Manfred Matthies

“When the demonstrations started in the GDR – in Leipzig and every other East-German major city – and when they were showing it on the TV, I couldn’t help but think that the tanks would be there any minute. I just couldn’t keep myself from thinking: ‘where are those tanks?’ I wasn’t capable for a second to account for the possibility that there would be no tanks. Because all my experience up to that point was telling me that it was a necessity that the tanks would come. It was in the logic of things as they were in the East. It simply wasn’t possible otherwise in the eastern bloc. But they wouldn’t come and they wouldn’t come and they wouldn’t come. Then you had these demonstrations at the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Republic. In the front, the blue helmets were filmed cheering but behind them, you could see the crowd shouting ‘Gorbi, Gorbi’. Again I was amazed: ‘where are the tanks?’ But again the tanks wouldn’t come. I was completely amazed. How was that even possible? What was happening? The developments paced ahead at a dizzying speed. I ran back to the Wall, which had already begun to shake and crumble. Indeed, the holes were getting bigger and bigger. Near Kochstraße, there was this barren site adjacent to the Wall where people had already begun to pass cigarettes across the Wall. The members of the border patrol were standing by indifferently, doing nothing to prevent it. Immersed in their chat, they even left their rifles in the unoccupied watchtower. I said to myself that this just can’t be true. Something would happen - that I was sure about. Well, at the Brandenburg Gate, on top of the Wall, there were people standing and so slowly you began to realize Schabowski who was only shown later. First, the rumor was spreading that they had opened a border crossing at the Bernauer Straße and that they’d all come over. And then, this huge convoy of Trabis shrouded by smoke passed through West Berlin. It was an endless line of Trabis, a massive feast, everybody was honking and clapping on the roofs of the cars and they all drove down the main road. They wouldn’t even dare to drive to the side. And then the next one was opened on the Sandbrücke Bridge, where they had arrested me and then let me go again. They removed the barriers and they flocked into West Berlin across this border crossing as well. That was the first time when I thought that the events had developed so far that maybe they’d really open the Wall. I thought that maybe they’d remove some tiny segments in order to enable people to travel out of East Germany so as to ease the pressure off it a little bit. But still, I wouldn’t believe that the Wall could ever disappear completely – be gone completely. I still wouldn’t believe it even as they were taking out the first elements out of it, basically dismantling it, right at the Brandenburg Gate where the first three were indeed taken out thus allowing people to pass through. Even then, I still couldn’t believe that they’d take apart completely this protective barrier that had separated us from each other for decades. I thought it was impossible to take away this infamous and incredible bulwark and let people leave the country in an uncontrollable way, back and forth. If this was to happen, there could only be one possible outcome, a single logical conclusion: the reunification of Germany. It made absolutely no sense other than to reunite the countries if you removed this structure that no longer served any purpose.”

“So you could basically take the regular passenger train and take a ride to Berlin – I believe it went via Brandenburg-Potsdam, or you could go via the outer ring at that time. I think back then it was built around the outside of West Berlin and you could go somewhere to Lichtersberg or something like that. Then you could get out in Potsdam, take the S -Bahn and say you wanted to go to the Ostbahnhof Railway Station and from there take a train to Greifswald. We wanted officially to Greifswald because my brother lived there. Then you had policemen running around and asking: ‘do you have your train ticket?’ And of course we had it – there was no problem with that. We had everything and so we didn’t raise any suspicion, I’d say. It was quite plausible to go on vacation there and also to take a suitcase with you. That was altogether fine. And so we got from Potsdam, got on the S-Bahn and later hopped off in Wannsee. It must be noted that the S-Bahn belonged to East Berlin. I mean the Reichsbahn was under the administration of East Berlin and although the territory was already in the West, it was better to leave the train at the first station in the West and take a bus instead because the bus was completely secure and nothing could happen to you anymore. Back then there were an awful lot of kidnappings in West Berlin by the Stasi. There were horror stories being told about people being stunned in West Berlin and taken back over the border to East Berlin. Fricke, for example, was a famous case. He later on served his term in Bautzen with some others. So, the whispering campaign went like this: ‘get out of the train and onto the bus’. Then you had to pass through the reception center in Marienfelde. Uh, it still exists, that reception center. That camp was quite terrible, established in some old factory buildings in Reinikendorf. One has to imagine the old days there. 3000-4000 people would come here daily. It was an incredible rush. And these were some old factory buildings. There were four bunk beds in each room and the compartments were formed by two times four bunk beds in a row. Four bunk beds on each side, the compartments were divided in half by a canvas. Those were, basically, the cells where some had lived for ages. Since they had been pre-sorted, yes. So, I’m not going to say that they always knew ‘aha, so these are the ones who always run away and then come back again, back and back and forth’. And some of them had already taken roots quite solidly there. Some of the women had their business, the oldest profession, well established there. I mean, somebody should actually make a movie about it, it was really a Fellini-like setting, quite terrible. These food pots were then placed there in the aisle, and the inmates could take their food. And the people were so depraved that they poured it back in and said: ‘I’m not eating this shit’. Well, simply people who had really hit their personal bottom. Absolutely terrible. Well, and this facility served for the pre-sorting of the detainees. We then immediately came to another tract with single rooms and this sorting, this social stratification, lasted all the way to West Germany. The better families, middle-class families, were transferred to Salzgitter into a reception center located in a former manor house. It was vast, almost like a castle with a large former agricultural barn which had been turned into housing compartments for these detainees. And the proletariat was placed in the factory.

