Under the Wall

Summary

Criminal Podcast Episode Summary: "Under the Wall"

Podcast Information

• Title: Criminal
• Host/Author: Vox Media Podcast Network
• Description: Criminal explores stories of people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or found themselves caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge, it was named a Best Podcast of 2023 by the New York Times.
• Episode: Under the Wall
• Release Date: October 11, 2024

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Introduction to the Berlin Wall

Phoebe Judge sets the stage for a deep dive into the history and personal stories surrounding the Berlin Wall, a pivotal symbol of the Cold War era.

The Rise of the Berlin Wall

In October 1961, Joakim Rudolph, an engineering student in West Berlin, experiences the sudden erection of the Berlin Wall—a barrier erected by the East German government to prevent citizens from fleeing to West Berlin. The Wall's construction was a surprise to many, including the commanders who were unaware of the operation until the very evening it began.

Joakim Rudolph explains at [02:01]:

"The commanders who were in charge of this had no idea that they were about to do this until that evening when they open these envelopes, these secret envelopes, and they're given their instructions."

The Wall, initially consisting of barbed wire, soon evolved into a fortified barrier with concrete slabs, guard towers, and patrols, effectively splitting Berlin into East and West. Families were abruptly divided, and East Germans found themselves trapped with limited freedoms.

Life Under the East German Regime

Helena Merriman provides context on the oppressive nature of East Germany under Soviet influence. The state-controlled police force, the Stasi, employed pervasive surveillance and psychological tactics to suppress dissent.

At [06:14], Joakim Rudolph details the Stasi's invasive methods:

"Their job was very simple. Its job was to keep the party in power... they trained up hundreds of thousands of people to become informants."

The economic situation was dire, with rising food costs and decreasing wages, leading to widespread dissatisfaction and increased emigration attempts. By 1961, approximately 4 million East Germans had left in search of better opportunities in the West.

Joakim Rudolph's Decision to Escape

At [14:21], Rudolph recounts his personal awakening:

"He picks up a newspaper... seeing a list of everyone who had turned their radio aerials to the west. That was the moment for Joakim where he suddenly saw himself in a country where you can't listen to what you want... That was his breaking point."

Determined to escape the oppressive regime, Joakim and his friends plan and execute a daring escape through a tunnel built beneath the Berlin Wall.

Construction of the Escape Tunnel

The group identifies a potential site—a factory building that produces cocktail stirrers. Posing as a jazz band, they gain access to the cellar, where they begin digging.

At [18:07], Helena Merriman introduces the technical challenges:

"They need to dig up into it, but they didn't know the people who live there. They decided to go ahead with the plan anyway."

Joakim Rudolph describes the meticulous efforts to ensure the tunnel's stability and functionality:

"He rigs up a lighting system... connects 160 different bits of pipe to bring fresh air down to the front."

The tunnel, meticulously planned and ingeniously constructed, was dubbed Tunnel 29, named after the number of successful escapes it eventually facilitated.

First Escape Attempt and NBC Involvement

During the initial escape attempt on [23:00], the group organizes a mass escape facilitated by a hidden NBC camera crew funding the operation in exchange for real-time footage. This unprecedented collaboration aimed to bring global attention to the plight of East Germans under Soviet rule.

Joakim Rudolph explains the secrecy involved:

"They agreed to give them $7,500 if the diggers let them film the whole thing in real time. So it sort of the birth of reality TV."

However, an informant tipped off the Stasi, leading to a dramatic confrontation where Joakim and his team narrowly escaped detection, though many escapees were captured.

Successful Escape Through Tunnel 29

Undeterred by the initial failure, Joakim and his team refine their approach. On September 14, with enhanced secrecy and improved tunnel infrastructure, they orchestrate their second escape attempt.

At [29:11], Joakim Rudolph recounts the tense moments:

"She crawls out and she gets to the ladder. And halfway up the ladder she collapses. And one of the diggers catches her and manages to take her up the rest of the way."

