Helena Merriman
Appearances
Criminal
Under the Wall
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Criminal
Under the Wall
In October of 1961, Joachim Rudolph was a college student going to school in West Berlin.
Criminal
Under the Wall
They came across a factory building that made cocktail stirrers. It seemed like it could work. But they needed a way to access the cellar. So they told the owner they were a jazz band looking for a place to practice.
Criminal
Under the Wall
It was just two months after the Berlin Wall had gone up overnight. Even the people building the wall hadn't known about it beforehand.
Criminal
Under the Wall
This is audio from Inside the Tunnel, recorded by NBC in 1962. Joachim and his friends had made a secret agreement with the network. NBC could film them digging in exchange for money, for tools and wood and supplies, and to pay workers to dig 24 hours a day.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Did the government, U.S. government, know about this payment that they were working together?
Criminal
Under the Wall
They dug for two months, more than 100 feet, longer than a basketball court, and had gone under the wall into East Berlin. But one day, they noticed a drip in the tunnel. Eventually, the leak got worse and was flooding the tunnel, and they realized they had to give up. Meanwhile, the East German government kept fortifying the Berlin Wall.
Criminal
Under the Wall
They built a second inner wall about 100 yards behind the outer wall. The land in between became known as the Death Strip. Getting over the wall became even harder.
Criminal
Under the Wall
The other tunnel ended beneath a house on the east side of the border. They would have to dig up into it. But they didn't know the people who lived there. They decided to go ahead with the plan anyway. They sent word to the people hoping to escape East Berlin to come to the house on August 7th, almost one year since the Berlin Wall was built.
Criminal
Under the Wall
It was the woman who lived in the house. She'd seen Joachim and the other diggers sawing through the floor and started screaming at them to leave. She ran outside where the Stasi were already waiting. Someone working with the diggers was a Stasi informant. He'd tip them off.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Joachim decided to keep going and broke through the floor. He and the other diggers pulled themselves up through the hole and found themselves in an empty living room.
Criminal
Under the Wall
They escape. But many of the East Germans who'd come to the house were arrested by the Stasi waiting there. A month later, Joachim and the others decided to try again. We'll be right back. After their first failed escape attempt, Joachim Rudolph and his friends went back to check on the first tunnel they dug, the one that was flooding underneath the cocktail stirrer factory.
Criminal
Under the Wall
They used the barbed wire to mark the border between East Berlin and West Berlin.
Criminal
Under the Wall
This time, they didn't tell as many people what they were doing. On September 14th, Joachim and two other diggers crawled to the East Berlin end of the tunnel and started to dig up into the basement of an apartment building. There was a new leak, and water was starting to flood the tunnel again. The NBC film crew was set up on a balcony overlooking the wall in West Berlin.
Criminal
Under the Wall
It was such a good location that the diggers asked if they could use it to send their final signal that the tunnel was ready. They'd hang a white sheet out a window.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Joachim and the diggers got through the floor of the basement of the apartment building. It was empty. The film crew hung the white sheet out the window. A woman working with them named Ellen saw it from East Berlin. That was her cue to make three stops at nearby bars, where the people hoping to escape were waiting.
Criminal
Under the Wall
They would know it was safe to go when they saw a woman come in and order something specific.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Joachim was waiting for them in the basement. Finally, the escapees started to arrive in small groups. They started making their way through the tunnels.
Criminal
Under the Wall
In a matter of hours, a barrier more than 25 miles long had gone up, cutting the city in two.
Criminal
Under the Wall
NBC News edited their footage into a documentary film. And then word got out that the network had been filming, and even quietly funding, a tunnel operation.
Criminal
Under the Wall
It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, and suited to you and your schedule. Visit BetterHelp.com slash criminal today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash criminal.
Criminal
Under the Wall
One person was smuggled out of East Germany in a specially modified tiny BMW. Others snuck out under pig carcasses in a refrigerated truck. One man swam four hours across a canal to escape. Another man invented a small submarine scooter that would pull him across the Baltic Sea.
Criminal
Under the Wall
An acrobat named Horst Klein crawled on a tightrope across the border, but months later went back to East Berlin after his wife sent him letters saying she couldn't live without him. It was a trap, and he was arrested and sentenced to hard labor. In 1979, two families attempted an escape over the wall in a homemade hot air balloon.
Criminal
Under the Wall
They made the balloon in secret out of small pieces of taffeta sewn together. One night in September, the two families took off. They spread out in the balloon's basket.
