7 | Europe divided between East and West, between communism and capitalism. |
| 0:55.0 | After the wall went up, Berlin became a city of espionage and people smuggling. |
| 1:00.0 | In 2015, Robin Lustig spoke to a West German who helped East Germans to escape the communist system. |
| 1:08.0 | It's March 1966, a 22-year-old law student, Falker Hines, has arrived in East Berlin from the |
| 1:17.7 | West German capital Bonn, on his way to meet some people who want to escape by illegally crossing the wall. |
| 1:25.0 | Alles, Alice, get for buy. |
| 1:30.0 | The onlys in our way. Top Vulture is part of a top secret network of West German escape helpers and their plans have been |
| 1:40.0 | meticulously prepared. |
| 1:41.6 | I was given a description, I was given some kind of a sign to recognize each other I should |
| 1:48.4 | hold let's say a book they should hold an umbrella or two. Then my task was to put them in the car, in the boot. |
| 1:57.6 | The car had been carefully chosen. It belonged to a Syrian diplomat based in East Berlin, whose diplomatic immunity meant that he could drive from east to west without having his car searched by border guards. |
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