99% Invisible - 104- Tunnel 57

Episode Date: March 5, 2014

At its peak, the Berlin Wall was 100 miles long. Today only about a mile is left standing. Compared with other famous walls in history, this wall had a pretty short life span. The Great Wall of China has been … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Five steps to keep in a defecting population. Step one. Build a 12-foot reinforced concrete wall. There was a wall. Step two. Build a second wall right next to it. Creating a no-man's land in between. Then there was a 10-20 meter wide strip of land, which Then there was a 10-20 meter wide strip of land, which there was absolutely nothing. Das Niemannsland. That was sprayed with chemicals that not even grass could grow.

And it was raked every day that you could see the slightest clue that there was an escape this time. Step 3. Build a narrow road for vehicles of the secret police. Distazi, step 4. Add electrified barbed wire. And also, step 5. Signal wires. Signal wires.

That if you touch it immediately in one of the watchtowers, there was the alarm ringing. At its peak, the Berlin Wall was 100 miles long. Today, only about a mile is left standing. Compared with other famous walls in history, this wall had a pretty short lifespan. The Great Wall of China has been around for 2500 years, so have the walls of ancient Babylon. Although it's most famous part, the Ishtar Gate is actually in a museum in Berlin. This is Daniel Gross.

But even though the wall dividing Berlin into East and West was only up for 30 years, it had a huge impact on the psyche of the city. It broke families in two. Now, let's remember how it got here. In 1945, Berlin was the fallen Nazi capital. The weary victors could agree on two things. One, Hitler was bad. Two, Germany needed a big change.

After that, they did not agree on very much. Berlin was carved up into two sectors, with Western countries controlling the west of the city and the Soviet Union controlling the east. West Berlin had a booming post-war economy, but life was tougher in East Berlin. So in the decade that followed, more than 2 million people fled from East to West, East Germany was losing its most skilled workers, as they sought jobs and a reunite with their families across the border. And East Germany was losing face with every East Berliner who chose to defect.

And that's why, in 1961, East Germany closed its border to West Berlin with a wall. But this isn't a story about the design of the Berlin wall. This is a story about one design to get through it, or really underneath it. Ralph Kabish was there. The tunnel had a diameter of less than one square meter. We had to save space. The less we excavate, the better it was. You couldn't sit, you were laying on your back or on your front, and with the feet we were driving the spade into the front face. You couldn't dig for more than two hours than you are really dead.

dick for more than 12 hours than you are really dead. In 1964, Ralph was 21, a student at the free university of Berlin. Ralph was studying civil engineering. At school he made a lot of models and did a lot of math. But he hadn't really ever built anything. And like virtually everyone in West Berlin, Ralph knew and was related to people in East Berlin. Parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, classmates, how could they get to the West? You couldn't have jumbled with all. You couldn't have fly over it. It was the only way. Dig a tunnel.

In 1964, Westerners could still visit the east if they were in good standing with the Eastern Government. That year Ralph took a trip with his parents and sister, from the west to the east, to visit extended family. My cousin approached my sister and me and said, can you do something for me? I must get out of here. Rumors had been going around of tunnels popping up beneath the city. So when I get back to Berlin, I had an idea who was involved here. And I approached him. We were living together in the students' dormitory.

I approached him, I asked him, and four days later, it was in the tunnel. Now to be clear, the kids were tumbling from west to east. They were tumbling into communist east Berlin. Ralph was led to a defunct bakery along the border. It had closed because too many of its customers were stuck in the east. Near the bakery's entrance, you could actually see East German guard towers looming over the wall. And in that bakery, young Berliners were tearing into the ground, trying to dig a tunnel

under the wall and into East Berlin. We were digging vertically down until we got to the ground water table. If you don't want your tunnel to flood, stay above the water table. And from there, we said, okay, half meter above the ground water table. If you don't want your tunnel to flood, stay above the water table. And from there, we said, okay, half meter above the ground water table, we dig for it, straight for it, horizontally. Very simple. Very simple in theory.

In practice, Berlin is a nightmare underneath the surface. The city is a swamp. The ground is so wet and sandy that to this day, construction workers have to pump water out of Berlin's soil in order to build new subway tunnels. They even use mobile refrigeration units to freeze the ground solid in trouble spots. But the soil over by the bakery happened to be perfect for tunneling. Because here was the geologic soil is consisting mainly of clay. That means if you dig there a hole in it, it is self-supporting, whereas sand collapses.

