Through the Wall

In East Germany, terror began to take a grim new form. Thousands of citizens were being hauled before Schnellverfahren (literally, rapid proceedings, i.e., kangaroo courts) for sentencing to the dozens of new "work rehabilitation camps" springing up across the land. To qualify, the victims needed only to be "work shy" or reluctant to volunteer for the army, or merely generally "injurious to the public welfare." Two workers at a carbide plant in Buna were beaten for failing to enlist for military service, then were hauled before a judge, who noted happily that "they got the fist of the workers' class for their cowardly statements." In Leipzig, two members of a jazz club drew 13 and 15-year terms because, as the court put it, they were "stimulated by broadcasts of Radio Luxembourg [which transmits mostly music] into setting fire to the stable of a collective farm."

But the new camps are mainly intended as relocation centers for the 10,000 East Germans who are under arrest be cause they cannot be trusted to remain in the workers' paradise. The idea is to move them to a safe distance from the sealed frontier in Berlin or other areas bordering the West. Some were actually caught in the act of fleeing; others are merely suspected of planning to flee, or "spreading unrest." For all, the penalty is swift deportation to the new camps in the interior, where "work rehabilitation" means sweating in a quarry or a mine from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The camps could never hold the millions of East Germans who would escape if they could. To deal with this restive mass, Communism's wall at Berlin grew ever higher, ever thicker. Bands of Volkspolizei (people's police) strung more strands of barbed wire atop the concrete blocks to stop the desperate dozens of East Berliners who were still leaping over the parapet to freedom; but to the dismay of officials, four Vopos on a fence-mending detail themselves threw down their tools and took the opportunity to flee west. In front of the wall, Communist workers laid heavy new barriers to frustrate daredevil drivers who had discovered a new way to escape. Most talented of these was the 23-year-old worker who last week packed his wife into the front seat of a five-ton dump truck, got up speed along darkened side streets paralleling the frontier, then roared out at 40 m.p.h. to plow through the wall, scattering Vopos and broken concrete in all directions.

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