Heroism remembered as anniversary approaches of Berlin Wall's fall

A daring escape across the Berlin Wall, then audacious dashes back to the East to spirit another 30 people to freedom - Hartmut Richter's experiences are the stuff of a cold war thriller. Richter, now 66, loved to swim in the sparkling lakes of Potsdam as a teenager living behind the Iron Curtain, quietly dreaming of liberty and adventure in the West. "I reached a point where I no longer believed the regime could be changed from within," he said ahead of celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. His first "stupid" attempt to quit communist East Germany, in January 1966, ended when he was caught on a train with fake papers bound for Austria. Richter would have more luck just seven months later with a reckless plan: swimming across the Teltow Canal separating the East German region of Brandenburg from West Berlin. It took him four hours filled with heart-stopping moments. "A swan attacked me, dogs were barking, I had to wait several times and dive underwater until the coast was clear," he said. "I had hypothermia and was exhausted when I finally made it, and passed out on shore." Having cleared only a short distance, past border guards with shoot-to-kill orders, Richter had arrived in a different world. He worked in the shipping industry in the West German port city of Hamburg and even made it as far as New Orleans where he roamed the jazz clubs of Bourbon Street before eventually going back home to study. But a sense of solidarity with those still trapped behind the Wall gnawed away at him. The opportunity to help them arose in 1972 when the East German government, seeking international recognition, loosened the rules for West Germans to visit. Richter helped more than 30 friends and acquaintances to the West by ferrying them to freedom in his car's boot. But his good fortune ran out at a checkpoint on March 4, 1975, with his sister and her fiancé in the car. "I knew that they could conduct an inspection if they were suspicious," he said of the East German authorities. "I had to pull into a garage. There were border guards waiting for me with machine guns. And then one came over with a dog, which jumped on the boot of the car." The terrified couple were yanked from the car and Richter was seized by the guards. Richter was handed the maximum sentence of 15 years. In 1980, the West German government finally bought his release under a programme by which the communist regime traded prisoners for hard currency. When November 9, 1989, came, East German authorities opened the border. Richter raced to the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of the city, then to the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing "where I saw an endless stream of people coming through and we wept together". Berlin today has several memorials to the estimated 136 people who died trying to flee. Merkel says East German exodus has ended, 25 years after Berlin Wall A quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the exodus of people quitting the former East Germany has come to an end, Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel said. Merkel - who spent the first 35 years of her life in East Germany before the communist regime collapsed, leading to unification with West Germany within the year - said that progress had been made in rehabilitating the eastern states since the events of November 9, 1989. While differences remained with the western states, notably in higher levels of unemployment, the younger generation in both east and west had now grown together, she said. "Today we have the flourishing landscapes that [former chancellor] Helmut Kohl spoke of back then," Merkel, Germany's first chancellor from the former east, said in her weekly official podcast. The six "new" eastern states "have been able to recover with the incredible help of the old federal states," she said. Twenty-five years and some €2 trillion (HK$19 trillion) of west-to-east transfers after the Berlin Wall fell, reunited Germany is at last coming to terms with its domestic divisions and beginning to expand its global role to match its economic clout. Boasting a chancellor and a president from the former east, where infrastructure such as roads is often superior to its western equivalent, it is becoming increasingly hard to argue that easterners are the poor cousins of the west. Economically, state subsidies and a skilled workforce have drawn companies such as Volkswagen to set up in the east. That has helped create jobs where unemployment within 15 months of reunification reached a peak of 19.4 per cent in March 2005. It now stands at 9.7 per cent in adjusted terms compared with 5.9 per cent in the west. Bloomberg

Heroism remembered as anniversary approaches of Berlin Wall's fall

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Heroism and sacrifice remembered as 25th anniversary of Berlin Wall's fall approaches

Heroism and sacrifice remembered as 25th anniversary of Berlin Wall's fall approaches