3 Soviet ‘Dummies’ and an Ersatz Sergeant Dupe Border Guard in Escape to West

An East German border guard casually waved what he thought was a Soviet staff car containing a sergeant and three officers, all in uniform, through a checkpoint in the wall dividing Communist East Berlin from West Berlin.

The guard had been duped. An ingenious East German tire salesman had bluffed his way to the West with the help of three department store dummies dressed in homemade Soviet officer’s uniforms, one bearing the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Heinz Braun, 48, the ersatz Soviet sergeant who drove the car that was dressed up with a phony license plate and Red Army colors, told of his escape at a news conference Friday, conceding that the only flaw in his plan was that in his excitement he failed to return the border guard’s salute.

Braun said the escape was engineered by himself and the Aug. 13 Society, which claims to have helped more than 1,000 people flee from East Bloc countries to the West during the past 20 years. The group takes its name from the date in 1961 when East Germany began building the wall to stem the flow of thousands of Germans fleeing to the West.

To Dramatize Anniversary

The society said Braun’s escape was staged to dramatize the 25th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall.

Society leader Wolfgang Quasner appeared with Braun at the news conference where the mannequins were displayed for the news media in their bogus uniforms.

Quasner said members of his group took pictures of Soviet officers crossing the East Berlin-West Berlin border during the past several months to study their appearance.

Quasner said his group used photos to copy the Soviet uniforms and made counterfeit license plates that they attached to the car they had spray painted olive green to match Soviet military vehicles.

The counterfeit uniforms, license plates and car were smuggled into East Berlin by methods Quasner refused to disclose.

2 Dummies in the Back

Braun said one mannequin sat beside him in the front seat in the uniform of a Soviet lieutenant colonel and the other two dummies were in the back seat dressed as lieutenants as the “staff car” drove unhindered through the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint.

Once Braun completed his escape and met a contact person on the West Berlin side of the wall, he described how he felt.

“I was emotional and I was in tears. I flung my arms around Mr. Quasner. It was the sheer relief that everything had gone well,” Braun said. Later, Braun, downed champagne with Quasner and other group members at a fashionable hotel near the wall.

Braun said it wasn’t the first time he had crossed the wall to the West.

On June 24, he said he used a different, undisclosed method to enter the West and later returned to East Berlin to pick up a female friend and her child.

Woman Changed Her Mind

But the woman said was apprehensive and decided not to go after she talked with her former husband, who apparently was employed by the East German Interior Ministry, Braun said.

Braun, who ran a tire business in East Berlin, said that when he learned East German officials had a warrant for his arrest, he decided to make his escape with his silent partners, the disguised department store dummies.

He said 26 years ago he left West Germany, where he was born, because he was interested in Marxism and the “experiment in the East.”

“I soon recognized that I had made a dreadful mistake,” he said.

He said he tried unsuccessfully to get permission from East German officials to emigrate to West Germany and served a 30-month sentence in an East German jail for allegedly trying to persuade another East German to defect.

A West Berlin police spokesman said he could not confirm the account of Braun’s escape, which took place last Wednesday, and knew about it only through the news media. The newspaper Die Welt said such escapes are not new and cited the case of an East Berliner who put on a phony Soviet uniform and drove his car to freedom in a similar fashion in 1962.