A documentary about the biggest tunnel-escape in the history of the Berlin wall, the soldier Egon Schultz, and a Cold War lie.
57 people escaped from East Berlin in October of 1957 – it was the biggest mass-escape of people to West Berlin since the erection of the Berlin wall. For months the escape helpers – among them the actor Wolfgang Fuchs and the later astronaut Reinhard Furrer – dug the longest escape-tunnel in Berlin. Just before the last few refugees could escape, the border guards discover what’s happening and open fire. All the refugees reach the other end of the tunnel unharmed, but one border guard is dead: the 21 year old officer Egon Schultz. The GDR proclaims him a national hero. “Bandits from West Berlin have viciously killed him” – so they say. More than 100 schools, streets and enterprises are named after him. Every child in the GDR knows the name of this young man, who was a teacher in maths before starting his border duty.
More than ten years after the German reunification, documents were found proving that Egon Schultz was inadvertently shot by one of his own comrades. The GDR government knew this all the time, but for propaganda purposes they kept this information secret. Erich Honecker – chief of security at that time – wrote to Stasi-Chief Mielke that a “number of weak points obviously favoured the tragic results of this operation”. Egon Schultz’ death is more than welcome to justify intensifying border-control and to further militarise the Berlin wall. New victims are the condequence.
In this documentation the escape helpers speak for the first time in public about what happened on this night in that backyard. Contemporary witnesses, such as Egon Bahr and Regine Hildebrandt, remember the days of the Cold War, when Berlin was the seam between two global systems and when the people of Berlin suffered the most. The escape had been filmed by a cameraman and was stored for 36 years undiscovered in a private apartment – now it is shown for the first time. Also, the autopsy report and the reports of the security department’s homocide squad – now completely assembled and “unblackened” – prove the historical propaganda lie of the GDR.