Rudolf Müller (escape helper)

Memorial plaque , Zimmerstrasse 54, in Berlin-Mitte

Rudolf Müller (* 1931 in Berlin ) is a former German escape helper.

Life

Müller lived with his family in East Berlin and as a young man initially joined the People's Police . He later went to the West, was researched by the secret services and a member of the combat group against inhumanity . After voluntarily returning to the East, he was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison as an agent. He was released early and from then on worked in West Berlin as a foundry worker. When the Wall was built on August 13, 1961, he was separated from his wife, his two sons and his daughter. With other people who also wanted to enable their relatives to flee, he dug a tunnel from West Berlin to a tenement house at Zimmerstrasse 56 in East Berlin in 1962.

While helping his family to escape, on June 18, 1962, in East Berlin, Müller shot and killed Reinhold Huhn , a private member of the border troops of the GDR , who stood up to him and his family for an ID check. In the West German media, however, a version of the crime was subsequently distributed according to which Müller was unarmed and shots by other border guards caused Huhn's death. Müller remained unmolested for decades.

In 1999, Mueller was convicted of manslaughter by the Berlin District Court to one year's imprisonment suspended sentence. In 2000 the Federal Court of Justice judged the act as murder in an appeal proceedings , but did not change the sentence.

Following the successful escape in 1962, Müller and his family moved to West Germany. After evening school and studying at the Academy of Labor in Frankfurt, he was a works council, IG Metall functionary, chairman of the board of the mechanical engineering and metal trade association and managing director of the occupational health service (BAD). He was also an advisory member of the EU's Economic and Social Policy Committee in Brussels and Luxembourg.

After his judicial conviction (in 2000), he described his life and the escape aid campaign in two books (published in 2004 and 2007).

Honors

• Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon (December 30, 1993)

Fonts

• Grandpa - are you a murderer? Tando-Verlag, Schwäbisch Hall 2004, ISBN 3-9809414-4-2 .
• Tunnel escape in Berlin. Death of a border guard; Did the German judiciary believe the lies of the Stasi files? A true story . Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2007, ISBN 978-3-8334-6104-0 .

literature

• Kurt Frotscher , Horst Liebig : Victims of German division - killed at the border guard . GNN-Verlag, Schkeuditz 2005, ISBN 3-89819-198-2 .
• Dietmar Arnold , Rudolf Müller: No light at the end of the tunnel. Berlin 1962 - The tragic escape of a family . Ed .: Berliner Unterwelten. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-96289-020-9 , pp. 328 .

Movie

• The Death Strip - Deadly Shots (Germany, 2000) Director: Gernot Steinweg

Web links

Commons : Rudolf Müller  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• RIAS report on the tunnel escape from June 19, 1962 (audio)
• OPI are you a killer? ( Memento from March 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) - extract of the

Individual evidence

1. ↑ welt.de, May 15, 2018, The Kalashnikov blocked the way into the escape tunnel
2. ^ Judgment of the Federal Court of Justice of July 5, 2000 or press release on it
3. ↑ BVerfG of November 30, 2000 ( Memento of August 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
4. ↑ Office of the Federal President