Wolfgang Fuchs (escape helper)

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Memorial plaque on the house, Bernauer Strasse 97, in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen

Wolfgang Fuchs (born January 8, 1939 in Jena , † June 7, 2001 in Berlin ) was an escape helper for refugees from the GDR and East Berlin. In the first few years after the building of the Wall , he devoted himself exclusively to helping people escape, and after acquiring and running a drugstore in Berlin-Neukölln until the beginning of the 1970s. Fuchs organized the construction of several escape tunnels in Berlin , including that of tunnel 57 , and operated large American Cadillac cars that had been converted into escape vehicles .

Escape actions

Wolfgang Fuchs learned the profession of optician in Jena . In 1957 he fled the GDR. He settled in West Berlin, where he worked as a precision optician and devoted himself to acting. In 1958 he met his future wife Selina, who lived in Wusterhausen and worked as a nanny. In 1960 the couple had their first daughter, and in 1961 their second daughter. As Wolfgang Fuchs lived in an apartment that was too small, his wife stayed with their daughters in their parents' household. On the day the Wall was built, Selina was visiting her husband in West Berlin, but returned to the GDR because of the children.

In March 1962, Wolfgang Fuchs and friends helped Selina and the children to escape. While some of the helpers threw Molotov cocktails to distract the border guards , he and the family climbed over the wall with the help of ladders that had been propped up from the west. In August 1962, a brother of Selina was able to escape in the same way, with Fuchs and his friends helping out from the west. In both cases, the border guards did not shoot the refugees. After that, however, Fuchs mainly organized excavations of tunnels through which the escape was no longer directly life-threatening. His primary motivation for further escape aid is to bring his mother-in-law and her youngest son to the West and thus successfully bring the family reunification to an end.

Fuchs and friends undertook the first tunnel excavation in the autumn of 1962 on Bethanienstraße. After betraying the Stasi , the tunnel was given up prematurely. At the beginning of 1963, the Fuchs group joined the Jülicher brothers, who dug a tunnel from the Eberswalder Strasse freight yard (today Mauerpark ). Due to a deviation from the planned line, the planned house cellar in the east ( Schwedter Strasse / Kopenhagener Strasse) was missed. Corrective excavations were not carried out because the Stasi was already familiar with the tunnel at the time. A large number of those who had already been notified and who had been betrayed to the Stasi were arrested. The Fuchs group then took part in a second excavation on Heidelberger Strasse, branching off from the Jercha tunnel, to the same house cellar in the east. Although a large number of refugees came through here, the tunnel was made known to the Stasi prematurely through a report from the tenant of the cellar compartment. The family members of Fuchs were warned in good time and were therefore not among the arrested persons willing to flee.

From July 1963 to October 1964, Fuchs organized the construction of two tunnels from Bernauer Strasse 97. The first - the Kohlenplatz tunnel - was finished in January 64, but could only be used by three escaping girls. Here, too, one had missed the intended direction to the cellar of a house in the east and arrived in the middle of the square. The tunnel was spotted quickly and the border troops threw hand grenades into the entrance. Fortunately, at that moment there was no one who was certain to have been seriously injured in the tunnel. In April work began on digging the second tunnel on the left parallel to the first, which was completed in October. The direction wasn't exactly right here either, but you came out from under a toilet block in the courtyard behind the targeted houses on Strelitzer Strasse 54 and 55. 57 people were able to escape through this tunnel ( tunnel 57 ).

After these tunnel objects, Fuchs stopped dealing exclusively with escape assistance. He had already achieved family reunification in June 1964 when his mother-in-law and brother-in-law, together with a doctor couple, were able to escape through the barbed wire barriers in northern Berlin. Fuchs had planned this action and supported it from the west together with his group of escape helpers (fogging the guard towers of the border guards, cutting the barbed wires and other things).

In January 1967, Fuchs bought the getaway car (a Cadillac) from Burkhart Veigel and Hasso Herschel . With this and with some prepared successor cars, he organized the two salesmen escapes from Czechoslovakia and Hungary to Bavaria and Austria until the beginning of the 1970s.

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. 150-158 .
  • Klaus-Michael von Keussler, Peter Schulenburg: Escape helpers - The group around Wolfgang Fuchs. Berlin Story Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86368-001-5 .

Web links

Commons : Wolfgang Fuchs  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Klaus-M. v. Kreusser, Peter Schulenburg: Escape helpers - The group around Wolfgang Fuchs. Berlin Story Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-86368-001-5
  2. ↑ Der Spiegel : Obituary for the death of Wolfgang Fuchs
  3. ↑ a b c Burkhart Veigel: Paths through the wall. Edition Berliner Unterwelten, 3rd edition, 2013, pp. 372–82, ISBN 978-3-943112-09-2
  4. ↑ Keusser / Schulenburg: pp. 24-25
  5. ^ Knut Teske: Codeword "Tokyo" . In: Die Welt , June 16, 2001.
  6. ↑ Keusser / Schulenburg: pp. 26-27
  7. ↑ Keusser / Schulenburg: pp. 37–39
  8. ↑ Keusser / Schulenburg: pp. 40–60
  9. ↑ Keusser / Schulenburg: pp. 72–98
  10. ↑ Keusser / Schulenburg: pp. 99–114
  11. ↑ Keusser / Schulenburg: pp. 115–31
  12. ↑ Bodo Müller 2000: Fascination Freedom: The Most Spectacular Escape Stories , Ch. Links Verlag, p. 211.
  13. ↑ Keusser / Schulenburg: pp. 132–48 and 156–75
  14. ↑ Keusser / Schulenburg: pp. 176–89
personal data
SURNAME Fuchs, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German escape helper on the inner-German border
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Jena
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 2001
Place of death Berlin