I was just watching a documentary on the ZDF website about some East Berliners who managed to cross to the other side of town during the Cold War (mostly during the 1960s to be precise). This brought up a question or two.
IIRC, the government of the Federal Republic considered all Germans, including East Germans, to be its citizens. So any East German who turned up in West Germany, or elsewhere* in West Germany, didn’t have to worry about immigration hurdles or any of that stuff, but was already a full citizen. Also, as far as I’ve heard, the East German border guards didn’t fire on people on the Western side of the border, or routinely harass or intimidate West Berliners/West Germans who were visiting. So once an East Berliner had managed to cross over, and had received a Federal Republic ID, could he or she return to East Berlin without fear of being arrested and detained? If they had fled early in the month, could they casually return to their old houses later in the month and retrieve their belongings, perhaps making several trips over several days the way we often do when moving from one apartment to another?
Tangentially, the documentary also mentioned people using false passports to get out of East Berlin, but that sometimes these attempts failed because, for example, the person claimed to be Swiss but spoke Saxon. Here, are they referring to Standard German, but with slightly different accents?
*Understood, West Berlin was not, strictly speaking, a part of the Federal Republic in those days, but I am assuming for this purpose it was.
People who successfully fled East Germany had committed the criminal offence of Republikflucht and were subject to arrest and a prison sentence of up to 8 years. They usually were amnestied after a number of years and could then travel to East Germany on their West German passport. Their ‘stuff’ was long gone by then, of course - they would not be allowed to transfer belongings or assets anyway.
Until being amnestied, they could only travel between West Berlin and West Germany by air (the three designated air corridors to West Berlin then a monopoly of US, French and British airlines then and consequently flights were pretty expensive).
Saxon and Swiss German are dialects of standard German and a border guard would have needed to be deaf not to distinguish them.
tschild has correctly described how it was back then. Plus, most people were more concerned with getting to West Berlin and didn’t much care about their “stuff” back in the East.
One side note/funny story:
A Gay couple I knew had a tragic love affair for many years - one lived in the West, the other in the East and they could only get together when the guy from the West got a chance to go to East Berlin to visit.
Then came rumors of people starting to sneak through the border of Austria. The guy from the West sent quite a bit of money for his friend to sneak down through Czechoslovakia, and further down to the border of Austria. He got through, and the friend in West Berlin then paid for the flight from Vienna to West Berlin! Expensive trip, but Free At Last!
Two days later, after spending all that money to get his friend out, the Wall came down.
The next day, they simply walked a few blocks to where his friend had been living in the East and got his things - the milk in his East Berlin fridge was still fresh.
While generally, the East German guards were supposed to respect the passports of non-DDR citizens, in practice things were different. A friend of mine was born in then-German area, that become Tcheslovakia territory after WWII. When he applied for his ID card and passport, the official told him that he shouldn’t use the real name of his birth town, because if he ever travelled to a country behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviets could use that as an excuse to keep him. Only now, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, has he finally corrected his real birth town in his pass.
There were also stories that West German soldiers were abducted by itnelligence agencies (East German and /or Soviet) when riding the S-Bahn (subway, run by the East Germans) in Berlin - so much that the military command issued an official order that soldiers in uniform were forbidden from using the subway (and traveling to certain countries, for fear of being kidnapped to get secrets).
I still often miss bits of verbal German, especially in a dramatized or dramatic context, at least until I watch the show a second time. But at one point in the show it seemed that in one case the Stasi were waiting in a cellar on the western side, and shot an escapee as he emerged from his tunnel. Is that possible, or did I misunderstand? (That’s very possible!) Also, when I watch these shows I’m often doing other things on my computer, or I get interrupted, or whatever.
This was during the hot phase of the cold war, the 60s and 70s. I didn’t hear it directly in the 80s myself either, but from said friend who was in the military earlier.
I think I saw that or a similar docu on TV - when they recently revealed a memorial for the people who died in one of the tunnel attempts in Berlin. I was also a bit confused at having soldiers at the western end. I guess they meant secret operatives - there have been earlier accounts that the Stasi sent secret operatives to assissnate or otherwise render inoperable East German fugitivies with high profile or people who were helping many East Germans escape.
Remember Germany had a “right of return” in general for any Germans. About 1/3 of present day Poland was Germany before WWII. Most of those Germans either fled that area after the war or were forced out. But there were also the “Volga Germans” who had a right to return, though that was seriously curbed after the reunification.
That is a bit mystifying to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, I don’t think I ever saw a single West German soldier in West Berlin in the entire 14 years I lived there! American, French and British soldiers all over the place, but West Berlin was the only city in Germany where males did NOT have to go into the military, simply because they lived in West Berlin; hence 1000’s of West German guys would simply move to West Berlin to avoid being drafted into the military. I suppose some West German soldiers on leave might have visited West Berlin, but to be quite honest, I seriously never met one - and cannot remember ever reading anything about any West German soldiers being abducted on S-Bahns.
