Exodus From Tyranny: An East Germany Defector Recounts his Journey to Freedom

They were the refugees of autumn. Some came with only the clothes on their backs, others with the few possessions they could carry. Some travelled alone, some with babies in their arms and small children in tow. Never before had the expression “voting with their feet” been given such vivid substance.

It was a flood of East German refugees to the West in 1961 that caused the communist government to build the infamous Berlin Wall. And in a delicious symmetry of history, it was East German refugees streaming to the West this past fall who tore that stolid government apart and forced The Wall open.

I was not surprised that these young East Germans should flee when they found the door to freedom slightly open. After all, hundreds of thousands before them had risked—and sometimes lost—their lives to escape while the door was bolted. By 1961, when The Wall went up, East Germans found themselves behind a sullen barrier of masonry, mines and machine guns. So they crawled west under barbed wire, dodging searchlights and watchdogs. They dug tunnels, swam rivers, flew out in homemade balloons, smashed through in crazy, makeshift armoured trucks.

The attempts and escapes were so numerous and commonplace as to be almost trite. Even we who had made “the crossing” paid scant attention. But no one could ignore this mass exodus. It began in May, when Hungary started to dismantle its section of the Iron Curtain. East Germans by the thousands headed down through Czechoslovakia to Hungary, all hoping to cross into Austria. Daunted by their sheer numbers, Hungary finally let them go in September. When the hard-line Czech government sealed its Hungarian border, East Germans en route to Hungary sought asylum at the West German embassy in Prague.

I studied the faces of these people who had crossed into Austria or who looked out from the crowded West German embassy compound in Prague. To see such desperation, anxiety and finally tearful relief on these well­fed faces was the most damning possible indictment of East Germany. Wasn’t this the foremost economy in the Soviet bloc? Wasn’t this where German industriousness and discipline had managed to make even communism work? Yet a couple from Potsdam, both of them teachers and making a comfortable living, bolted west because, as they explained, “everything soon will shatter in our country.”

Actually, everything had shattered long ago. It had shattered in the very presumption of Stalin that the human spirit could be coldly manipulated for the needs of the state. His puppet leaders had festooned the fraud with promises and dubbed it the German Democratic Republic. Those who bought it—the ruthless, the power­bent—became the state and to hell with the rest of us.

East German refugees being welcomed by locals to Helmstedt, West Germany as they arrive on a special train from Warsaw, Poland, October 1989. Photo: Getty images

I was a boy. I did not grasp the meaning of freedom fully enough to realize it had been destroyed. But I learnt quickly. As a member of the Free German Youth (the ‘Vanguard of Socialism’), I had been ordered to literally drag an old, sick couple from their home so they would register to vote for the communists in the ‘democratic’ elections of 1951. This was not right, I told my superiors. I refused to obey.

I was expelled from the organization. The group’s chairman—a man clearly on his way up in the system—stiffly shook my hand at my trial. He made it clear that dismissal from the prestigious youth group meant the end of any hope for a real career in the new Germany. But he held forth the chance that I could redeem myself by a life of ‘socialist production’ as a menial worker. He was a young former roofer from the Saarland named Erich Honecker.

And so one day in June 1953, caught up in the rage sweeping a starving and oppressed Berlin, I found myself in the battles with Soviet occupation troops, and in brash, boyish anger cursed and threw cobblestones at the T­34 tanks that roamed the streets to protect the new order.

There was noise and shouting and death in the air. Only later did it dawn on me that it was the hope of freedom which had died—and freedom was everything. Then, as soon as I could, I got out, slipping past the border guards to West Germany at a little town called Tiefenbrunn early in November.

I remembered that day as I read of these new refugees, as I saw them on the television news, smiling deliriously from train windows in railroad stations at Hof and Giessen, greeted by crowds with tears streaming down their faces.

These people were well­ dressed by Eastern European standards, and well­educated. Some were attorneys, doctors, professors. Many were craftsmen, skilled factory workers and bosses; store clerks, secretaries, butchers, shopkeepers, accountants. They were in fact the communist state’s people of promise and potential, most of them between the ages of 20 and 40.

For years, many of them had tried to believe that the price of socialist progress was censored and confiscated mail, and the monitoring of their ‘social habits’ by the Stasi, the state security police. And as the government of my former youth leader, Erich Honecker, proved ever more stern and doctrinaire, they had resigned themselves to fashioning some kind of nest in the spreading branches of the state bureaucracy.