This successful operation saw 29 people escape through Tunnel 29, earning it historical significance. The Stasi, unaware of the tunnel's existence, were later infuriated upon discovering the breach, highlighting the tunnel's effectiveness and the Stasi's limitations.

Impact and Aftermath

The televised success of Tunnel 29's escape significantly shifted public perception in the West, humanizing the Cold War tensions and highlighting individual bravery against oppressive regimes.

Joakim Rudolph reflects at [33:34]:

"Whenever they would see footage of it, it was often tanks sitting there. But here, suddenly you had this human story... made this issue feel personal and relevant."

The episode concludes with Joakim's personal life, where his involvement in the escape leads to meeting his future wife, Evie—another escapee—illustrating the profound personal impacts of such daring endeavors.

Conclusion

"Under the Wall" offers a gripping narrative of courage, ingenuity, and the human spirit's resilience against oppression. Through Joakim Rudolph's firsthand account, listeners gain an intimate understanding of life under the Berlin Wall and the lengths to which individuals would go to attain freedom.

Notable Quotes:

• Joakim Rudolph at [02:01]:

  "The commanders who were in charge of this had no idea that they were about to do this until that evening when they open these envelopes, these secret envelopes, and they're given their instructions."

• Joakim Rudolph at [06:14]:

  "Their job was very simple. Its job was to keep the party in power... they trained up hundreds of thousands of people to become informants."

• Joakim Rudolph at [14:21]:

  "That was his breaking point. That's when he decides to escape."

• Joakim Rudolph at [33:34]:

  "It was often tanks sitting there. But here, suddenly you had this human story... made this issue feel personal and relevant."

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Additional Resources:

• Book: Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman
• BBC Podcast: Tunnel 29 featuring Helena Merriman
• Illustrations: Julian Alexander (@thisiscriminal.com)
• Membership: Criminal Plus for ad-free episodes and bonus content

Follow Criminal:

• Website: thisiscriminal.com
• Facebook & Twitter: @criminalshow
• Instagram: @criminalpodcast
• YouTube: Criminal Podcast

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Note: Advertisements and non-content segments from the transcript have been excluded to focus solely on the episode's narrative and key discussions.

Transcript

[Phoebe Judge]

This message is a paid partnership with Apple Pay. When you've got a gift list to finish, the last thing you want to do is take out your wallet a million times. Instead, pay the Apple way. With Apple Pay, you can pay with the phone you're already holding. Just double click, smile at Face ID tap, and you're done. The people in line behind you will thank you. Apple Pay is a service provided by Apple Payment Services, llc, a subsidiary of Apple Inc. Any card used in Apple Pay is offered by the card issuer.

[Helena Merriman]

Support for Criminal comes from Framed John Grisham teams up with innocence advocate Jim McCloskey in their New York Times bestseller framed 10 True Stories of Innocent People. Framed for Murder. In Framed, you'll read about the incompetence, corruption and racism that contribute to wrongful convictions. And you'll be able to hear real people's stories as they fought for freedom against the odds. Read Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCluskey in stores now, also available as an audiobook. You come to the New Yorker Radio.

[Phoebe Judge]

Hour for conversations that go deeper with.

[Helena Merriman]

People you really want to hear from.

[Phoebe Judge]

Whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, or some.

[Helena Merriman]

Of my extraordinarily well informed colleagues at the New Yorker.

[Joakim Rudolph]

So join us every week on the.

[Helena Merriman]

New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts. In October of 1961, Joachim Rudolph was a college student going to school in West Berlin.

[Joakim Rudolph]

One day he's in his dorm room and there's a knock on the door.

[Helena Merriman]

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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

So it took everyone by surprise.

[Helena Merriman]

Helena Merriman is a journalist, an author.

[Joakim Rudolph]

The commanders who were in charge of this had no idea that they were about to do this until that evening when they open these envelopes, these secret envelopes, and they're given their instructions. And in the dead of night, at around one in the morning, this operation begins. So the street lamps are switched off. They don't want anyone to see what's about to happen. And you have soldiers driving across these border points, pulling out coils of barbed wire.