And this is one of very, very few areas in and around Berlin where you have such solid formation. That made it for us so interesting. Of course, Stazzi knew it. So from an engineering perspective, this bakery seemed like the perfect place to dig a tunnel. But strategically, it seemed like a terrible choice. This was the spot where right after the wall was built, some Germans in the east tried to jump out of their apartment windows into the west, which made the eastern

government extra careful about security. During the lifespan of the wall, five people died on this stretch of border. So we're talking about a bunch of 20-somethings digging a tunnel, the length of one and a half football fields, with a garden spade and a wheelbarrow under one of the most fortified borders on earth. Ralph was actually joining the second tunnel that this group had dug. The first tunnel had stretched nearly 500 feet, a six-month effort. The day they reached the backyard of an apartment building in the east, it was snowing.

And because the air inside the tunnel was warmer than outside, it left a small circle of melted snow. Which basically told the Stasi, you who there's a tunnel over here. Within a few hours, the Stasi found out and flooded the tunnel with water. But Ralph Cabish says that being 20 years old and free Berlin, they were all naive enough to try again. One of the student leaders, Wolfgang Fuchs, proposed a bit of reverse psychology. Wolfgang, it was a really smart guy, said, you know, the Stasi, we fool them. They would not even dream about that we use the same location for another tunnel. So idiotic nobody could be. And it worked. And that was a tunnel Ralph started working on in the

summer of 1964. The bakery where the tunnel started was in the basement of an apartment building full of retirees. A group of 20 or so students going in and out all the time would have been suspicious, so they had to be stealthy. They could only come in and out every couple weeks. In other words, they had to live there. The bakery had become a makeshift home. They slept in military cots and warmed up canned food on a little electric stove that ran on borrowed electricity.

Of course we needed more power than a retired couple is using normally. The most stupid man of a power company would say, my goodness, normally they pay about $20 a month, yeah? And now they consume for 200. How come? So one of our friends managed to get to the power supply cable before it went into the distribution board, before the power was metered and registered to the various apartments. The windows were painted white on the inside to minimize suspicion, but maximize lighting. In the bakery's storage room, flower and salt and sugar had been replaced with heaps and heaps of

dirt. And when they needed fresh supplies like tools, baked beans, spare parts, tape, soda, that was where Ralph came in. I had a job as a student on the weekend to deliver drinks, home service. I had a small Volkswagen bully, like a bus or station, a bigger station wagon. And that was of course perfect camouflage, yeah, for bringing in tools, spare parts, cans, bread, drinks. In these boxes, we are normally the bottles were. How much soil do you think you moved in total?

The shaft going down that had a size of 2x2 meters. 12 meters, that is, that's about to be 4, that's already almost 50 cubic meters. Yeah, and then, 145. I never thought about it. Never thought about it. Could be close to 200 cubic meters. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Craftmanship. Yeah. Yeah. An 18-wheeler truck can haul about 50 cubic meters. Crosper Chip. An 18-wheeler truck can haul about 50 cubic meters. So wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow, through the summer and into the autumn, roughness friends scraped and carved and heaved enough dirt to fill 418-wheeler big rigs.

All the while worried, the stasi would spot them, coming in and out, or detect them with special acoustic sensors. Fall 1964. They finally reached the east. They'd aimed for a basement, just like last time, but again they miscalculated. The one who was on duty on the front face of the tunnel came back with a little plant. He saw, oh, there are roots, and that was grass. They hadn't noticed that the border zone sloped slightly downward, which is forgivable, given the fact that they couldn't properly survey the land. But this time they were lucky. They had come up inside an abandoned shed.

Soon after the tunnelers left the shed, they sent a crew of messengers above ground, legally, into East Berlin, to alert their friends and relatives of the imminent escape. The message included a time, a place, and a password. At the time, the radios were buzzing with the news of the recent Olympics. Tokyo is dressed in her holiday vest, while the opening of the 18th modern Olympics. And so the password was Tokyo.

Ralph and his friends took turns standing watch in the east, holding pistols they hope they wouldn't have to use. Back in the west, another student stood watch on the roof with a walkie talkie. The msipts and the stuff the ambulance had. of the Andruenshälter. And we had of course a very precise plan at 8.20pm there's coming a couple at 8.30pm there's coming a small family with one child. And with the Wauki-Tonki he gave us the information, oh yeah, refugee number so and so is coming. We gave the information to the front end of the tunnel in the east. That our people could prepare to open the door if their refugee comes, knocks at the door, and is saying Tokyo.