Others held the hope that they, too, might join those old men of the ruling elite who drove Western cars and enjoyed every luxury in the privacy of their estates within a walled compound near the Berlin suburb of Wandlitz (‘Volvograd’, workers derisively called it). They had taken great pains to play the game. They had joined the blue­-shirted Young Pioneers at age six, and the Free German Youth at 14. They had won medals for their mastery of Marx and Lenin and joined the Society for German­–Soviet Friendship.

But an awful irony was everywhere at hand. Their country was indeed the model Stalinist state envisioned when it was founded, and it had ‘progressed’ accordingly. The government boasted about the standard of living. After all, they didn’t have to stand in line for toilet paper like the people in Moscow.

But being ‘better off’ than the rest of the family of communist police states with their sham economies didn’t count for much. Citizens of the ‘First Workers’ and Peasants’ State on German Soil’ looked with envy at friends or neighbours fortunate enough to receive clothes, food and consumer goods from relatives in the West.

Some grasped that these ‘care packages’ were emblematic of the staggering billions of dollars a year in West German trade and aid that kept their inefficient, centrally planned economy afloat. The routine affluence they saw on West German television seemed scarcely believable.

They had to wait 10 or 15 years to buy a car, usually a wretchedly built Trabant. They saw about them a crumbling highway system; ancient railroad rolling stock on poorly maintained tracks; drab, shoddy buildings. These material things were only symptoms. We Germans have a profound sense of order and of the importance of heimat, home, which has endured far worse than mere shabbiness or hardship.

An image of the Berlin Wall taken in 1986

There was a far deeper reason that these people forfeited everything and embraced instead the uncertain status of refugees: the realization that human beings are overqualified to live in a communist state. These bright, young East Germans had seen the future, and it did not work. I remembered that during the Berlin uprising of 1953, playwright Bertolt Brecht had scribbled in his notebook: “The government had lost all trust in its people ... Would it not be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and choose another?” These were the new people of East Germany, and they had lost any trust that their government would ever tire of its fraud upon them.

I had sensed early that I could not build a life on the premise the state knew best how I should live. It was easy for me to leave. I had nothing to lose. But these new refugees had everything to lose. In the thrall of communism their only solace was their possessions, honors, a niche in the system, whatever they might win by obedience and accommodation. It was no small thing to give them up; no small thing for them to teach us again the needed lesson that comfort and security are no substitutes for liberty.

It would be wrong to describe these people as disillusioned. Prisoners, even if relatively well cared for, hold few illusions about prison. These refugees, tossing their East German money out of train windows at the border, were eminent realists. They left behind houses and apartments that had cost them dearly in routine payoffs and years on waiting lists. They left their highly prized automobiles, keys in the ignition, on the streets of Prague.

They had no idea, of course, that they were the vanguard of an exodus that would change history; no idea that their desire to be free was the tremor that would shake East Germany to its foundation. By 18 October, as embarrassment grew over the hemorrhage of the country’s very lifeblood, Erich Honecker was deposed by the East German Politburo.

By 8 November, most of the Politburo itself had resigned. Honecker’s successor, Egon Krenz, tried desperately to restore order to a government that had been the grim symbol of order in Eastern Europe.

An eerie atmosphere descended on the country. Stores closed for lack of clerks. Trains were left without engineers; factories without skilled workers; villages without bakers, doctors, teachers, ambulance drivers. The next day, 9 November, the unthinkable happened. The East German government announced that its citizens were free to pass directly into West Germany. The Wall had come down.

In the ecstatic celebrations that followed, I could not forget those refugees of autumn, and the escapees before them. They had brought this about. They had shocked their rulers into reality by fashioning a unique and courageous plebiscite on democracy. They triumphed because they were willing to abandon everything fur Freiheit—for freedom.

Editor’s Note: H. Joachim Maitre fled East Germany in 1953. Since his defection, he built a distinguished career as a celebrated journalist, author, and academic known for his commitment to freedom and truth. In 1983, he joined Boston University, where he taught international relations and journalism until 2013, and founded the Center for Defense Journalism, leaving an enduring legacy of intellectual rigor and dedication to democratic values. He passed away in 2020.