Dig-It-Yourself

Ten months after Walter Ulbricht sealed off East Berlin, his harassed border police last week were still adding new gun emplacements and barbed wire to keep their fellow citizens from climbing the Wall to freedom. But East Germans, in increasing numbers, are taking another route: underground.

Using spades, spoons and fireplace shovels to excavate three separate tunnels, 45 East Germans last week dug their way out. chalking up the biggest weekly total of successful escapes recorded so far this year. Most ambitious of the tunnels went from West to East. Led by Peter Scholz, a 2O-year-old West Berlin mechanic who was separated from his East German fiancee by the Wall, six young Berliners started in the cellar of a West Berlin tavern, dug a shaft 9 ft. below ground that surfaced 60 ft. away in the basement of an East Berlin photograohy shop. There they made rendezvous with eleven friends and relatives, including Scholz's fiancee and her four-month-old daughter, Suzanne, who had to be fed tranquilizers so that she would not cry out on the trip back.

Gingerly hauling Suzanne in a tin dishpan, the fugitives--among them five other women and two small boys--took three hours to squeeze through the 2O-inch shaft to freedom.

The dig-it-yourself movement stirred irate protests from Moscow, where Pravda accused West Berlin authorities of "openly inciting subversive actions against peace." In fact, the exodus has been stepped up by East Germany's increasingly desperate food shortage. Blaming the situation on its lack of export credits rather than the abysmal failure of its collectivized agriculture, the regime last week urged the people to start growing food in their own backyards. Whether for food or freedom, it looked as if more and more East Germans would be out digging this summer.

Tension mounted on both sides of the Wall at week's end, as West Berliners planned mammoth rallies to commemorate the anniversary of East Germany's abortive 1953 uprising. When Konrad Adenauer announced that he planned to fly to West Berlin for German Unity Day, as it is called, East Germany protested to the U.S., Britain and France that this would be a "provocative" act. But it was an East German border guard who did most to raise Berlin's blood pressure. When a twelve-year-old East Berlin schoolboy named Wolfgang Gloede approached the barbed wire opposite the U.S. sector, the Vopo opened fire with a machine pistol. West Berliners had to watch helplessly as the dying boy was dragged back from the wire and left unattended for an hour until an ambulance came. He died on the way to a hospital.

Twice last week, in Washington, President Kennedy called meetings of his Berlin task force to discuss the continued shooting incidents along the Berlin wall. "We get 200 shots a day fired there now," said one State Department official. "In Laos that's a war."

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