Risking everything to help repressed people escape for freedom (East and West Berlin; 1961 – 1989 & afterwards): There’s not enough ways to tell and retell one of the 20th century’s greatest escape stories. Tunnel 29 was made into documentaries, a movie, a ten-part podcast, and most recently, this non-fiction book by British journalist/producer/broadcaster Helena Merriman, who created the BBC podcast watched by some six million viewers who clamored for more.
In telling the daring story of a tunnel dug from democratic West Berlin underneath the Berlin Wall into East Berlin’s terrorist regime, the book reads like an historical spy thriller. The brainchild of three university students attending the Technical University in West Berlin who had their freedom, the formidable undertaking was carried out at “unthinkable” risks in a “mud tomb.” The enormity of courage, obstacles, backbreaking exhaustion, perseverance, creativity, and fears far exceed what anyone could have imagined possible given East Berlin during the Cold War was “one of the most repressive police organizations in the world.”
As gripping as Tunnel 29 reads, released August 2021, reading it in March 2022 when a Russian dictator seeks to spread authoritarianism the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Soviet Union collapsed, two years after the Berlin Wall – the “Wall of Shame” – came tumbling down. The world has been inspired beyond anything imagined by the courageousness of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people, defending their freedom and their beautiful, historic country, making this book even more chilling and electrifying.
If you want to see what Freedom looks like to people deprived of it, take a look at this roaring scene when the “wall of all walls” was torn down in 1989, echoing President Ronald Reagan’s Tear Down This Wall Speech delivered in 1987:
Merriman asks many penetrating questions:
- “How do you dig your tunnel when you can’t use machines in case you’re heard?”
- “How do you buy tools when you have no money?”
- “How do you avoid hitting a pipe and not drowning?”
- “How do you see in the tunnel when there’s no light?”
- “How do you breathe when the air runs out?”
- “And if, somehow, you do all this, and you get to the other end, what if the secret police are waiting for you?”
The book brings you right into the story, so much so that a major newspaper’s review questioned how Merriman could have possibly known some of the details she provides. Tunnel 29 is not historical fiction, but the fact it feels like it is is why it’s so widely appealing.
As for its authenticity, the answer seems to come from consulting many sources, starting with first-hand interviews with the original three diggers: Joachim Rudolph, ringleader, and two of his university friends who came to West Berlin from Italy to study: Luigi/Gigi and Domenico/Mimmo. Rudolph was a twenty-two-year-old engineering student, around eighty when Merriman met with him (and his wife) at their Berlin apartment. See:
She also interviewed some of the escapees, including two married couples. One crawled through the narrow, dark, airless, “clay-like soil” with their baby. The other had been separated, arrested and tortured by the Stasis, “one of the most powerful secret police forces on earth.” Fashioned on the KGB, both were brutalized inside a “crystal coffin” named for its “enormous glass roof” – the Brandenburg Prison.
All the diggers and escapees, as well as the Stasi leader Erich Mielke, architect of “mass surveillance,” and his “productive” spy Siegfried Uhse, can be seen in thirty-five, black-and-white images. These are some of the real people who dug, escaped, and fanatically surveilled the “death strip.”
The authenticity answer can also be found in information we’re told has been released for the first time. Merriman also provides twenty detailed pages citing the resources she used and specific references in the book – chapter by chapter, quote by quote, comment by comment. She delved through those resources, “oral histories, maps, memoirs, court-papers, declassified CIA and State Department files,” with the assistance of translators.
Better questions might be:
- How long did the research take?
- How difficult was it to organize a massive amount of information into a coherent whole?
- What was it like to find yourself inside the Stasi Archives “trawling through reports, interrogations, photos and videos”?
- Considering the records of the “informant” Siegfried Uhse consumed 2,735 pages alone, how did Merriman choose what to focus on?
- How much had she already worked out by writing, producing, and delivering the Tunnel 29 podcasts that aired on BBC Radio 4 in 2019? Each of the episodes runs about 14 minutes each. You can listen to the full podcast here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000nfh/episodes/player. Or, this preview clip: https://vimeo.com/371849580.
The world first learned about the sensational tunnel escape in 1962 when the revolutionary and highly controversial NBC documentary The Tunnel was released on TV. Delayed months as the timing was on the heels of the Cuban missile crisis, the two bold newsmen who made the film (in return for funding the underground operation at the cost of $12,500) didn’t think it would ever be shown: Reuven Frank, “a father of broadcast journalism,” and Piers Anderton, the pioneering NBC executive’s correspondent. You can watch the documentary here:
Merriman opens the story in 1945 to provide context as to why Soviet-controlled East Germany built a “twenty-seven-mile-long internal border” separating West and East Berlin, “the most heavily guarded in the world.” In 1961, a barbed wire unrolled overnight dividing Berlin into two. Then the over ten foot high wall was built before everyone’s shocked eyes.
The heart and soul of the underground story takes place from ‘61 to ‘62. The wall, though, remained until ’89. Two years later marked the end of the Soviet Union, ending the Cold War. An Epilogue, Afterward, and “What They Did Next” chapters fill us in on what happened to the key historical characters and the postponed documentary.
Woven throughout is the inhumanity of the Stasis, as well as “tens of thousands” of VoPos (local police), the Stasi mastermind Mielke, and his unlikely yet earned-his-trust spy Siegfried, who had been a hairdresser and was gay. Merriman analyzes what motivated him for so many years. Homosexuality, a chief factor, as he was blackmailed by the Stasis who thought nothing of killing, locking up, and torturing people for doing anything deemed subversive.
As unbelievably harrowing digging fifteen-foot down into enemy territory was, Joachim says “never knowing who to trust” was worse. That the “personal betrayals” caused the most anguish. Up against “masters of psychological torture,” also referred to as “operative psychology,” the Stasis perfected “decomposition”: the “disintegration” of families and friends until they broke down.
Information about JFK’s role in agreeing to let Berlin be divided is characterized as “one of the biggest ‘what-ifs’ in the twentieth century: what if Kennedy and the West had done more?” Disturbing yet gratifying when JFK came to West Berlin after the Berlin Wall was erected keeping East Berliners “locked” in and after his administration’s Berlin Airlift, greeted by cheering crowds even he hadn’t expected.
The Tunnel documentary wasn’t intended “for the mind, but for the heart and gut.” Tunnel 29 gives us all three.
Lorraine