“Once there was this woman who wanted to escape to the West together with her child. She allegedly had a fiancé or at least that’s what she told us. She was still married to a man in East Germany but according to what she told us they were living separated. I don’t know if that was true but there was no way to find out whether she was true or not. So the so-called fiancé wanted to drive. We set the whole plan up for the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, because that was the most frequented time with the biggest traffic at the border which was the most suitable time for such an undertaking. However, one day before the operation, he called me and said that he wouldn’t make at as he had suddenly fallen ill. He said that he had severe stomach problems and was basically tied to the bed and toilet. He couldn’t leave his flat. I had gotten a pass to the East as well because I wanted to keep an eye on the operation myself so I told him that it was alright, that I’d drive myself – we would not blow up the plan because of this. However, his girlfriend in the East was being spied on, as I later learned by being allowed to take a look at her file. Her husband – as I’ve said she was still married at that time – revealed her intention to run away and reported it to the East-German secret state police. He basically gave them a hint – ‘she’s gonna run away at some point so you better watch her’. So I basically fell into this trap. I’ve never seen her western fiancé ever since. After I came back from prison he was nowhere to be found, he had simply disappeared. So I’ve actually never found out whether that was some sort of a plot or if he had just gotten scared. But I wasn’t really that important in the whole story as I was soon to discover. It was mainly about that girl as her husband turned out to be a quite important figure – a high East-German political functionary. He was important in sports and I don’t know what they did there with drugs and doping, but I have a feeling that the GDR was really not keen on it to leak to the West. So they had a strong interest in not letting her get away. There was definitely something bigger in the background, some connections and state interests were involved. She was no ordinary girl from next door – it was an important case fort he Stasi. I was accused of assisting her to flee the country but she was sentenced to six years herself and she served those six years. I was sentenced to thirteen years and served four years. At the border checkpoint, it worked like this: You showed them your papers, an official would take them and bring them to a counter where they were stamped and brought back. That was a sort of a ritual at the border. But this time, it was different. The official took my papers and walked away with them. At that point I already knew that I was in trouble. He came back with four armed soldiers who pointed their machine guns at me. I was told to drive the car into a garage that was right around a corner and when I arrived there the door was closed behind me. They told me right away that I didn’t even need to try to talk myself out of it because they knew that there was somebody hidden in the car. I told them that I didn’t know what they were talking about and invited them to see for them self, to take the car apart if they wanted. But they were absolutely sure. They knew it. They even told me her name. He told me that there was no point in denying it and that I should make it easier for me and show them the hiding place. I mean what can you say in such a situation? So I loosened a few screws and told her to get out. I said that unfortunately we had to give up and this was the end.”

“In the beginning, it was hardly more than barriers, sort of a temporary fencing made of wire and rows of posts erected across the road. At certain focal points, such as the Brandenburg Gate for example, they erected concrete slabs right behind the wire fence. So these slabs actually became the first segments of the Berlin Wall. It was these thick things where you can take a tank and roll against it. And in the Bernauer Straße there was also merely wire fencing with a chain of guards patrolling next to it. But these were still the early days and you could still cross from one side to the other and freely talk to people on the other side. People were excited, the local residents had no idea, and nobody informed them about what was taking place there. They were chaotically running around the quarters and talking to the guards, trying to find out what was going on. And many of them took what later turned out to be the last opportunity to get out of there. They simply disappeared to the West because they had absolutely no chance to handle it so tight to prevent people from escaping. I mean in the early days of the formation of the wall it was all very chaotic and even the guards who stood at the fences didn’t really know so well what they were supposed to do there. Those men were themselves fathers of families, members of these battle groups. So in the first few days, their slogan was: ‘we have to protect our State’. Then of course the reply came: ‘but who’s damaging your state? You’re doing it yourself. You hardly have something to eat over there. Why don’t you come over here?’ ‘Well, but it is so expensive in the West’. Indeed, the exchange rate was not in favor of those from the East. A West-German mark was twenty-five East-German pennies, so the rate was 1 to 4 or something like that. So this was the kind of situations that were happening. It was rather calm at first, nothing had to be solved with guns back then, even though they had rifles strapped around their shoulders. But it only took a few days for the arrival of the real soldiers and that completely changed the situation already. The proper soldiers already strictly kept their distance, you clearly noted the difference in attitude. Then came the masons and the wall went up quickly. At first, it would reach your chin, so it was about at your eye-level. Then they put on a few more bricks and then they put a ladder to the wall in the west and it went up high into the air. But at the moment when the masons came, then of course the contacts between the people from the two sides were over. I believable this was on August 20. Then they set up a cordon around the emerging wall and kept the East-Berlin population away from the border. In the first few days you had the combat troops and the people from the East standing directly behind them, and the Westerners stood in front of the combat forces. It was as if the people would meet at a corner. But in the next few days this changed and the Easterners were pushed some 50 meters back. They had to stand behind the crowd control barriers that were controlled by soldiers as well and so it slowly progressed.”