Tunnel 57

1960s: Days of Rage

A woman crawls through Tunnel 57 to escape East Germany.

Tunnel 57 was a tunnel under the Berlin Wall that on 3 and 4 October 1964 was the location of a mass escape by 57 East Berlin citizens to West Berlin. Built from the basement of an empty bakery at 97 Bernauer Straße in West Berlin, under the Berlin Wall – which at that time and place consisted of empty, bricked up apartment buildings on the east side of Bernauer Straße – all the way to a disused outhouse in the rear courtyard at 55 Strelitzer Straße in East Berlin. At a depth of 12 meters, and a length of 145 meters, Tunnel 57 was the longest, deepest and most expensive flight tunnel built in Berlin. 35 West Berliners, including Wolfgang Fuchs, the future astronaut Reinhard Furrer, and many students from the Freie University in West Berlin…

View original post 287 more words

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s