Tunnel 57: The Escape Under Strelitzer Straße
Why is it significant?
Stand on this ordinary residential street, with its parked cars and courtyard entrances, and picture it on a night in October 1964: dark windows, nervous footsteps, people pretending to be on their way home. Somewhere in a courtyard here, a hole led down to the West.
Key Facts
| Place | Tunnel 57: The Escape Under Strelitzer Straße |
|---|---|
| Address | Strelitzer Straße 55, 10115 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53620, 13.39410 |
| Part of Walk | The Wall on Bernauer Straße: Escapes, Tunnels and the Mauerpark in Berlin |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on this ordinary residential street, with its parked cars and courtyard entrances, and picture it on a night in October 1964: dark windows, nervous footsteps, people pretending to be on their way home. Somewhere in a courtyard here, a hole led down to the West.
For months, a group of mostly young West Berliners, many of them students, had been digging. They started in the cellar of a disused bakery on the western side of Bernauer Straße and went down about twelve metres, deep enough to pass beneath the border installations. Then they dug roughly one hundred and forty-five metres south, lying in the cold, sticky sand and hauling the earth back to the cellar. The tunnel came up in an old outside toilet in a courtyard on Strelitzer Straße, in the East.
On the nights of the 3rd and 4th of October 1964, fifty-seven people crawled through it to freedom. That number gave the tunnel its name. Among the diggers was a young man named Reinhard Furrer, who two decades later flew into space aboard the Space Shuttle as a West German astronaut. From a tunnel twelve metres under Berlin to orbit around the Earth... it is hard to invent a better story.
But on the second night, the Stasi had been tipped off. Armed men came into the courtyard, there was shooting, and a young East German border soldier, Egon Schultz, was killed. The GDR turned him into a hero, murdered by Western agents. Only after 1990, when the files were opened, did it emerge that the fatal bullet had come from the gun of one of his own comrades. He too is remembered in the Window of Remembrance you saw earlier.
Fifty-seven people free, one young soldier dead, and a lie that lasted twenty-five years. Few places show the moral tangle of the Wall as clearly. Now walk back to Bernauer Straße and continue east to the next big crossroads, where Brunnenstraße meets the old border.