Life Along the Death Strip

An 856-mile German frontier of guns, mines and attack dogs

While the labor crisis in Poland was making headlines nearly everywhere else in the world, the nervous Communist regime in neighboring East Germany pointedly minimized the news in its state-controlled press. At the same time, observers along East Germany's border with West Germany noted signs of stepped-up security, presumably to prevent the escape of any East Germans who might be infected by the unrest in Poland.

Today, more than ever, that border is a formidable and repelling obstacle, marked by a heavily fortified wire mesh fence 856 miles long. For nearly 20 years, it has stood as the means by which East Germany has effectively sealed off its 17 million people from the West. The fortifications have been progressively extended, and new security devices are constantly being added. TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs visited the West German side of the bristling barrier and flew a 40-mile surveillance mission in Army patrol helicopter. His

Grim steel watchtowers equipped with machine-gun ports and studded along the frontier within sight of each other monitor every yard of the fence and the barren strip of no man's land behind it. The nine road, eight rail and two canal crossings are tightly guarded and brightly floodlit at night. Traffic is minutely inspected to foil escapes. Heat-sensitive devices are used to detect persons hidden in vehicles and barges, and trained German shepherd dogs roam underneath all trains to sniff out would-be escapees clinging to undercarriages.

At Grusselbach the wire fence is 9 ft. high and anchored 3 ft. deep in the ground to prevent tunneling. It is topped with specially sharpened mesh so fine that a fingerhold is impossible. It is hung with powerful fragmentation mines at head, chest and knee level that can be triggered automatically by trip wires or detonated from nearby guard towers. For 547 yds. back into East Germany, all vegetation has been cleared, and the ground is raked regularly so telltale footprints will show. Farther back runs a deep trench that prevents vehicles from reaching the fence. Nearly a mile inside the border is a second fence, equipped with detection devices and automatically triggered shotguns.

East Germany keeps its citizens well back from the fence. Those permitted to live within three miles of the frontier must have special permits. These are mostly farmers, who work their fields from one hour after sunrise to one hour before sunset, usually under armed guard and sometimes with other guards guarding the guards to discourage escape attempts.

There is no doubt why the fence is there. East Germany claims the fortified frontier is purely defensive, but many watchtowers do not even afford a view of West Germany. All, however, offer a clear field of fire back to the east. Fortifications are being refined and modernized continually. According to Western estimates, the East Germans have invested well over $7 billion in building and maintaining the barrier. "They now have third-generation equipment in place," says Major Karl Ball, deputy commander of the Bundesgrenzschutz, West Germany's border police, in the central sector. "It has always been difficult for people to escape. Now it is nearly impossible."

The fence was first fortified in 1961, after East Germany erected the infamous Berlin Wall, to stanch an outward flood of East Germans to the West that was running at the rate of over 200,000 a year. In 1962, the first full year in which a primitive fortified fence was in place, there were 5,761 escapes across it. So far this year there have been only 147. "Today it is far safer to try and get out through a neighboring East bloc country," Ball says. "Only the truly desperate risk the so-called Death Strip."

Some escapes have been ingenious. Last year two families fashioned a homemade hot air balloon out of bedsheets and curtain strips and sailed silently over the fence to freedom by night in the southern border sector. But most who manage to get across today are either disaffected members of the 42,000-strong East German border guard force or people living near the border who are told by sympathetic guards about spots along the fence where mines have been temporarily removed for maintenance. In May a young couple scrambled over the fence at an unmined spot in the central sector; two border guards in a nearby watchtower studiously looked the other way.

Others are not so lucky. Last month there was an outbreak of automatic weapons fire one night in the central sector. No death has been reported, but a farmer on the western side says:

"They brought out a truck at dawn and threw something into it. I understand they are claiming it was a cow. But it was light enough so I could see that whatever it was had only two legs." All told, 106 people have been officially listed as killed while trying to escape across the fence since it was armed 19 years ago.

"It's heartbreaking," concedes Colonel John Sherman Crow, 43, commander of the U.S. llth Armored (Black Horse) Cavalry Regiment, which is charged with border surveillance in the central sector at Fulda. "But we are forbidden to interfere until someone actually gets across the line. And we must make sure that we don't violate that line on patrol, not with a single footprint, tire track or rotor blade." Crow assigns daily helicopter patrols to fly "the trace," as the border is known, always with specially trained pilots. Ground patrols operate within a few feet of the frontier, occasionally augmented by new M-60A3 tanks, says Crow, "to remind the other side that we have a wartime capability here as well."

His orders to his troops are strict: no talking, swearing or gesturing to East German patrols who sometimes pass less than 5 ft. away. For the most part, the discipline is matched on the other side, although it deteriorated when the Dallas Cowboys' cheerleaders came to visit a U.S. Army observation post last March. "They can tell when we have visitors at the o.p.," says one squad leader, "and it usually takes them ten minutes or so to get transport and come up opposite for a closer look. On the day the girls were here, they made it in five minutes flat, with broad smiles to boot."

Inevitably, the fence has separated friends and families. "Eighty percent of our people have relatives over there," says Deputy Mayor Guenter Burghardt of Rasdorf (pop. 1,700), gesturing at the town of Geisa (pop. 4,000) across the fence, less than two miles away. "Many were born over there, went to school there, or had jobs there. Now we have to look west, not east, for all that." Though Rasdorf and Geisa are in plain sight of each other, telephone calls between them take up to eight hours to complete, and getting from one to the other--if a visiting permit for Geisa is granted--is now a 154-mile drive instead of a 20-min. walk.

Even in death the fence intervenes.

"By the time we hear that a friend or loved one has died over there," says Burghardt, "he's long since buried." Farther north along the fence at Unterbreizbach, however, there is a cemetery on the eastern side next to the border; a grim watchtower soars amid the headstones. As Easterners bury their dead under the scrutiny of border guards, West Germans gather to watch, pray and lay wreaths against the border markers. "We don't know who they are," says a local butcher, "but our hearts go out to them anyway. Don't forget, we are all Germans, after all." The wreaths are always gone the next day. East German patrols have scooped them up overnight and destroyed them. -

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