Escape assistance

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Escape aid refers to help to escape, for example, from a prison or from one country to another.

Forms of escape assistance

The so-called Jewish rescuers in the Third Reich also acted as escape helpers, among other things. With the construction of the wall , escape aid gained importance again; it made it possible to escape from the GDR .

Smugglers are negatively judgmental as smugglers , tugs or people smugglers called. Today we have a complex overlay of different forms of escape aid: The clear distinction between escape aid in humanitarian, commercial and criminal forms cannot be maintained without contradictions. What proportion of social , ethical or financial motives play in the activity of escape assistance can only be found out in each individual case.

The assessment of escape aid by the legislature is also changeable. In Switzerland, for example, the Federal Law on Residence and Settlement of Foreigners (ANAG) provided until 2008 that assistance to illegal entry would not be punished if it was done “for legitimate reasons”.

History of escape assistance

Moses leads the people of Israel through the Red Sea - illustration from the Hortus Deliciarum by Herrad von Landsberg (around 1180)

Ancient oriental help to escape

In the Old Testament , Yahweh's image of God changed from being an escape helper via the god of war to the god of world domination and world peace. The Israelite exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses , described in the Book of Exodus , is one of the best-known traditions of helping people to escape. Harriet Tubman Moses was inspired by the escape helper until modern times , and the Jewish Hagana renamed her escape ship, the President Warfield , to Exodus 1947 (Exodus for short).

The Babylonian Codex Hammurapi (18th century BC) provided for the death penalty for helping slaves escape .

Underground Railroad

Map of some routes on the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad ( English for subway was) one of the opponents of slavery - even many religious whites as Baptists, Quakers and Methodists - existing informal network, the slaves on the run from the southern states of the United States to the north, for example. B. to safer Canada. Using secret routes, shelters, escape helpers and secret communication, the abolitionists succeeded in freeing around 100,000 slaves between 1800 and 1850. The origins go back to individual refugees who initially made their way to Canada on their own. Around 1830, the term Underground Railroad became common for this type of alignment. Harriet Tubman, Thomas Garrett and Levi Coffin were driving forces in the network.

Escape aid during the time of National Socialism

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Saving border crossings

Before and during the Second World War , many refugees in Germany and in occupied territories, threatened with death or imprisonment, sought the services of escape helpers. The St. Gallen police commander Paul Grüninger became known because he allowed several hundred, perhaps several thousand, Jewish refugees to enter the country. He was deposed and sentenced by a court, lost his pension and could not find a regular job until the end of his life in 1971. Other escape workers have been sent to concentration camps, sentenced to prison terms or shot at night. The escape helpers convicted in Switzerland have been rehabilitated thanks to a new law since 2003. Herbert Herden and others are now counted among the Righteous Among the Nations because of their relief efforts for Jews . The film Casablanca is about people who try to escape the Nazi-affiliated Vichy regime through an escape helper. The Emergency Rescue Committee also played an important role in France .

Hiding as a domestic refugee

Escape helpers within the Nazi sphere of influence were often called Jewish helpers or Jewish rescuers . Their act was regarded there as a kind of “favoring the Jews”, a punishable offense under the new balance of power . Many Jewish residents of Germany or countries occupied by Germany did not emigrate at a time when the new rulers still permitted this. This was partly due to the admission requirements of the foreign countries. On the other hand, in the hope of not being threatened with life in their home country. The National Socialist government issued travel bans in 1941. Citizens were not safe in their own country and could only leave it illegally and at risk of death for themselves and those who might help. Therefore, a large number of Jewish residents decided to dive into illegality in their own country as a so-called submarine. At least they wanted to avoid the risk of crossing the border. As a rule, they were dependent on the support of many helpers, very often people they could not get to know and assess beforehand. All other characteristics of escape assistance, except crossing the border, applied to this situation.

