Alexey Novikov chronicles some truly ingenious escapes over, through, across and underneath the world's most sinister engineering structure - the Berlin Wall. FIFTEENTH AUGUST, 1961 was something of a big day for 19-year-old East German soldier Conrad Schumann, standing guard at the corner of Ruppiner Strasse and Bernauer Strasse in east Berlin. It was a mere three days after the start of construction of the Berlin Wall and, thus far, the results had been unimpressive. The Wall, which would become a universal symbol of the lengths to which the Soviets would go to contain and oppress, was still nothing but a stretch of barbed wire. Armed soldiers of the National People's Army (NVA) and the Combat Group of the Working Class (KdA) lined the fence of roughly 140km brandishing machine guns; their orders were to shoot all who dared cross.
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