Its existence was known, but its location was not, and the construction works of a block of flats have revealed, more than fifty years later, the exact location. In the basement of 26 Bernauer Strasse, the most infamous street in Berlin divided by the cold war, the entrance to an underground tunnel dug in 1970 for East Berliners to escape from communist Germany to the western sector of the city has appeared. city.
This section of the street was specially guarded by the GDR border guard, because the dividing line passed right through the eastern facade of the houses, but the sidewalk in front of them was already West Berlin. So when the communist regime built the Wall, the windows of these houses were boarded up to prevent the occupants from running away, and the houses themselves were eventually demolished.
The tunnel, discovered at the beginning of June, is very narrow; It measures about 50 centimeters wide by 70 high. It was never used, as the Stasi, the fearsome secret police of the GDR, tracked it down. Its existence was therefore known. “However, geophysical investigations suggested that the location was much deeper,” explains Jens Henker, a specialist at the Berlin Land Monuments Office (Landesdenkmalamt). The entrance is in the old western sector, about two meters below the basement floor of the building that was there before.
Without being a sensational find, this secret passage brings to mind once again the efforts of many people to escape the communist regime in East Germany. During the more than 28 years that the Wall stood (between August 13, 1961 and November 9, 1989), some 70 tunnels were built under some part of the 155-kilometre fortification that encircled West Berlin. , although only 19 were viable, and allowed some 300 people to escape, according to the Berliner Unterwelten (Berliner Underground) association, which conducts guided tours of underground infrastructures with history.
A West Berlin construction worker dug the tunnel in the spring of 1970, helped by a colleague, from the basement of a rented shop at what was then 80 Bernauer Strasse. Objective: to get his family out of East Berlin. This is stated in the archives of the Berlin Wall Foundation (Stiftung Berliner Mauer). “The excavation was in vain; the tunnel was discovered before anyone managed to escape, no one was able to escape clandestinely to the west through this tunnel”, explains historian Axel Klausmeier, director of the foundation.
On May 1, 1970, the Stasi informed the GDR border police that someone was building a tunnel in that area. “The Stasi discovered it as part of an ‘operational process’ under the code name Amigo [so, in Spanish], but the file that has been preserved does not reveal anything about the origin of the information,” continues Klausmeier.
Precisely because Bernauer Strasse was such a fortified and guarded place, the excavators – almost always West Berliners – counted on the fact that the police in the East would not be suspicious. Also, the subsoil is clayey, quite easy to dig. That is why several tunnels were tried to be made in this street, although only three were useful.
On the night of May 1, 1970, Stasi agents went to the buildings in East Berlin where they calculated that the tunnel just found would reach, assuming that the excavators who came to the rescue would put the last shovelful. But it was not like that, and those who supposedly had to be rescued did not appear either.
The Berlin Monuments Office and the builder of the new building, the municipal company WBM, have agreed on the terms of conservation of the tunnel. It will not be filled with concrete, but with liquid earth, to protect it as historical and cultural heritage. This way it can be examined and documented with cameras, since for security reasons it is not possible to enter the gallery, the exact length of which is also unclear.
The new building, which will be ready by the end of 2024, will have 87 floors at affordable prices. “Bernauer Strasse is a very special place in Berlin; the traces of the former division of our city are here more clearly visible”, said Christian Gaebler, responsible for housing in Berlin, when laying the first stone of the building. “It is done with due respect for the history of the place and the need to build affordable housing in all neighborhoods of the city.”
