In April 1964, about 35 West Berlin students began digging from the basement of an abandoned bakery at 97 Bernauer Strasse, descending 12 meters and tunneling 145 meters under the Berlin Wall. This episode explains the engineering: packing excavated earth into the bakery’s ovens to hide it from watchtowers, building a makeshift ventilation system with electric blowers, and reinforcing the shaft with timber, all financed by Stern magazine’s purchase of exclusive photo rights and a grant of around 30,000 Deutschmarks from a West German federal ministry.

The conversation covers the courier network that contacted 120 would-be escapees, the 57 people who crawled to freedom on October 3 and 4, and the Stasi informant whose tip led plain-clothes officers to the outhouse entrance on Strelitzer Strasse. It reconstructs the shootout in which border guard Egon Schultz was wounded by helper Christian Zobel and then killed by a fellow guard’s AK-47, and how East Germany turned that friendly-fire death into decades of martyr propaganda that Zobel himself believed until he died. It closes with dispatcher Reinhard Furrer’s later flight aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1985.

• Why the entrance had to be a bakery and the shaft had to go 12 meters down
• Plausible deniability: how a government subsidized a border-subverting operation
• The delay tactic Stasi officers used to pin down the tunnel’s location
• How Stasi archives opened after 1989 revealed the autopsy truth
• Stern’s retreat from the project and the memorial plaque that names both escapees and Schultz