[Helena Merriman]

They used the barbed wire to mark the border between East Berlin and West Berlin.

[Joakim Rudolph]

Streets cut off, train stations cut off. It cut through graveyards. It cut churches off from the gardens from the people who would go to those churches. There were some streets, like Bernauer Strasse, which were cut right down the middle.

[Helena Merriman]

In a matter of Hours, a barrier more than 25 miles long had gone up, cutting the city in two.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And when people wake up, they come out onto the streets and you can see in some of these extraordinary photos from the time, the shock on their faces. You have families suddenly divided. There are photographs, extraordinary pictures of mothers holding up babies to wave to their husbands on the other side, and people completely baffled as to what's happened.

[Helena Merriman]

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 Rudolf answered the door that day in late 1961, three other students.

[Joakim Rudolph]

Were there and they tell him about a group of friends who were trying to help people escape. And they want it to be the biggest escape since the Wall went up.

[Helena Merriman]

Joakim was an engineering student. He liked to build and fix things.

[Joakim Rudolph]

So here he is, he's 22 years old, his whole life ahead of him. He has so many reasons to say no, but he says yes, and that's how it all begins.

[Helena Merriman]

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. When the Berlin Wall went up, Germany had already been divided for 16 years, since the end of World War II.

[Joakim Rudolph]

Germany's defeated and the countries that defeated it were arguing over who should run it. So they divide it very crudely. The Soviet Union gets one half, Britain, the US and France get the other. And then they divide Berlin, the capital.

[Helena Merriman]

The west side of Berlin was run by the US and its allies, the east side by the Soviets.

[Joakim Rudolph]

Russians were really turning Berlin and East Berlin into their city. You know, the minute that the east and west were divided, clocks were changed in East Germany to Soviet time. You had Soviet musicians flown in, teachers. You know, you had a whole line of teachers who would be sacked and new ones put in place. And the propaganda started very early. So you had 2 year olds who were taught the principles of communism through communal potty breaks. You know, questions were discouraged, rebellious kids were sent to juvenile correction facilities. So it was a full, a whole scale reimagining of a national political identity.

[Helena Merriman]

And then on the other side of the street, they were watching movies from Hollywood and listening to the Beatles.

[Joakim Rudolph]

Exactly. It's these two incredibly different worlds. And I think what made that so extraordinary was just that you could wander from one side to the other and be back again in the same day. And a lot of people in East Berlin, that's, you know, their jobs or their lives were still in West Berlin. But then they would go home at the end of the Day and for all Those years since 1945, right up to 1961, people could cross the border whenever they liked. But the problem soon came when the Communist government in the east realized that millions of people were leaving East Germany and just never coming back. They were fed up with life under a communist dictatorship and they wanted a better life in the West.

[Helena Merriman]

One reason people were leaving was because of the state run police force, the Stasi.

[Joakim Rudolph]

Its job was very simple. Its job was to keep the party in power. And they had this idea of trying to find you, trying to find troublemakers before you carried out a crime. It was all about trying to stop things happening. And the only way you could do that was through information. And so their job was to know everything about everyone, including what you smelled like.

[Helena Merriman]

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. 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. 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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And most importantly, they trained up hundreds of thousands of people to become informants. So some people think around one in six people were informing for the Stasi. They were called, rather poetically, the breathing organs of the Stasi. People in churches or hospitals or schools or knitting clubs, even in the police.

[Helena Merriman]

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 so they would.

[Joakim Rudolph]

Know about what you were planning because your friend or your neighbor had informed on you, or perhaps even your child.

[Helena Merriman]

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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And these tanks plow into protesters. People are crushed under the wheels. Dozens of people are killed. Thousands are thrown into secret prisons. Hundreds of People executed. And so that was the very first anti Soviet uprising in Eastern Europe. And it ended so horrifically that there wouldn't be another one for another 30 years. So that's really when people learned the limits of what they could do.

[Helena Merriman]

Did people start trying to escape after they saw what was done to protesters? Did people try to leave East Germany?

