East Germany: Prisoners for Sale

East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht has long tried to make his miserable “German Democratic Republic” seem important. With Nikita Khrushchev’s approaching visit to Bonn, he is also plainly under Moscow’s orders to make it look more respectable and humane. In both respects, he again failed wretchedly.

Ransom Book. The 15th anniversary celebration of the G.D.R. turned out to be a Grade B production: the visiting Communist dignitaries were all second-stringers. Except for the first public showing of four Soviet medium-range missiles, the five-hour parade in East Berlin’s Marx-Engels Square was a dreary, neo-Nazi affair of goose-stepping soldiers and sullen workers, clearly more interested in their weary feet than in the oversized pictures of Communist leaders that they dutifully bore past the reviewing stand.

On the humanitarian side, Ulbricht grandly announced that he would set free 10,000 political prisoners between now and Dec. 20. But of course he will be doing his own counting, and few expect that he will live up to his promise. Even if he does, there will still be 50,000 inmates left in East German jails, many held for political reasons.

Before announcing the amnesty, however, Ulbricht had released prisoners—strictly on a business basis. Taking a leaf out of Castro’s ransom book, he quietly “sold” Bonn 800 prisoners, most of them West German citizens, in exchange for several million marks worth of butter, coffee, cocoa and sugar. The transaction was accepted last summer on behalf of West Germany by Vice Chancellor Erich Mende. When word of it leaked out last week, it was branded by the West German press as a grim “traffic in men.”

Not waiting to be ransomed, Ulbricht’s reluctant subjects were still finding their own ways to freedom. In fact, in the days preceding the anniversary celebration, the biggest mass escape took place since the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961.

Freedom Tunnel. It was engineered by 30 volunteer workers, many of them university students, who had managed earlier to escape from East Germany. From the basement of an abandoned bakery at 97 Bernauer Strasse, in West Berlin’s French sector, they dug a 448-ft. tunnel that emerged in an unused shack in the yard of an apartment house at 55 Strelitzerstrasse in East Berlin. Digging in shifts around the clock, 40 ft. underground, the men were hardly able to breathe. Again and again the tunnel threatened to cave in because of Berlin’s sandy soil. Several times, seepage from underground mains almost forced them to abandon the project. But they kept digging. They installed a ventilation system, used walkie-talkies to warn of the approach of Red Vopo patrols. At the West Berlin entrance to the tunnel they put up a sign that read: “Walter, we’re coming,” and 70 ft. further along, where the tunnel passed under the Berlin Wall, they erected another: “You are now leaving the French Sector.”

After nearly six months of steady work, the tunnel was completed. In three nights 57 East Germans—many of them relatives of the diggers who had been notified in advance by couriers—crawled to West Berlin. Just as the last group had entered the passage, two strangers came up to its entrance in East Berlin, pretending that they and some friends wanted to join the great escape. The “friends” turned out to be Communist cops who had been tipped off by informers. Four of the diggers who had guarded the tunnel entrance managed to get back to West Berlin—after shooting one East German Vopo sergeant.

The uproar over the escape destroyed whatever effect Ulbricht might have expected from his newest propaganda campaign about the good life in East Germany. Again his subjects showed that they were ready to vote against him with their feet—and with their lives.