How I smashed the Berlin Wall
We're approaching the 25th anniversary of the entry down the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 Although the German government has strengthened the barrier with all of watchtowers to keep the dog beds of nails, some people managed to drag on the incredibly border.
East Germany acrobat Horst Klein made one of the most daring escapes on the wall at the beginning of 1963 thanks to his acrobatic skills, Klein was able to turn an unused high voltage cable stretched over the wall in the way, he moved by hand on hand while dangling cable 60 feet above the head of patrol guards, and when his arms are tired, he swung his body over the cable and inched his way along dismount Klein was not particularly graceful, he fell from the cable, but it landed in West Berlin.
On March 31, 1983, Michael Becker and Holger friends Bethke had the idea of Klein a step further by letting gravity do the heavy lifting for them The pair climbed to the top floor of a five-story building on the side is the wall and fired an arrow tied to a thin fishing line on a West Berlin building an accomplice grabbed the arrow and reeled in the line that was connected to a fishing line a little heavier and a quarter inch steel cable once the steel cable was attached to a chimney on the west side of the wall, Becker and Bethke zip on a quarter inch cable with pulleys wood.
When the operator of Austria Heinz Meixner turn pulled up at Checkpoint Charlie, May 5, 1963, something must seem strange about his red convertible Austin Healey Sprite Namely, missing his windshield A closer look would also revealed that his mother was hiding in the trunk when the guard is German Meixner directed to pull a shed Customs instead Meixner floored the accelerator and dodged his little car slid just under the high barrier three feet dividing the West from the East.
A piece of Los Angeles in 1986 when Gordon E Rowley described the escape driving Meixner, but also detailed a decidedly low-tech method of crossing the border According to Rowley, some simply approached the border guards and flashed their membership card Playboy Munich club cards look so much diplomatic passports that their guards often waved through.
These clever escapes all worked, but in the early days of the wall, brute force was an option as In December 1961 a train engine driver, aged 27, named Harry Deterling led what he called the last train to freedom across the border instead of slowing down its passenger train as it approached the fortifications, Deterling strangled it at full speed and ripped through the wall.
The train skidded to a stop in Spandau district of Berlin the West, allowing Deterling seven family members, and 16 other people on the train to stay in the West train engineer and six other passengers chose to return to East Germany.
The escape orchestrated by Hans Gunter Wetzel Strelczyk and in 1979 sounds like it came straight out of a comic Strelczyk, a mechanic and Wetzel, a mason, used their mechanical know-how to build a hot air balloon engine old propane cylinders wives and reconstituted a makeshift ball from fabric scraps and old bed sheets, and September 16, 1979, the two couples and four children, floated up to 8000 feet drifting over the wall to freedom.
In May 1962, ten people escaped from the East by Der Seniorentunnel, otherwise known as the Senior Citizens tunnel Led by a man 81 years old, a group of seniors had spent 16 days digging a long 160 feet and the tunnel 6 feet high from a chicken coop east German all the way to the other side of the wall according to one of excavators, the tunnel was so great because the old men wanted to walk to the freedom with our wives, comfortably and despised.
Movies tend to portray the border guards is German like robots without souls who were dead-set to keep everyone on their side of the wall, but most of the guards were just as desperate to escape their German compatriots East one advantage of being a border guard was a soldier could simply walk over the border to freedom, and many of them have more than 1300 made the jump in the first two years of the existence of the wall.
The most famous of these escapes was made by 19-year guard Conrad Schumann August 15, 1961, only the third day of the construction of the wall as the wall was really just a lot of barbed son at that time, Schumann jumped over the wire in his uniform while lugging his gun a photographer took the wheel jump Schumann, and jump to freedom has become an iconic image of the cold war Schumann finally settled in the south state west of Bavaria and worked as a machine operator, he committed suicide in 1998.
8 creative ways people crossed the Berlin Wall, ways, people, Berlin.