[Joakim Rudolph]

Yeah. And when you look at the numbers of people who left every year, it was after 1953 that they suddenly skyrocket. That was the moment that for so many people, it becomes too much. You know, everyone has their breaking point and for a lot of people, that's, that's theirs.

[Helena Merriman]

By 1961, 4 million East Germans had left.

[Joakim Rudolph]

So Walter Ulbricht, who is the leader of East Germany, makes this extraordinary decision. If he can't persuade people to stay in the east, they'll just shut the border and lock them in. So he comes up with this plan to build a wall.

[Helena Merriman]

When the wall was first built, did people panic?

[Joakim Rudolph]

Yeah, I mean, when you, when you look at the, the photos and the footage of that first day, you see some people very quickly, desperately just leaping over the barbed wire. Because back then it was just a sort of crude, crudely built barbed wire stretched between concrete posts. So people could just jump over the barbed wire. And that's what they did in some of those early days. And you then had had East German police trying to pull them back. You also had people in West Berlin who were suddenly separated from family in East Berlin driving up to the border on motorbikes, throwing stones and West Berlin pulling them back. And you then have, over the next few days, this wall was gradually fortified. So concrete slabs brought up to the wall, it was made stronger. So you had some people who had smashed through the wall in dump trucks. There was a couple who swam with their three year old baby in a bathtub along the river. You even had people who would walk up to the top of their houses, which were on Bernauer Strasse, which was a street which was cut in half by the Berlin Wall. And they would quite literally throw themselves out of the window because one half of their house looked out onto West Berlin. And you would have them. They would often write down the date and the time when they were planning on jumping. They would throw the piece of paper down to the streets of West Berlin, hoping that people would then turn up with mattresses on the other side. And there's an extraordinary piece of footage where a woman had climbed out of one of these windows and she was dangling out of it. The East German police run up one side and they're pulling on her arms and people in West Berlin are pulling on her legs and they manage to she manages to escape. But you also then have the very tragic cases. So there was a woman called Ida Siegmann who jumped out of her window and there was no mattress and she dies. And you have a man called Gunther Litvin who was a 24 year old tailor. He tries to swim across the River Spree and he's shot by transport police. So very quickly those first rather chaotic escapes soon stop and people realize they need to come up with better plans.

[Helena Merriman]

Including digging underneath the wall. We'll be right back.

[Phoebe Judge]

This message is a paid partnership with Apple Pay. When you've got a gift list to finish, the last thing you want to do is take out your wallet a million times. Instead, pay the Apple way. With Apple Pay, you can pay with the phone you're already holding. Just double click, smile at face ID tap and you're done. The people in line behind you will thank you. Apple Pay is a service provided by Apple Payment Services llc, a subsidiary of Apple Inc. Any card used in Apple Pay is offered by the card issuer.

[Joakim Rudolph]

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[Helena Merriman]

See for yourself at botoxcosmetic.com Engineering student Joakim Rudolph was 6 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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

He talked to me about growing up playing hide and seek in bombed out buildings and finding bits of unexploded shrapnel and throwing them onto tram tracks.

[Helena Merriman]

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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

All his friends are there, he doesn't want to leave. But then there's this moment where he's at university and this is about a few weeks after the Wall goes up, and he picks up a newspaper, and in that newspaper is a list of everyone who has been turning their radio aerials to the west because the only way you could listen to radio from the west was to climb onto your roof and tune the aerial to the West. But of course, Albrecht didn't want people listening to this, so he made it a criminal offense to consume Western news, which is why they then made a list of everyone who was doing that in the newspaper. And that was the moment for Joakim where he suddenly saw himself, this 22 year old, in a country where you can't listen to what you want or watch what you want or say what you want. And that was his breaking point. That's when he decides to escape.

[Helena Merriman]

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. Joakim went to a refugee camp and then a CIA safe house. He eventually enrolled at a technical university in West Berlin. But life there wasn't easy.

[Joakim Rudolph]

He really struggles in West Berlin. You know, he's grown up in this country where you have communal potty breaks to suddenly living in West Berlin where you can do what you want whenever you want. And like a lot of people who then will move to another country, he was desperate to find other people from East Germany who were living in West Berlin. And he does. He goes to university, he studies, he makes a group of friends.