Alija Bet 1934-1948

Exodus 1947 of the Hagana

When the British made it difficult for Jews to immigrate to Palestine in the 1930s, Zionist groups responded with organized illegal migration. In 1939 David Ben Gurion saw this as the only option to reach Palestine and the official organization Mossad le Alija Bet was created. From 1944 onwards, the Bricha underground and refugee movement developed among the traumatized Jewish displaced persons in Eastern Europe , which set up illegal escape routes to Palestine. After the Kielce pogrom on July 4, 1946, the Bricha swelled into a mass exodus to Western Europe and began to work with the Mossad le Alija Bet and the Hagana . Many Eastern European refugees were initially accommodated in UNRRA- managed camps for displaced persons in American-occupied Germany. From there they tried to get through with other Holocaust survivors and the support of the Mossad le Alija Bet and funding from the Jewish Agency and the Joint Distribution Committee via Mediterranean ports and the sea route to Palestine. The odyssey of the Exodus in 1947 led to a change in British immigration policy through international pressure and ultimately to the establishment of the State of Israel .

Rat lines

The fascist Croatian Franciscan priest Krunoslav Draganović began in 1943 to set up escape routes for the Ustaše together with the Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal . With the help of the Catholic Church , numerous representatives of National Socialism and the Ustaše were able to flee to South America or the Arab world from the legal prosecution of their crimes .

Escape aid on the inner-German border

The case of the escape helper Rudolf Müller , who shot the soldier of the border troops of the GDR Reinhold Huhn , and the escape helper Michael Gartenschläger , who was shot by a special squad while trying to dismantle a self-shooting system at the border, became known. Harry Seidel , a former GDR cycling champion, was sentenced to life imprisonment for helping to escape. The smugglers Wolfgang Welsch the committed Stasi several assassination attempts, using a car bomb , a sniper with poison. In the Federal Republic of Germany reporting help to escape was a criminal offense, for example as a political suspicion or deprivation of liberty as an indirect perpetrator .

In the early years of the division of Germany, several escape tunnels were dug in Berlin , including tunnels 29 and 57 with their starting point in Bernauer Strasse . The tunnel builders often acted for ideational reasons or to bring relatives from the GDR. The escape helpers came from all walks of life. Egbert Weiß has worked on the role of corps students in the escape aid of the Fuchs group in West Berlin . With the continued development of the border installations and surveillance in the GDR, escape assistance also became more professional and commercialized. As a result, the earlier escape aid groups broke up.

The federal government of the Federal Republic of Germany supported escape aid in the early years, albeit covertly. For this purpose, the Federal Ministry used members of the parties for all-German issues . The protection of the constitution warned escape helpers if they were discovered by the state security of the GDR and established contacts among the escape aid groups.

Escape helper Heinrich Böll

Like many less well-known people, Heinrich Böll , German writer and later Nobel Prize laureate , worked as a private escape helper in 1961 , in which he smuggled Slavi Mandlová, the wife of his colleague Herbert Thomas Mandl , from Ostrava ( Czechoslovakia ) into the West with his prepared private car .

Situation today

Since 1990 there has been a conceptual shift from escape helpers to people smugglers or smugglers. The term can - for example in connection with smuggling - have a derogatory connotation. In addition, the term escape helper is still used, for example for helpers for those persecuted in their country of origin .

People who take others to other countries for payment and bypassing legal entry restrictions are referred to as people smugglers or smugglers. The refugees are often people who want to leave their country of origin for economic or political reasons. In addition to occasional tugs, there are also professionally operating tugs. In media reports, help to escape by smugglers is often attributed to organized crime . Smugglers are described as gangs who collect high prices for their services and unscrupulously put people extradited to them in mortal danger. Not infrequently they are also associated with human trafficking . The human smuggling study published in 2007 opposes “the widespread thesis that large, pyramid-shaped, hierarchical mafia organizations dominate business and that they are not only active in the area of ​​illegal migration, but also in the drug and arms trade and in the prostitution business”. Instead, it can be assumed that refugee aid consists of a large number of decentralized migration networks that are sometimes set up and maintained by migrants themselves.

The fluctuating use of the term between refugee aid and smuggling and their strongly diverging connotations suggest that the assessment of aid to irregular border crossing depends on the respective political and historical circumstances.

