Once an escape tunnel under Berlin Wall... now a popular tourist spot
BERLIN: An escape tunnel underneath the Berlin Wall opened to the public on Thursday for the first time amid celebrations of the 30-year anniversary of the dismantling of the Wall.
Digging for the 100-metre tunnel at Bernauer Strasse, near the city’s main Wall memorial, started in late 1970, nine years after East Germany sealed its border. The tunnel was built by a group of people who had escaped earlier to West Berlin. They wanted to help friends and family to flee to the West but, days before it was finished, somebody informed East German officials about it.The authorities then found the tunnel by using ultrasound tracking and partially destroyed it.
Through two windows, 7.5m under the ground, visitors can peek into the dimly lit 1970 tunnel but not get inside.
The original tunnel is so narrow that the men who built it could only crawl through it. It led from the basement of a corner building on the western side of the Wall to another building on the eastern side.
Ulrich Pfeifer, a civil engineer and one of the builders of the tunnel, made calculations and created maps for the project. He fled to West Berlin through the sewerage system just a few weeks after the Wall was erected in August 1961.
He said his motivation to dig escape tunnels was the conviction of his girlfriend, who got seven years in prison for an attempt to escape to the West of the Wall.
Built in 1961, the Berlin Wall, dubbed the Iron Curtain, stood at the front line of the Cold War.
In the 28 years that it divided the city, more than 70 tunnels were built underneath the 156.4km barrier and around 300 people managed to escape through them, according to the Berlin Underworlds Association, which conducts tours of the city’s historic bunkers and tunnels.