[Helena Merriman]

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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And essentially they need to find somewhere safe that they can dig from and to they need tools because they can't use machines. They need to avoid the water pipes because there've been a few tunnels dug by this time that have collapsed. There have been diggers who've been drowned in the mud because the Berlin water table is pretty high. So they then also need to decide how far or close to the wall to start digging from. Because if they. If they start digging too far away from the wall, it will just be too long. It will take them too long. If they dig too close, then they'll be too close to the border guards. And then they need the soil to be of a certain type of soil. If it's too soft, then it will fall in. So they start driving around. They get a van. They're driving around. They're looking at all these different sites.

[Helena Merriman]

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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And he doesn't buy it. He guesses what they're up to. But it turns out he is a former East German factory owner. And he says, you can use my cellar. You can use the water and electricity. And that's how their first part of their plan gets going. They one night take this group of tools to this cellar, and it starts up in exactly the way you might imagine. They draw a circle on the floor and they start digging down. They have to dig to a certain depth. It's about as deep as a mini car. And once they get to that depth, they know they can start digging along towards East Berlin. So you have one digger hacking out the clay. You have another one shoving pieces of wood into the walls. And then you have Joachim, who's this real whiz kid. He loves inventing things. So he eventually gets a cart and he puts it along rails so they can start putting earth into the cart and whizzing it back to the cellar. And he is constantly problem solving. So once they start getting quite a way down along under the ground towards East Berlin, it's very dark at the front. So he rigs up a lighting system. They also then have a problem with fresh air. So he connects 160 different bits of pipe to bring fresh air down to the front. He even. I think one of my favorite things he does is he goes to an old U.S. army store at one point and he finds this old World War II telephone. So he puts one end right at the front of the tunnel and the other one back in the cellar so that when the digger is at the front and they've got a cart full of earth, they can ring back into the cellar. And the digger knows to pull the cart back.

[Helena Merriman]

Could you stand up in it?

[Joakim Rudolph]

No. So I. I crawled inside a replica of this tunnel. And I.

[Helena Merriman]

It.

[Joakim Rudolph]

It sort of felt like being inside a coffin. You know, you're. They're 30 meters under. And when. Yeah, when you're inside, I could only. There was only space for me to crawl. You can't stand up in there. So Joachim would lie on his back, dig out some earth, put it along this cart, and the cart would be pulled back into the tunnel. So it was incredibly claustrophobic. And of course, what made it all the more claustrophobic was the tunnel is so close to the surface of the ground that he knows he can't talk, he can't make any noise because the border guards have listening devices that they put on the ground. And when they hear sounds of digging, they. They're known to open these holes and throw in dynamite. So he lies there. He can hear the sound of his breathing. He has to switch the air off. There's no talking. He can even hear the sounds of people walking above him.

[Helena Merriman]

This is audio from inside the tunnel recorded by NBC in 1962. Joakim 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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

They agreed to give them $7,500 if the diggers let them film the whole thing in real time. So it sort of the birth of reality tv.

[Helena Merriman]

Did the government, US Government, know about this, this payment, that they were working together?

[Joakim Rudolph]

No. So the whole thing was shrouded in secrecy. They had separate accountants outside NBC, and they hire these two West German brothers, Peter and Klaus Demmel, who then go to the tunnel. Once they start digging it every day with this tiny little camera that's so small it can only hold two minutes of film at a time. And so it's this incredibly secret process which the US Government knows absolutely nothing about until it's too late.

[Helena Merriman]

They dug for two months, more than 100ft 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. 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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And that's when they discover that there's another tunnel that they can use that's been abandoned. And they realize that this could be their next great chance to help people escape. So they set a date to try their first escape attempt.

[Helena Merriman]

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 live 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 7, almost one year since the Berlin Wall was built.

