Berlin Wall escapes required impossible choices between safety and freedom. You’re standing in East Berlin, 1965. Your family is hiding in a ministry bathroom with an out of order sign on the door. In a few hours, you’ll tie a nylon rope to a flagpole, throw it 120 meters over armed guards, and zipline to West Germany. If the guards realize what you’re doing, you go to prison. If the rope fails, you fall to your death.

The border guards watched the entire zipline escape happen. They saw the rope thrown over the wall. They saw bodies sliding across above their heads. They never sounded the alarm because they assumed it was their own spy mission into the West, not an escape attempt out of the East. Students dug for five months, 11 meters deep, under armed guard towers with no idea where they’d surface. They popped up in an abandoned building and moved 300 people before guards figured out why everyone kept walking in but nobody came out.

Someone had to go first on that untested zipline. The father sent his child. The tunnel diggers were former escapees who came back, not for themselves, but to rescue 300 strangers still trapped. And the guards who could have stopped the zipline escape believed their own government was capable of that level of audacity, which is why a family made it across.

Topics: Berlin Wall escapes, East Germany resistance, tunnel 57, Cold War stories, political prisoners, escape attempts

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Originally aired on2026-01-28