escape aid and fate at the Berlin Wall
The Berliner Unterwelten e.V. is always good for creative innovations: One of the most successful escape helpers, Burkhart Veigel, reports in a lecture and subsequent conversation about his activities on the Berlin Wall, in which he was able to help around 800 refugees to freedom between 1961 and 1970.
Image gallery
Brandenburger Tor, im Hintergrund die US-Botschaft
Three of his tours were never discovered red-handed by the State Security (Stasi): the legendary “double-ganger tour,” in which an escape helper used a trick to go through the border control twice and thus received a registered ID for a refugee - this is how they came about 100 people to the West; the escapes in a Cadillac, in which one refugee was smuggled across the border, hidden in the dashboard - about 200 refugees in three years; and the “French Tour”, in which a French ally was able to bring up to 14 refugees across the border in one tour - around 250 refugees came from the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany in four years.
After 37 years as a practicing orthopedist and trauma surgeon in Stuttgart, Burkhart Veigel returned to Berlin in 2007 to research and write about the topic of escape and escape aid. This resulted in, among other things, two books, "Paths through the Wall - Escape Aid and Stasi between East and West" and "FREI", a novel about East-West love, which he wrote together with his wife, the writer Roswitha Quadflieg .
At the end of the event there will be time for book sales and signing.
(Program in German)