[Joakim Rudolph]

You have around 80 people in East Berlin who are all walking towards this tunnel. They're walking towards the cottage. Meanwhile, Jork and Rudolf and his friends are crawling down the tunnel. You also have NBC filming from over the Wall. And the diggers, they've got pistols and an old World War II machine gun. So they crawl through the tunnel until they get to this cottage. They hack through the floor with an ax and a saw. And there's this moment where Joakim hears a woman screaming.

[Helena Merriman]

It was the woman who lived in the house. She'd seen Joakim 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 tipped them off.

[Joakim Rudolph]

There's incredible footage where you see the Stasi taking off their shoes. So the diggers, they don't want the diggers to hear them.

[Helena Merriman]

Joakim 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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And that's the point where Joakim suddenly sees someone creeping outside the window. And there's this extraordinary moment I read about in the files where the Stasi are just about to go in and arrest or shoot, but they suddenly hear Joachim and his friends talking about the machine gun. And now at this point, the Stasi only have Kalashnikovs, which are no match for the machine gun. So they wait for backup. Joachim finally realizes what's going on and he and his friends crawl back through the tunnel.

[Helena Merriman]

They escaped, but many of the East Germans who'd come to the house were arrested by the Stasi waiting there. A month later, Joakim and the others decided to try again. We'll be right back.

[Phoebe Judge]

This message is a paid partnership with Apple. Pay. When you've got a gift list to finish, the last thing you want to do is take out your wallet a million times. Instead, pay the Apple way. With Apple Pay, you can pay with the phone you're already holding. Just double click smile at face ID tap and you're done. The people in line behind you will thank you. Apple Pay is a service provided by Apple Payment Services llc, a subsidiary of Apple Inc. Any card used in Apple Pay is offered by the card issuer.

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[Helena Merriman]

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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

It's now dry and they decide to give it one more shot and they set a date for a month from that failed escape attempt. So they set a date. 14th September.

[Helena Merriman]

This time they didn't tell as many people what they were doing. On September 14, Joakim 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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

They have managed to find a tower and a building block overlooking the Wall, which has an incredible vantage point so they can film everything.

[Helena Merriman]

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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

Window and NBC say yes. So they're now filming and being part of it.

[Helena Merriman]

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. They would know it was safe to go when they saw a woman come in and order something specific.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And there are three separate signals. She has to order coffee in one, matches in another, water in another. And that's how the group of escapees in each pub will know that the tunnel is ready.

[Helena Merriman]

Joakim was waiting for them in the basement. Finally, the escapees started to arrive in small groups. They started making their way through the tunnel.

[Joakim Rudolph]

So you have these groups of families, you have kids, toddlers, babies. And the Krul itself is about 120 meters, so it takes about 12 minutes to crawl through. And remember, this tunnel has sprung a leak. So as they're crawling, the water is getting higher and higher. And the footage of this moment is just extraordinary.

[Helena Merriman]

The first person to go through the tunnel was a woman named Evie.

[Joakim Rudolph]

She's terrified as she's crawling. So one of the diggers is carrying her baby behind her. She's on her hands and her knees. And the camera, the NBC camera crew is pointing to the mouth of the tunnel. And you suddenly see a hand appear through the tunnel holding a purse. And then you suddenly see this woman, a very beautiful woman in a black dress, appear through the tunnel. Her tights are torn. She crawls out and she gets to the ladder. And halfway up the ladder she collapses. And one of the diggers catches her and manages to take her up the rest of the way. And over the next hour, you see person after person come through. And I think one of the most extraordinary moments is the moment when one of the diggers is helping out a woman. And the woman hands him a baby. And as she hands him this baby, this digger looks at the woman and realizes it's his wife. And the baby that she's carrying is his child, who he hasn't seen ever before, because the wall went up as she was pregnant and he escaped, but she didn't make it. So it's the first time he's ever seen his baby. And the camera captures everything.

[Helena Merriman]

How many people were able to escape?

[Joakim Rudolph]

29. And that's why the tunnel is called Tunnel 29.

[Helena Merriman]

Did the Stasi have any idea that this had happened?

