This thrilling page-turner digs into history of a tunnel beneath the ‘death strip’ and marks 60 years since the Berlin Wall was built
It was a plan that seemed to defy not just caution but geography: to build a tunnel to help East Germans escape to the west – in cold war Berlin, of all places. To this day the preponderance of Berlin street names ending in “damm” reminds locals that the German capital is mainly built on oozing wet sand that requires effort to be kept in place. There are elevated areas, such as the district of Wedding, where the groundwater level is lower and the earth more firm, but after 1961 that part of the city also happened to be one where houses on either side of the Iron Curtain stood furthest apart, by Bernauer Straße. Tunnelling here underneath the “death strip” – the heavily guarded corridor between the walls – looked like a particularly arduous suicide mission.
In four months during the summer of 1962, a group of daredevil diggers achieved the seemingly impossible