"Contemporary witnesses in conversation" - escape helper Burkhart Veigel

Escape help and fates at the Berlin Wall

Berliner Unterwelten e.V. is always good for creative innovations: One of the most successful escape helpers, Burkhart Veigel, reports in a lecture and subsequent discussion about his activities at the Berlin Wall, during which he was able to help around 800 refugees to freedom between 1961 and 1970. Three of his tours were never uncovered in flagrante delicto by the State Security (Stasi): The legendary "doppelganger tour", in which an escape helper used a trick to go through border control twice and thus obtain a registered ID for a fugitive - around 100 people made it to the West this way; the escapes in a Cadillac, in each of which a fugitive wasthe "French tour", in which a French ally was able to bring up to 14 refugees across the border in one tour - this brought around 250 refugees from the GDR to the FRG in four years.

After 37 years as an orthopaedic and trauma surgeon in Stuttgart, Burkhart Veigel returned to Berlin in 2007 to research and write about the topic of flight and refugee aid. This resulted in two books, "Wege durch die Mauer - Fluchthilfe und Stasi zwischen Ost und West" and "FREI", a novel about an East-West love affair, which he wrote together with his wife, the writer Roswitha Quadflieg. At the end of the event there will be time to sell and sign books.

Meeting point: Brunnenstraße 142, 10115 Berlin (near Bernauer Straße subway station)

Price: €5.00