[Joakim Rudolph]

No. And they were livid. So you see this moment sort of about a week later when a border Guard discovers a push chair outside this house and they investigate and discover this escape tunnel that is still mostly being submerged by water, but there's still enough evidence of it there. And you can see from the way they talk about in these Stasi files just how embarrassed they are, the number of people that managed to crawl through without them knowing anything about it.

[Helena Merriman]

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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And there is fury amongst other journalists, partly because a lot of them had wanted to do the same thing, but the State Department had said absolutely not.

[Helena Merriman]

The US government was worried about starting a nuclear war with Russia.

[Joakim Rudolph]

And the New York Times ran an article saying that NBC had helped build the tunnel. The East German government says the film is an attack on them. The West Berlin Senate even says the film has to be dropped. And the State Department then call NBC in for a meeting and say they have to drop the film. But four months later, the controversy dies down and the State Department agrees to show it. And so at 8:30 in the evening, people get their TV dinners ready, they're sitting on their sofas, and people in 18 million homes watch it.

[Helena Merriman]

The film was called the Tunnel.

[Phoebe Judge]

These are ordinary people not trained or accustomed to risk. What must they be leaving to risk this?

[Joakim Rudolph]

In the US it had. It had a huge impact in that it suddenly shone a spotlight onto a story that so many people had found it hard to connect with because so much of the Cold War was actually about inaction, you know, inaction against the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. And so whenever they would see footage of it, it was often tanks sitting there. But here, suddenly you had this human story, something that humanized it and made this issue that seemed so very far away feel personal and relevant. And of course, then, only five months later, President Kennedy goes to Berlin and makes his very, very famous speech. We don't know if the film itself helped to engineer that trip, but I think it definitely changed the way in which people in the US thought about Berlin and the Cold War.

[Phoebe Judge]

All free men, wherever they may live.

[Helena Merriman]

Are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ich bin ein bialine. Did people continue to escape?

[Joakim Rudolph]

Yes, but in much smaller numbers because too many other tunnels were intercepted. There were some truly horrific incidents of people trying to dig similar tunnels and coming face to face with border guards in the tunnel and being killed underground. And people tried other things.

[Helena Merriman]

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. 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. 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. One of the men who helped build the balloon, Gunter Wetzel, spoke with the Smithsonian podcast Airspace in 2022. As they started lifting off the ground, the balloon caught on fire, but they quickly put it out. 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 6,000ft 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. 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.

[Joakim Rudolph]

Until 1989, every year, the Berlin Wall would get stronger and stronger until the point where very few people would even attempt to escape.

[Helena Merriman]

What happened to Joakim after the escape?

[Joakim Rudolph]

So this is a very beautiful part of the story, which is that the escape tunnel that he digs eventually brings him a family.

[Helena Merriman]

Not long after the escape, the very first woman through the tunnel, Evie, whose baby daughter was carried behind her, got divorced. She and Joakim started dating, and in 1971, they got married.

[Joakim Rudolph]

You might expect that the minute someone escaped into West Berlin, they would be so relieved to escape this authoritarian country that they would. They would create their own life and not look back. But the irony is that a lot of people did then want to help other people. And when I asked Joachim why he wanted to help other people escape, people that, you know, he didn't even know, he said, well, what you have to understand was that we had been brought up in East Germany to think of everyone as brothers, as part of our family. So when he escapes into West Berlin, the idea that you would just forget people you'd left behind, even people that weren't your friends, he said. That was, that was completely out of the question. And so there was a real irony, I think, that the very values that East Germany had encouraged in its citizens helped to then undermine the country when those people, having escaped, helped other people to escape too.

[Helena Merriman]

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 Roberson, Jackie Sachiko, Lily Clark, Lena Silason and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Helena Merriman is the author of the book Tunnel 29 and she made a podcast with 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 [e-mail] and you can sign up for our [e-mail] Newsletter 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 Spohr too. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com plus we're on Facebook and Twitter @criminalshow and Instagram @criminalpodcast. We're also on YouTube at YouTube.com criminalpodcast Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great [e-mail] I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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[Joakim Rudolph]

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