A Cadillac ride to freedom. After the Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961, students at Freie Universität helped people living on the other side of the Wall to escape from East Germany. By January 1962 they had assisted more than 800 individuals in getting out of the eastern part of the divided city. Their support took various forms: forged foreign passports, converted cars, or tunnels under the border.
 

Sources and additional information

When the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961, Burkhard Veigel was twenty-three years old and a medical student at Freie Universität. He was one of several hundred students who between August 1961 and January 1962 helped more than 800 individuals flee from East Germany. At first they helped fellow students, who were living in East Berlin but wanted to continue their studies at Freie Universität, to reach the West by using passports from Luxembourg, Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland. In the fall of 1961, they started various “tunnel actions.” Later they used a modified Cadillac to smuggle people across the border.

The East German judiciary imposed high prison sentences on students from Freie Universität and Technische Universität, whose assistance was betrayed by informants for the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi). On July 4, 1962, the Supreme Court of the GDR (East Germany) sentenced three students from West Berlin to twenty-eight years in prison. Altogether more than seventy students at Freie Universität were arrested and sentenced to prison terms by East German courts for helping fellow students, friends, or relatives escape from East Germany. Later East and West Germany negotiated permits, and prisoners could be ransomed by the West German government, so by 1964 most of the imprisoned students were freed. Fifty years after the Wall was built, the escape helpers were recognized at an event at Freie Universität.

• Information about the escape helpers in the FU-Chronik (in German)
• Article in the student magazine FURIOS, “Staatsfeind im Cadillac,” posted December 9, 2013 (in German)
• Article in the Tagesspiegel supplement about the escape helpers, “Wir wussten nie, wem wir vertrauen konnten,” published August 15, 2011 (in German)
• Book: Detjen, Marion, Ein Loch in der Mauer. Die Geschichte der Fluchthilfe im geteilten Deutschland 1961-1989, Munich, 2005. (in German)