9 Ingenious Smuggling Machines That Beat the Berlin Wall

Wolfgang Engels was a 19-year-old driver for in the East German Army in April 1963. His escape was not the best-planned, but it was certainly one of the most daring. He befriended some soldiers who drove SPW-152 personnel carriers and persuaded them to show him how to drive one. When his new friends were on a meal break, Engels stole a getaway vehicle and motored across Berlin.

As he approached the wall, Engels gunned the 110-horsepower engine and rammed the wall at full speed with the ten-ton armored truck. The vehicle’s nose punched through the wall, but it stopped there, with the door on the wrong side. Engels got out and tried to climb over but was caught on barbed wire. An East German Guard fired at him and Engels was hit twice, but West German police returned fire and a group of men piled out of a nearby bar and helped the injured Engels to freedom.

In 1984, Czech Ivo Zdarsky built his own aircraft to fly over the Iron Curtain. A microlight based on the two-stroke engine and fuel tank of the ubiquitous Trabant. Other components were scavenged or home-made.

After taking off at 3 am his homemade propeller struck a rock during take-off but survived thanks to its steel edge. Zdarsky stayed low to avoid radar, flying under power lines and landing at Vienna International Airport. After his escape, Zdarsky moved to the U.S. and set up Ivoprop, a successful business manufacturing propellers.

One way of smuggling a passenger across was in a secret compartment in the car. The included an outsize fake fuel tank, and this BMC Mini with a concealed space for a small person inside the passenger seat.

Back in the early days of electronics, audio equipment providing options for concealment for refugees flexible enough to pack themselves in. Successful escapes were carried out in this old-fashioned wooden radio case, and in the outsize speakers carried by a touring musician.

Roof racks also came into play. A single large object might be too obvious, so one West German found a more subtle way to get his East German girlfriend over the border. By hollowing out two surf boards and putting them together, he created a space just large enough for her to fit in for the short journey across the border.

The BMW Isetta, better known as the ‘bubble car’ was a 1950’s design classic. Just seven and a half feet long, it took 30 seconds to get up to 30 mph from a standing start. Far too small to smuggle a hidden passenger out under the eyes of the border guards–unless you were a very smart mechanic.

In 1963, Klaus-Günter Jacobi converted his Isetta over several weeks, moving the storage box behind the seat up four inches and welding it back in place, removing the air filters and spare tire to make more space, replacing the rule tank with one the size of an old can, bending the exhaust pipe – then sanding it all down and leaving no trace. Then 5-foot-7-inch Manfed Koster could just squeeze into the hiding space. The border guards did not bother checking such a tiny vehicle, and Jacobi drove right through with his concealed passenger.

In May 1963, Austrian Heinz Meixner drove up to Checkpoint Charlie in a fancy British sports car, a bright red Austin Healey Sprite convertible. The top was down, and Meixner had made one important modification to the car: he removed the windshield. When the border guards ordered him to pull over for inspection, Meixner lay flat and hit the accelerator. Without the windshield, the entire car was low enough to slip under the lowered barrier. Meixner made it across—along with his East German fiancée hiding behind the seat and his prospective mother-in-law in the trunk.

Norbert Konrad pulled off the same trick a few months later in the exact same car, but the East Germans then added steel bars under the barrier arm to prevent a third attempt.