Episode Details

Harry Seidel had been an East German champion cyclist, good enough that the state paid him to train full time, until he refused to take the steroids other national team riders used and refused to join the Communist Party. That cost him his spot on the 1960 Olympic team and his government stipend. It also made him the kind of man Stasi files would later call an escape helper.

By the fall of 1961 he had already swam past an East Berlin police boat to test the border himself, then gone back for his wife and infant son, cutting the wire along Kiefholzstrasse, dressing the baby in black, and giving him part of a sleeping pill so he would stay quiet while they crawled through.

By winter 1962 he was tunneling under Heidelbergerstrasse from a basement in the American sector into a cellar in the East, so strangers, not just family, could walk out the way he already had three times himself.

A partner financed the project, a butcher named Fritz Wagner, ran it like a business from the first shovel. He drove a Mercedes, kept a newsstand on the side, and rarely missed an opportunity. Friends and relatives of the diggers crossed for free. Strangers paid a fee, and Wagner kept the accounting to himself. Wagner supplied the capital and the basements at both ends of the street. Seidel did the digging, and he went through first whenever someone had to.

The tunnel ran three days before it failed.

It failed after Seidel struck up a conversation with a man he had just met outside the building. When the stranger said he wanted to flee west, Seidel told him they had just opened a tunnel downstairs, and pointed him to the tenant who held the building keys, a man named Horst Briga. Briga reported to the Stasi within a day under the codename Naumann. The secret police let the early escapes through so they could stage what their own files called an operation to liquidate the tunnel and take Seidel when he surfaced on the other side.

Heinz Jascha went through first that night instead of Seidel. He had insisted on it, and took seven Stasi bullets meant for his friend before dying on the way to the hospital. What ended the operation was one sentence, spoken to a stranger.

Seidel kept digging after that night, at other locations. His mother was still in an East German prison. Two of his wife’s brothers were still under arrest. The tunnels he had already finished did not stop being reasons for the Stasi to keep looking for him.