‘I dug a tunnel to be with the woman I love’
Thirty years after the fall, one German couple tells Luke Mintz about their daring rescue mission – and how they were betrayed
On August 13 1961, Wolfdieter Sternheimer was sitting in his bedroom in West Berlin when he heard a startling radio announcement: Soviet authorities had built a wall across the city, dividing west from east. It was bad news for most of Berlin’s 3.3million residents including Sternheimer, then an 18-year-old student, who would suddenly find himself struggling to meet up with Renate, his best friend and soon-to-be girlfriend, who lived in the East.
“She was deeply down because she had no option to flee,” Sternheimer remembers from their first meeting after the wall had been erected. “I can’t have children in this country, because I know what this means for them,” she told him. “When I heard that I said, ‘Well, we have to help her’.”
Sternheimer’s decision to rescue Renate from East Berlin put him at the centre of one of the most ambitious escape plots of the Cold War, in which a group of West German students dug Great Escapestyle tunnels beneath the city border in an audacious bid to help hundreds of East German families crawl their way to freedom. The story is told in a thrilling BBC play, Tunnel 29, broadcast over nine parts on Radio 4 and as a podcast on the BBC Sounds app ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Wall falling on Saturday.
Sternheimer and Renate started out as teenage penpals, exchanging letters about The Beatles, sports, and the “great questions of life”, the 79-year-old tells me, half a century on, from a small office room in central London.
He continued to see Renate almost every weekend after the Wall was built – East German rules meant that she was not allowed into the West to visit him, but he was allowed day-long trips to the East to visit her. But each visit required a three-hour queue at a Soviet checkpoint, and their letters were intercepted. They developed their own language to avoid detection: “She could say, ‘You know what that character said in the scene in Don
Carlos…’, and I could go to the book and find it.”
Soon, they were in love. Yet “it was not easier after that, we had no chance to be together.” At that time, he adds, “we had no future.” Determined to bring her to freedom, he asked for help from an employee at his university who was plotting an East-to-west escape mission. The employee promised to aid Renate’s escape, as long as Sternheimer agreed to become a “refugee messenger” who would take secret information into the heart of East Berlin. Over the next year, his university marks suffered as he made repeated eastward trips, telling desperate East German families where, when, and how they could make their escape, and passing along information about births, deaths and marriages from relatives on the other side of the divide.
In the summer of 1962, Sterheimer spotted Renate’s opportunity when he was introduced to a group of student diggers who were planning the escape of 100 men, women and children. They were led by Joachim Rudolph, a 22-year-old engineering student who had escaped from East Berlin by wading across a river in 1961, but immediately began to tunnel back to rescue others.
Between 4pm and 7pm on August 7, the plan went, three lorries would take the escapees to a cottage in East Berlin, near the city border, where they would descend into a dusty tunnel that was roughly the “size of a coffin”. If all went well, they would crawl 100 metres through the tunnel and emerge in a West Berlin factory as free men and women. Remarkably, the mission was funded by NBC, the American broadcaster, which offered the escapees $7,500 – about £120,000 in today’s money – in exchange for exclusive filming rights; this created tension with the. Kennedy administration, which feared the deal could undermine East-west relations in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Sternheimer’s job was to keep everybody on the eastern side up to date on the plan. “I said, ‘Don’t tell me too much, tell me only what I really must know’,” he remembers. “It was too dangerous.”
Unfortunately, Sternheimer’s group had been infiltrated by a Stasi spy. So, when the lorries arrived at the cottage, dozens of the escapees stepped out into the arms of plain-clothed Stasi agents, who bundled them into vans and drove them to Hohenschönhausen prison, a notorious interrogation facility. One of the three lorries turned back after its leader recognised the men in the street as Stasi; trying again a month later, 29 of the escapees ultimately made it to freedom.
Once their cover had been blown, Sternheimer was arrested at the East-west checkpoint and taken to Hohenschönhausen, where he was strip-searched and flung into a cell with only a chink of sunlight.
Everything about the prison was designed to crush the spirit of its inmates: the light switch and lavatory flush were both located outside his cell – designed to deprive Sternheimer of any sense of control – and the interrogation room had a wonky table to knock prisoners off-kilter.
Deprived of sleep and bombarded with questions for 12 hours, he was eventually bullied into signing a confession, in which he agreed that the plot had been encouraged by the West German and American governments – none of which was true. He was given a high-profile show trial, broadcast on television across East Germany, and sentenced to seven years hard labour at Brandenburg Prison.
At one point, a particularly cruel prison guard drove him to court and forced him to watch as Renate, who had also been captured on the day of the foiled plot, was handed a four-year prison sentence. The pair held hands for five fleeting seconds before she was bundled out of court.
In 1964, the East Berlin government agreed for Sternheimer to be released five years early in exchange for coal, medicine, and money from West
Berlin. Around 34,000 political prisoners were set free as part of this arrangement.
He returned home, and managed to track down Renate, who had also been released early. They were reunited in October 1964: “We had to discuss our future, and discuss our past, because I didn’t know some parts of the story,.” he says.
The pair married in 1966, later having two children and moving to Stuttgart, where they still live. Sternheimer completed his degree and became a sociologist; they now have three grandchildren.
Celebrations marking the fall of the Wall are widespread this week around the world, a global sign that unity, rather than division, is always possible. To the Sternheimers, things will pass quietly; Wolfdieter does not consider his story remarkable, nor himself a hero. “We had no other choice. We knew the danger,” he reflects. “But we wanted to help, and we had to take a risk.”
‘We knew the danger. But we wanted to help, and we had to take a risk’