Hasso Herschel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hasso Herschel (born March 1935 in Dresden ) is a former escape helper at the inner-German border who helped around 1000 people flee the GDR .

Life

Herschel lived in Dresden in 1953, where he took part in a demonstration on June 17 and was arrested. He was released a few weeks later, but was expelled from high school . After that he worked as a shunter for the Reichsbahn and was able to earn his Abitur at the evening high school.

After approval by the GDR authorities, he began studying psychology at the Free University of Berlin . In order to supplement his livelihood in addition to his scholarship, he used the money he earned at the Reichsbahn to buy goods in East Berlin, which he was able to sell in West Berlin at a better than the current cash rate between DM-East and DM-West. After he was caught doing so, he received a six-year prison sentence for economic crimes in 1955, which he spent, among other things, in a work camp run by the Black Pump . After his release he went back to the Reichsbahn, which helped him to study at the Dresden Transport College from 1959. In October 1961 he fled to West Berlin with a Swiss passport that had been prepared for him and brought from the West .

Escape assistance

Herschel moved to the Eichkamp dormitory in West Berlin , where he found a connection to the student escape service . He wanted to bring his sister, who remained in the GDR, and her family to the West. To this end, he got involved in the spring of 1962 together with the Italians Domenico Sesta and Luigi Spina on the 120-meter-long tunnel 29 , which led from the basement of a bombed house on Bernauer Strasse in West Berlin to East Berlin on Schönholzer Strasse. Besides digging, Herschel's tasks were to coordinate those willing to flee. On September 14, 1962, his sister and 28 other people fled through the tunnel, which was dug by around 30 helpers. He also helped in other tunnel projects in Berlin , such as those of the group around Harry Seidel and the Girrmann group .

Herschel smuggled people into the West for about ten years. In addition to the tunnels, he also used converted passenger cars. In 1964, among other things, he contributed to the cost of converting a Cadillac from Burkhart Veigel . With the car, in whose dashboard a passenger container was built, they smuggled around 80 people over the "socialist foreign countries" from the GDR. The car was later sold to Wolfgang Fuchs , who used it for another 50 smugglers. Other smuggling procedures included swapping passports in the transit area of Prague airport or requiring the assistance of a diplomat . Later Herschel worked as a restaurateur in Berlin ( discos , restaurants ). He also appeared as an extra in episodes 213, 214 (2002) and 307 (2004) of the television series Hinter Gittern - Der Frauenknast , in which his sister Anita Moeller was responsible for the props. Today he lives in the Uckermark .

The escape helpers were mostly idealists. In some cases they devoted themselves exclusively to helping people to escape, although at the beginning they also assumed all the costs and often got into debt. As the debts and expenses increased as a result of the perfecting of the wall, they took money from the refugees or their Western relatives from 1962 onwards. At that time Hasso Herschel was not yet in financial distress due to the sale of the film rights to Tunnel 29 to the American television station NBC . Just as the wall became permanent, the escape assistance developed into a company for him that could no longer work exclusively on a voluntary basis. The escape aid received no public funding, but was tolerated in West Germany . Nevertheless, this encouraged a slowly progressing tendency, beginning around 1965, away from the student idealism of the early days towards profiteering and crook. This smaller part of the escape aid was better known in the public than that of the helping idealists. Anyone who only took money to cover their expenses and living expenses, like Hasso Herschel, is occasionally even today unjustifiably attributed to self-serving smugglers.

reception

Hasso Herschel's life formed the basis for the 2001 television film Der Tunnel . A niece of Herschel, Astrid Nora Moeller , who came to West Berlin with her mother through tunnel 29 as a toddler, produced the documentation Der Fluchthelfer - Ways to freedom about his activities , published in 2011 .

Honors

literature

  • Marion Detjen: A hole in the wall. The history of refugee aid in divided Germany 1961–1989 . Siedler, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-88680-834-3 , p. 130-134 .
  • Maria Nooke : The betrayed tunnel. Story of a prevented escape in divided Berlin. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2002, ISBN 3-86108-370-1 , page 45 ff.
  • Arnold, Dietmar; Kellerhoff, Sven Felix: The escape tunnel from Berlin . Propylaea, Berlin 2008.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The tunnel digger Hasso Herschel - escape helper and businessman. In: Spiegel Online . January 21, 2001. Retrieved November 12, 2019 . Maria Nooke: The betrayed tunnel: story of a prevented escape in divided Berlin. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2002, ISBN 3-86108-370-1 , pages 45-51.
  2. ↑ a b Burkhart Veigel: Paths through the Wall , Edition Berliner Uterwelten, 2013, pages 400 to 405
  3. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK2oFeSCJmQ#t=10m25s ARD Panorama - escape helpers
personal data
SURNAME Herschel, Hasso
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German escape helpers on the German-German border
DATE OF BIRTH March 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden