Minefields, barbed wire, armed guards, and attack dogs. Getting across the Berlin Wall meant risking
imprisonment if you were lucky, your life if not. But despite the grave danger,
thousands attempted to make their way to freedom, by land, air, and even sea. Today on Nutty History
we’re covering the bravest and brashest escapes from East to West Berlin. But before we can knock
down the wall, let us know what historical hiccups you’d like to hear about next time.
Wolfgang Engels was a former East German soldier who actually helped construct the wall before
defecting two years later. The bold teenager noticed a new batch of armoured cars on site,
and befriended some border guards who unwittingly taught him how to drive the tanks.
After the guards went off on break, Engels stole a tank and headed straight for the wall,
hoping to ram his way through to freedom. Teens really do think they’re invincible,
don’t they? Engel offered up spots on his getaway vehicle to passerby,
shouting, “I’m leaving for the west, who’s coming?” Weirdly no one hopped on to the
stranger-driven tank as it plowed into the wall. While the nose of the tank broke through,
the doors remained definitively in East Germany. Engel found himself entangled in barbed wire
and he tried to summit the wall while dodging flying bullets. Shot once through the back,
Western Germans who were drinking at a nearby bar formed a human ladder to rescue the wounded
Engel and pull him over to their side. Upon his arrival in West Germany, Engel asked for a drink,
but was instead taken to the hospital where he spent three weeks recovering from a collapsed
lung. But we’ll cheers to this to this incredibly risky but still somehow successful feat.
A few months after the wall’s construction, a train engineer named Harry Deterling discovered
an unused train track from an East Berlin suburb into West Berlin. Deterling began planning a
group escape on the “last train to freedom.” Inviting 25 friends and family members on board,
Deterling drained the air from the train’s emergency brakes and conducted it full steam ahead
into West Germany to the understandable shock of border guards. East Germany blocked the railway
the following day, but Deterling and his friends had already choo-chooed their way to freedom.
It wasn’t long before the idea arose that rather than going over the wall, why not go under?
In the early days of the Berlin walls, tunnels were a huge success in escape numbers. NBC
funded a group of west German students to build a 131 foot tunnel beneath a factory.
The resulting escapees (29 before the tunnel’s discovery by East German guards) was documented
and later broadcast as a documentary. The most escapees of all time came from another
student-dug tunnel, when 57 people fled East Berlin underground over a period of two days.
It was such a loss for the East German authorities that they installed listening
devices and began a constant monitoring across the wall for tunnelling activities.
The three Bethke brothers each attempted their own creative means of escape in the craziest sibling
rivalry ever. The oldest brother, Ingo Bethke had previously worked as a soldier at the wall,
and knew the area well. He planned ahead by surreptitiously cutting a small hole in part
of a border fence. He used a wooden block to check for landmines in a real life game of minesweeper.
Finally he approached the River Elbe, with a blow-up mattress tucked under his arm. In the
dense fog, he avoided the spotlights of police boats and crossed the river into West Germany in
a half hour on an air mattress. Eight years later, Ingo aided in his younger brother Holger’s escape,
which was a bit less relaxed. After much planning, practice, and top secret communication,
Holger and a friend disguised themselves as electricians with a bevy of wires around their
necks and headed into an East Berlin house. After hiding out in the attic for 13 hours,
Holger managed to shoot an arrow from the attic across the Berlin wall to West Berlin. Ingo found
the arrow an hour later, stuck in a bush. Attached by fishing line, the brothers ran a steel cable
across the line. With wooden rollers, Holger rode his home-made zip-line into West Berlin. When the
decline was less than anticipated, Holger was forced to crawl the remaining rope, hanging
up above the wall, where luckily the guards below were taking a snooze. Somehow this
psychotic idea had actually worked. By the time the youngest Bethke brother attempted escape,
border patrol was stricter than ever before. Not one to be deterred by bombs or armed guards,
Ingo and Holger purchased ultralight planes and taught themselves to fly. For disguise,
the brothers painted their planes with Soviet stars and dressed in military
uniforms before flying across the wall and successfully rescuing their youngest brother,
Egbert. Something tells me that even if this trio had been arrested, they wouldn’t have remained in
jail for long. Seriously, this story needs to be made into a movie. Would you have waited
out the fall of the Iron Curtain? Or risked a blaze of bulletfire to make your way westward?
Let us know in the comments below, along with what historical heroes you’d like to learn about next.