Today in 1962, NBC broadcast a documentary showing a daring and dramatic effort to rescue people from Communist East Berlin.
What was unusual was that NBC had funded that rescue project.
The documentary was called “The Tunnel,” and it came at a pivotal moment in the Cold War.
Like Germany itself, the city of Berlin had been split between a Communist East and an anti-Communist West.
And in 1961, after hundreds of thousands of their people fled to West Berlin, East German authorities just walled the western part of the city off, turning it into what some people then called an “Island of freedom.”
They put up huge, imposing concrete barriers, complete with barbed wire, land mines and very heavily armed guards looking down from elevated towers.
The Berlin Wall made escape attempts on land extremely risky.
But a few West Berliners found a workaround: they started digging tunnels under the wall between West and East Berlin.
Not all of these tunnels were successful, but a few were, and they became famous.
American TV networks raced to get their news teams into West Berlin to film some tunnel-builders, and the winner was NBC.
The network not only connected with three college students leading a tunnel project, they essentially paid for the tunnel, in exchange for letting their cameras document the construction.
This was hard work, and dangerous, too: after digging for months, the students might break through the wall of the wrong building and deliver themselves right to the secret police.
Fortunately that didn’t happen, as their 140 yard tunnel would help dozens of East Germans escape to the West.
NBC’s cameras caught it all; their documentary won multiple Emmy Awards.
It also got lots of flak from President John F. Kennedy’s administration, which felt that NBC funding a tunnel into East Germany and making a movie about it wasn’t helping to cool the Cold War (especially since the network had originally planned to run the film in October 1962, the same month as the Cuban Missile Crisis).
I guess you could say the US government didn’t “dig” it.
They couldn’t write a story more perfect for our show than this one: officers in Ashland, Virginia came to the scene of a break-in late last month.
They soon found the culprit: it was a raccoon, one that had gotten drunk and passed out in the store bathroom.
They sent the raccoon to an animal shelter to dry out before it was released back into the wild. Thanks etc
Escape From East Berlin (New York Times)
Drunk raccoon found passed out in Virginia store bathroom after ransacking it: officials (WJLA)