Criminal
Under the Wall
As the weeks went on, the wall became more and more fortified. Concrete slabs went up. Soldiers and police were guarding it. East Germans were trapped. And some West Germans started trying to get them out. When Joachim Rudolph answered the door that day in late 1961, three other students were there.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Then they got turned around and weren't sure which way to fly, so they just hoped for the best. They went up more than 6,000 feet in the air. It was less than 20 degrees. And then their gas went out. They started to go down, brushed over some trees, and were on the ground.
Criminal
Under the Wall
They'd made it to West Germany. Between 1961 and 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, at least 600 people were killed trying to cross from East Germany to the West. 140 of them were killed at the Berlin Wall. 91 of them were shot.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Not long after the escape, the very first woman through the tunnel, Evie, whose baby daughter was carried behind her, got divorced. She and Joachim started dating, and in 1971, they got married.
Criminal
Under the Wall
In 2012, Joachim and the other diggers were awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, one of Germany's most prestigious awards. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Helena Merriman is the author of the book Tunnel 29, and she made a podcast for the BBC with the same name. You can listen at the link in our show notes. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.
Criminal
Under the Wall
We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads. And you'll get bonus episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Sporer, too. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast.
Criminal
Under the Wall
We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Dratch. This is Criminal.
Criminal
Under the Wall
This is Criminal. When the Berlin Wall went up, Germany had already been divided for 16 years, since the end of World War II.
Criminal
Under the Wall
The west side of Berlin was run by the U.S. and its allies, the east side by the Soviets.
Criminal
Under the Wall
And then on the other side of the street, they're watching movies from Hollywood and listening to the Beatles.
Criminal
Under the Wall
One reason people were leaving was because of the state-run police force, the Stasi.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Including what you smelled like. The Stasi collected dissenter's scents on pieces of yellow fabric, collected from things they'd touched, and stored them in airtight jars. If the person went missing, a tracker dog could use the scent on the fabric to hunt them down. They wiretapped phones, opened mail, and planted microphones inside people's homes.
Criminal
Under the Wall
They had a division of garbage analysis, looking in people's trash for signs of disloyalty. Eventually, the Stasi also used psychological tactics to intimidate and harass people they deemed a threat. They'd call you over and over and hang up, or spread rumors about you or your family.
Criminal
Under the Wall
They'd send you pornography in the mail to embarrass you, or break into your home and move your socks around, or change your alarm clock so it went off in the middle of the night.
Criminal
Under the Wall
There were lots of reasons that people became informants. Some thought they were being patriotic. Some people were offered money. Others were blackmailed into it. More than 10,000 children became informants, sometimes spying on their parents.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Meanwhile, the cost of food in East Germany kept going up, wages were going down, and then the government told people they had to work more without additional pay. In 1953, people began to protest all over the country. The government responded with tanks.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Did people start trying to escape after they saw what was done to protesters? Did people try to leave East Germany?
Criminal
Under the Wall
Including digging underneath the wall. We're going back on tour this November to Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Detroit, Madison, Northampton, and Atlanta. If you've never seen a Criminal Live show before, it's not like a live taping of an interview. It's a real show.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Nine brand new stories, specially chosen because they're fun to share in a room full of people, with music, photos, videos, and animations. We can't wait. You can find out more information at thisiscriminal.com slash live. See you soon.
Criminal
Under the Wall
Engineering student Joachim Rudolph was six years old at the end of World War II. His family had a farm in the eastern part of the country. But when Russian soldiers invaded their town, they made their way to East Berlin. Helena Merriman interviewed him in 2018.
Criminal
Under the Wall
His father had been sent to a Russian gulag and had died there. And Joachim had been a part of the anti-Soviet protests in East Berlin. But after the Berlin Wall went up, he didn't have any plans to try to get out. All his friends are there.
Criminal
Under the Wall
He and another friend look for a place along the border where they might be able to sneak across. They found a place outside of the city that looked less guarded and waited for a cloudy night. They crawled through a field for hours, avoiding being spotted by border guards, and crossed a river, reaching West Berlin. Joachim went to a refugee camp, and then a CIA safe house.
Criminal
Under the Wall
He eventually enrolled at a technical university in West Berlin. But life there wasn't easy.
Criminal
Under the Wall
It was some of those friends who knocked on his door one night to ask if he wanted to help other people escape from East Germany. They were planning to dig a tunnel.