Greg Mitchell - The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill

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Harry Seidel loved action, speed, risk. He found them all in bicycle racing. Harry might have been an Olympic championstill could be, probablyif he changed his attitude, for at twenty-three he remained in his leg-churning prime. But that wasnt Harry. Once he set his mind on something he went full bore, and now he wasnt chasing the next turn, other racers, or a finish line. Just months ago he had competed before thousands of cheering fans in raucous arenas. His picture appeared in newspapers. Children might call out to the lean, dark-haired sports hero when they recognized him cycling on the streets of Berlin. Now he toiled nearly alone. No one cheered, even if he deserved it for victories far beyond any of his racing exploits. That would be too dangerous.

Since the emergence of the new barrier dividing Berlin on August 13, 1961, Harrys wife, Rotraut, had worried about him. Whenever he set off on one of his secret missions she wondered if he would fail to come home, perhaps forever. Friends called Harry a draufgngera daredevil. They urged him to quit his death-defying deeds, return to cycling, and open that newspaper kiosk he coveted, but they might as well have been shouting into a wintry wind off the River Spree. In just the first months after the Wall arrived, Seidel had led his wife and son, and more than two dozen others, across the nearly impenetrable border to the West. And in Harrys mind there were still countless others (that is, nearly anyone in the East) to rescue.

Seidel had drawn only praise from the state during his cycling career, which had culminated in several East Berlin titles and two medals at the 1959 East German championships. Barely out of his teens, he quit his job as an electrician when the state began paying him to compete full-time. Even as he was being extolled in propaganda organs, Harry revealed himself as insufficiently patriotic when, unlike many others on the national team, he refused to ingest steroids to enhance his performance. He also failed to join the ruling Communist Party. This cost him any chance to make the countrys 1960 Olympic team, and his government stipend was canceled.