Berlin: O Tannenbaum

Two years ago, three East Berlin students donned homemade Russian uniforms, doctored a car to look like a Soviet military sedan and calmly drove through a checkpoint in the Communist Wall, unchallenged by the border guards. The story of the ingenious escape obviously got around, for last week West Berliners were chuckling over a similar stunt pulled off a fortnight ago with the help of American uniforms.

The leader, a young West Berliner identified only as Karl-Heinz B., used his Christmas-season pass to drive into East Berlin to visit two friends, a young mechanic and a girl pharmacist. Then, after dark, the three drove to a wooded area, where Karl-Heinz broke out a bundle of stolen U.S. army gear. Within minutes, the two men were dressed as a couple of casual G.I.s, and the girl was hidden in the trunk. Finally, Karl-Heinz replaced the car’s West Berlin license tags with U.S. military plates, and headed for Checkpoint Charlie, where uniformed Western servicemen can drive in and out without Communist inspection. It worked like a charm. As the car was waved through to West Berlin, neither the passengers nor the East German Grepo noticed Karl-Heinz’ only technical error: the sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves were sewn on upside down.

Less successful was the car that on Christmas night swerved out of a line of vehicles at another checkpoint, tried to crash the barrier pole. Communist guards, their marksmanship enhanced by the lights on a 20-ft.-high Christmas tree they had cynically erected near the Wall, opened fire. Horst Schöneberger, 24, of Dortmund, West Germany, was wounded and hauled away with two East German girls in the car (the Reds sentenced him to twelve years at hard labor). The driver, Horst’s brother Heinz, 27, sprinted for the boundary 15 feet away. Just as he got there, a machine-gun slug caught him in the jugular vein. He bled to death three feet inside West Berlin—the 65th person known to have been slain at the Wall.