List of known escape helpers

Movies

See also

literature

Escape aid in the migration regime

  • Wolfgang Bauer: Across the Sea: Fleeing to Europe with Syrians. A report . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-518-06724-6 .
  • Stefan Buchen: The new enemies of the state . How the helpers of Syrian war refugees are criminalized in Germany. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. Bonn, Bonn 2014, ISBN 978-3-8012-0451-8 .
  • Constantin Cantzler: The smuggling of foreigners and its criminal liability. Sections 92, 92a, 92b AuslG, Sections 84, 84a AsylVfG, employment of illegal foreigners, church asylum, marriage of convenience, EU law . In: Reports from jurisprudence . Shaker, Aachen 2004, ISBN 978-3-8322-2660-2 (also dissertation at the University of Regensburg 2004).
  • Jürgen Kepura, Frank Niechziol, Markus Pfau: Smuggling crime - basics of phenomenology, etiology and police intervention . Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft Lorei, Frankfurt 2015, ISBN 978-3-86676-386-9 .
  • Felix Keß, Helge Schwiertz: Civil society initiatives for safe escape routes - an overview . Federal Agency for Civic Education, August 30, 2019.
  • Matthias Neske: people smuggling . Germany as a transit and destination country for irregular migration. Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 3-8282-0397-3 .
  • Markus Pfau: Smuggling Crime - An Analysis of Phenomenon and Police Intervention Strategies . tectum, Marburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8288-3009-7 .

Escape aid under National Socialism

Escape aid on the inner-German border

Help for slaves to escape

  • Michael Burgan, Philip Schwarz: The Underground Railroad , Infobase Publishing, 2006, ISBN 978-1-438-10654-0
  • Mary Ellen Snodgrass: The Underground Railroad: An Encyclopedia of People, Places, and Operations , Routledge, 2015, ISBN 978-1-317-45415-1

Web links

Wiktionary: Escape aid  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stefan Buchen: The new enemies of the state: How the helpers of Syrian war refugees are criminalized in Germany . Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. Bonn, Bonn 2014.
  2. ↑ Is solidarity a crime? In: Facts instead of myths No. 136, www.fluechtlingshilfe.ch. October 18, 2018, accessed December 29, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Georg Fohrer : History of the Israelite Religion , De Gruyter, 1969, p. 8
  4. ↑ Eckart Otto : Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Legal History: Collected Studies , Harrasowitz, 2008, ISBN 9783447057912 , p. 521
  5. ↑ Underground Railroad on Historica Canadia retrieved 29 March 2016
  6. ↑ Aliya Bet on Yad Vashem, accessed March 30, 2016
  7. ↑ Anita Shapira, Irit Keynan: The Survivors of the Holocaust - An Overview , Yad Vashem, accessed March 30, 2016
  8. ↑ BGHSt 40, 125 (former GDR citizen as perpetrator); BGHSt 42, 275 (German citizens as perpetrators).
  9. ↑ Murder bandits, agents and provocateurs (M. Eggers, 2001) ( Memento from May 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 62 kB).
  10. ^ Herbert Thomas Mandl , report by Norbert Stirken in the Rheinische Post from August 21, 1995, section: The Böll family worked as escape helpers ; on the Boer Verlag website (accessed February 15, 2009).
  11. ^ Christiane Grefe : Where is Böll? In: The time . No. 32. August 2, 2007.
  12. ^ Matthias Neske: people smuggling. Germany as a transit and destination country for irregular migration . Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart 2007.
  13. ↑ Helmut Dietrich: Schleusertum - Fluchthilfe: Search practice and social reality . In: Klaus Jünschke , Bettina Paul (ed.): Who determines our life? Contributions to the decriminalization of people without residence status. Karlsruhe 2005, pp. 56-73.
  14. ↑ Johannes Stiegler: Helpers or Scoundrels? A consideration of the figure of the 'escape helper' to the figure of the 'smuggler' ( memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: Hinterland 27/2014 ( Schlepper, Schleuser, Superheld * in ), p. 11.
  15. ↑ escape helpers or smugglers. How refugees come to Berlin . In: taz July 23, 2015.