One by one, East Germans entered the shed in the east and came out in the bakery in the west. It was after 10 p.m., Ralph was now on duty in the west. He had parked his VW bus around the corner and was going to drive the escapees to their first night of freedom. In this bus, it was so silent. Nobody talked to the other. Just sitting there like an ice block. And then I heard one whispering to his neighbor,

who knows whether we are really in the west or is it not an other trap of the Shazze. I now heard that that was like an electric shock for me. These are East Germans who have just crawled to freedom through 500 feet of mud. But freedom had been out of reach for so long that they didn't believe it when they saw it. So Ralph decided to take a quick detour. He thought to himself, you go with them not the shortest way you go through Kuchosendom that they seered with their own eyes. Kuchosendom was the center of West Berlin, site of the second largest department store in Europe. It was covered with neon lights and advertisements for Coca-Cola and Marlboro, which you'd never

see in the East. Out of a sudden, they were checking, they were joking, laughing, we made it. As if it had been yesterday, it's still in my head. The tunnel operated for two nights, but among the students was at least one spy. At the end of the second night, two plain clothed policemen knocked in the apartment door in the east, tipped off by one of the spying students. They did not know the password Tokyo. One of the students standing watch opened the door.

A moment later an East German soldier appeared, pushed his way into the building and cornered the student at the door with a Kalashnikov. Then another student fired a shot. All of them sprinted to the backyard and into the shed while the East German police fired shots after them. By the end of the night, one East German soldier was dead. The tunnel had been destroyed with grenades, and 57 people had escaped, and so the tunnel became known as tunnel 57. But the one person Ralph was trying to get out, his cousin was not among them. After the tunnel was destroyed,

East German newspapers read about Western gangsters who had tunneled in and killed one of their soldiers. The East German government installed a plaque where the escape had occurred, condemning this violent assassination. The Western students sent a letter over the wall, using balloons. It read, We speak on behalf of our group,

which over the last half a year, built a tunnel through which 57 fugitives fled, and at the entrance to which your son was shot. First, we would like to express our sincerest sympathies for so heavy a loss. They were taking responsibility for the death of this eastern soldier, but the letter went on, but the real murderer is the system that addressed the massive flight of its citizens not by removing the cause of the problem, but by building a wall, and giving the order

for Germans to shoot Germans. This story persisted for exactly 30 years, longer than the wall even existed. The story that in helping 57 people escape, Western tunnelers killed an eastern soldier. Years after the wall came down in 1989, Stasi records revealed that the eastern soldier was actually killed by friendly fire, in all the confusion. The sixth step to controlling and affecting population build a wall around information and preserve the regime's reputation. We destroyed the wall down to its roots and only a year later we said, oh what what have we done with with our own history? No clue. Only here 100 meters and there's a little bit left, and that was then preserved.

You must understand that from situation. The Berlin, the West Berlinists, they were, let me say, they were fenced in. They were like prisoners in a in a in a free garden. There was such hate, such emotion, yeah? Turn it down, destroy it. Never, never, never, ever again. This is kind of the paradox of the past in Berlin. Destroy it, but never forget. This is a city with layers and layers of history, and yet much of it is gone.

The bunker where Hitler died, for instance, was mostly demolished. For decades, it was totally unmarked to prevent it from becoming a symbolic site for neo-nazis. The government finally installed a plaque in 2006. Even the largest remnant of the wall, the East Side Gallery, which is covered with paintings from international artists, is slated for partial demolition to make room for luxury apartments. Ralph Cobbish became a transportation engineer. He digs tunnels for a living. How many tunnels have you helped build?

Oh, in your life. Oh, several. Subway tunnels. Korea, China, Thailand. Ralph spent his entire engineering career digging underground. When he finished school, he got a job at the German engineering company that worked on railroads. He made him an international engineering consultant on underground train systems all over the world. Taipei Railway Tunnel, Taipei Sub-a--a tunnel, essence, two metro lines, complete metro lines. What else?

These tunnels were way, way bigger than the scrappy tunnel he dug with friends under the wall. But for Roth, all those tunnels lead back, at least in his mind, to tunnel 57. Let me say it a little bit like a joke it was our apprenticeship. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Daniel A. Gross with Sam Greenspan, Avery Trouffleman, and me Roman Mars. And please welcome the newest 99PI producer her name is Katie Mangle, she comes to us all the way from Chicago, from the Third Ghost International Audio Festival. If you happen to see her in the Berkeley Bowl, say hello and point her towards the good tortilla chips.

We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arksign, a brilliant collaborative architecture firm located in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars, Sam tweets at Sam listens, Avery tweets at Truffleman, Katie Mingle, the new Katie Mingle, she tweets at Katie Mingle. But we have cool pictures of tunnel 57 being made and then all the old episodes, everything you need to be a listener of 99% invisible at 99pi.org. you