Under the Wall
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In October of 1961, Joachim Rudolph was a college student going to school in West Berlin.
One day, he's in his dorm room and there's a knock on the door.
It was just two months after the Berlin Wall had gone up overnight. Even the people building the wall hadn't known about it beforehand.
So it took everyone by surprise.
Helena Merriman is a journalist and author.
The commanders who were in charge of this had no idea that they were about to do this until that evening when they opened these envelopes, these secret envelopes, and they'd given their instructions. And in the dead of night, at around one in the morning, this operation begins. The street lamps are switched off. They don't want anyone to see what's about to happen. And you have soldiers driving across these border points, pulling out coils of barbed wire.
They used the barbed wire to mark the border between East Berlin and West Berlin.
Streets cut off, train stations cut off. It cut through graveyards. It cut churches off from the gardens of the people who would go to those churches. There were some streets like Bernauerstrasse which were cut right down the middle.
In a matter of hours, a barrier more than 25 miles long had gone up, cutting the city in two.
And when people wake up, they come out onto the streets, and you can see in some of these extraordinary photos from the time the shock on their faces. You have families suddenly divided. There are photographs, extraordinary pictures of mothers holding up babies to wave to their husbands on the other side, and people completely baffled as to what's happened.
As the weeks went on, the wall became more and more fortified. Concrete slabs went up. Soldiers and police were guarding it. East Germans were trapped. And some West Germans started trying to get them out. When Joachim Rudolph answered the door that day in late 1961, three other students were there.
And they tell him about a group of friends who were trying to help people escape. And they want it to be the biggest escape since the wall went up.
Joachim was an engineering student. He liked to build and fix things.
So here he is, he's 22 years old, his whole life ahead of him. He has so many reasons to say no. But he says yes, and that's how it all begins. I'm Phoebe Judge.
This is Criminal. When the Berlin Wall went up, Germany had already been divided for 16 years, since the end of World War II.
Germany's defeated, and the countries that defeated it were arguing over who should run it. So they divide it very crudely. The Soviet Union gets one half, Britain, the U.S., and France get the other. And then they divide Berlin, the capital.
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