Helping People Escape and Stories from the Berlin Wall
“Freedom knows no walls,” wrote the 24-year-old Klaus-M. von Keussler passionately in his “Tunnel Diary” on 8 January 1964, after East German border guards and/or members of the East German State Security had blown up the 4th tunnel (the ‘Kohlenplatz Tunnel’), which von Keussler had helped to dig. Von Keussler, who in 1944 fled the burning city of Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad) via a circuitous route to Berlin, holding his mother and sister’s hands, later grew up in the Rhineland.
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Berliner Mauer
After completing his military service, he began studying law in Hamburg and continued his studies at the Free University (FU) in Berlin. Von Keussler witnessed the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 at first hand.
The driving force behind his subsequent efforts to help others escape was not only the requests for help from fellow students in East Berlin and others wishing to flee, but also – and above all – political resistance and protest against the unjust regime of the GDR. Together with his friend Wolfgang Fuchs (1939–2001), who had fled from Jena to the West in the 1950s, von Keussler and other friends carried out spectacular escape operations (scaling the Wall with ladders, group escapes across the ‘strip of death’, and tunnelling).
The escape facilitators, based in West Berlin – the capital of spies – were constantly under surveillance by the secret services from both East and West (Stasi, Verfassungsschutz, CIA, Mossad, BND). The arrest warrant issued against von Keussler by the Ministry for State Security in 1966 was only (partially) quashed in 1984 at the instigation of the well-known East Berlin lawyer Wolfgang Vogel.
In a lecture followed by a discussion, von Keussler recounts his experiences as an escape helper. In his work as a contemporary witness, it is very important to him to emphasise that, during the legendary ‘Tunnel 57’ operation, 21-year-old non-commissioned officer Egon Schultz, a teacher in Rostock, lost his life in an exchange of fire between escape helpers and GDR border guards on 5 October 1964.
Von Keussler has written numerous essays on the subject of helping people escape, as well as the following book: “Klaus-M. von Keussler/Peter Schulenburg: Fluchthelfer – Die Gruppe um Wolfgang Fuchs.”
This conversation with an eyewitness is taking place as part of Berlin Freedom Week.
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Dates
November 2026
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