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 g ...