Gerhard Hoch

“We had contact to the leading figures there all the time. Even in the era of the Iron Curtain, we were keeping contacts with them. When there were official issues to tackle, we got in the car and drove over, or they’d come over to us and we dealt with the problems, in particular with the freight traffic. One case I remember was for instance the loss of a service pistol by a Czechoslovak customs official. He inspected a truck loaded with Bibles intended for West Germany and in the course of the thorough inspection of the cargo space, he lost his pistol somewhere in the truck. Then the truck came over to us and we didn’t spend that much time with it, its clearance was fast tracked and within two hours it could leave the crossing for Germany. Three hours later, we received a call from the Czechoslovak colleague who told us that he had probably lost his service pistol in that truck. So I had to call a search for that truck because if that pistol and ammunition had gotten into the wrong hands and possibly on the black market, it would be a major problem. So I called a search for a Czechoslovak truck with this and that license plate and it was indeed stopped in the region of Amberg and the pistol was really found in it. But then a quarrel broke out because the customs officials wanted the truck to come back for an inspection as there was allegedly something wrong with it. But we only wanted to hand over the lost and found pistol and let the truck continue on its way. So I told them that it had already passed through clearance at our side and that it was not possible to send it back. So eventually we only sent back the pistol and not the truck. The pistol was handed over in person by our chief who was the representative for cross-border issues.”

“I still remember one case very well. It was a Romanian factory worker who built machinery parts to be exported to Germany in wooden boxes. These parts were shipped overseas to Germany and in those days there were no containers yet, as they’re in use today. So he squeezed himself into one of the boxes taking enough drinking water and food provisions with him and had his friends close the lid of the box and nail it. The box was placed on a train and dispatched overseas on a ship. It was so tight in there he could barely move a finger for the whole duration of the journey. When he then stood in Furth he probably heard the workers speaking German and he knocked on the wall of the box to make himself heard. We warmly welcomed him in Germany and he was granted asylum here. Another case I remember was a Czech, or rather a Slovak in fact. He took the engine from a Trabbi and used it for a lightweight airplane, a sort of a glider with an engine, to cross the border in the sky. He built this machine himself and flew across the border with it, just a few meters above the trees in fact. It was very close to the border crossing, a little bit to one side of it. He flew across the forest and when he noted an area densely covered with buildings near to Cham, he landed there. The good fellow even wrote a book about his enterprise that sold even here in Germany. He speaks German very well and has a hotel in Slovakia. I don’t exactly remember where. He received asylum as well. In the period off the Iron Curtain, everybody who came here was granted asylum, there were virtually no exceptions to this rule. I don’t remember a single application for asylum that would be rejected and sent back. I mean we didn’t really track that. We filed the application for the seeker and had a questionnaire filled in by him and then we sent the complete documentation to Zirndorf or somewhere else but there was not a single case where it would come back.”

“We didn’t really get the chance to see an awful lot there in Höll. The only thing that occurred there was that a crowd of curious people flocked to the crossing to see Russian tanks. It was because in Höll, there was also a border crossing at that time that was closed for the regular citizens and opened only to commercial travellers, like log transports from Czechoslovakia that were allowed to pass because otherwise they’d have to take a tremendous detour. So the German traders went over to buy the wood. That was the only activity across the border, except for another case, when the Pilsner brewery got a boiler and they had to ship it through Höll as the other crossings were too narrow for the transport. There were two or three similar cases. Höll was a tiny border crossing but there had to be at least one patrol there at all times or at least during the day because all the curious people ran over there to see. The border was open and the fence was only 500 meters farther away in the background. They ran farther towards the fence and were then arrested by the Czechs and were kept there for two days if they had intruded a bit farther into their territory. That was our duty in Höll. I still very well remember a group of travellers that arrived in their Volkswagens. I believe they were from the area of Nuremberg. They constantly wanted to see the Russians. One of them asked me what I would have done if the Russians had marched farther ahead. I told her: ‘well, what could I have possibly done? I would have stepped out on the crossing and directed the traffic to make sure the Russian tanks came faster to Nuremberg’. She turned around, got into her VW Käfer and drove back to Nuremberg.”