Escaping the Berlin Wall

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There were many attempts to escape over and under the Berlin Wall but Tunnel 29 was highly unusual for tunnelling into East Berlin rather than out to the West. Led by Joachim Rudolph, who had himself escaped to West Berlin in 1961, a group of students and refugees tunnelled into the eastern half of the city in an attempt to rescue friends and relatives. This was an extremely perilous mission with the risk of death ever present from the tunnel collapsing or the Stasi discovering their work. Even more bizarrely the whole endeavour was funded and documented by an American film crew as NBC bidding to win the ratings war back in the USA. To tell this heroic tale Dan is joined by broadcast journalist Helena Merriman. Helen presented and produced Tunnel 29 for the BBC and has written a book, Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall, all about this incredible escape.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit.
0:03.7	We've got an extraordinary story on the podcast now of people tumbling under the Berlin
0:09.1	wall, but not tumbling to get out of the eastern block like so many tumbling in to East
0:16.4	Berlin.
0:17.9	West Berlin is trying to open up a route through which people could escape, could reach the
0:22.8	West.
0:23.8	I'm sort of having a marion man.
0:24.8	She's done a great bit of journalism for the BBC.
0:26.4	You may have heard her wonderful podcast, tell them 29.
0:28.9	She's now got a book out about it as well.
0:31.1	And it all just came from a throwaway comment as you'll hear in a website or an exhibition
0:35.4	she was checking out about the Berlin wall.
0:37.1	And she liked his inspiration to all of us who work in the world of creativity and content
0:41.4	and finding new ideas.
0:43.1	They are out there.
0:44.0	They are out there.
0:45.2	And she pulled on this particular piece of string and my goodness, what she found is completely
0:50.5	extraordinary.
0:51.5	It was great to have Helena on the podcast, she's a superb journalist, even before her
0:57.1	new smash hit podcast, National Booking Series under her belt, two shuggen places.
1:01.9	Helena is going places like Joachim Rudolph did the 22 year old to escape to Germany in
1:07.5	1961 and then decided that he'd pick up spade and tunnel back into place he'd just escaped
	...

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