In 1961, Joachim Rudolph escaped from one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships. A few months later, he began tunnelling his way back in. Why? //
This was October 1961, just two months after the Berlin Wall had gone up. It was built by the East German government to stop the flood of people leaving the communist dictatorship for a better life in the West. But what was so extraordinary about it was the speed with which it had been built. //
Thousands of miles away in New York, a hotshot TV producer named Reuven Frank was thinking about how to tell the story of Berlin. He’d been there when the wall went up and wanted to explain what was going on beyond the headlines.
He was one of the most powerful figures at the US news network NBC. One morning he had an idea: What if he could find an escape story that was happening right now?
They could film it in real time, every twist and turn, not knowing how it would end. It could revolutionise TV news.
Frank took his idea to the NBC correspondent in Berlin, Piers Anderton, who loved it and began making enquiries.
It was not long before Anderton's search for tunnellers brought him to the charming engineering student Wolf Schroedter, who was trying to raise money for the diggers.
“We brought him to see the tunnel,” says Schroedter. “He was really impressed. He told us he wanted to film it. And that’s when we told him our conditions - if NBC wanted to film it, they would have to pay us.”
Anderton relayed all this to Frank who agreed straight away. NBC would pay for tools and materials, “and in return we would have the right to film,” says Frank. //
A few months later, NBC broadcast the film, despite an attempt by President Kennedy’s White House to block it, fearing a diplomatic incident with the Soviet Union.
It was described as without parallel in the history of television. The tunnellers heard that President Kennedy himself watched it and that he had been moved to tears. //
Helena Merriman tells the extraordinary true story of a man who dug a tunnel right under the feet of Berlin Wall border guards to help friends, family and strangers escape in a BBC Radio 4 podcast.
