News
By Tom Stafford
Staff Writer
“It was a Sunday morning,” Michael Otto recalled, “and the phone rang at 3:30 a.m.”
“Since I was attached with the Provost Marshal’s Office Berlin Command, there was no arguing with the caller. I got in uniform, grabbed my camera, several rolls of film and went.”
He photographed the concertina wire going up and watched traffic being flag-stopped at the border, the general reaction of the Western forces.
“Our response on Sunday was to stand and gawk,” he recalled.
“Within the next two or three days, (the East Germans) positioned parking barriers in a serpentine pattern to prevent cars from just blowing through the intersection. It wasn’t until much later that there was a gate and the other formal checkpoint hardware was installed.”
When the Americans discovered there was access to a roof on the border through the basement of an adjacent building, Michael Otto used it as a photographer’s perch.
Despite the tensions, it was a less precarious position than people traveling on Freidrich Straße, a main thoroughfare on the border, when American tanks took up their positions there.
“The scary part about that exercise was the fact that the subway runs underneath the street, and no one really knew whether the rumbling tanks would cause the subway tunnels to collapse,” Otto said.
A photo taken that week shows Michael Otto next to a Jeep parked in front of a tank on Freidrich Straße a block from the border spot that later would be called Checkpoint Charlie.
There’s some evidence that the East German soldiers had no ammunition in their rifles that week and that a bolder show by the West might have kept the Wall from taking more solid form.
In retrospect, that’s Michael Otto’s view.
But he remembers it all in the mix of a “frantic, hectic time” of 20-hour days worked between mid-August and Thanksgiving.
It was only after that time settled into one of lasting tension, and that he got involved in a personal fight for freedom that would cast a shadow of possible imprisonment and cost him at least one and perhaps two careers.
The Straßenkreuzer
Having lived in Berlin with his parents for three years before enlisting, Michael Otto had developed several friendships.
“One particular friendship was with a young engineering student from the Technical University in Berlin. The Wall separated him from his fiancee, who was stuck in East Berlin,” a place to which Michael often traveled on business in a 1952 Packard imposing enough that the Germans referred to it as his Straßenkreuzer, a kind of battle cruiser for the street.
“Since I was registered with the military government I was able to cross the border with no interference from the East Germans,” he said. “It did require that I have official travel orders once the border was closed.”
But in his position, in which he often drove from West Berlin through parts of East Germany en route to West Germany, those weren’t hard to come by.
As Christmas of 1961 passed and his friend, Peter, became increasingly depressed about prospects of reuniting with his fiancee, Otto began thinking about putting his auto to another purpose.
“West Berlin radio was encouraging people in the East to defect,” he explained. “They even went so far as to tell people that they would not be interrogated as to how they got out.”
Although that information was false, “Peter and I began to plan how to get his fiancee out of East Berlin.”
His Straßenkreuzer was, of course, the perfect vehicle — one they could easily modify so someone in the passenger compartment could crawl into the trunk for the border crossing.
As though out of a Cold War novel, they decided to smuggle Jutta out on the night of a performance of the popular Stattsoper (State Opera) in East Berlin, a March night on which border traffic would be heavy for the popular event for Soviet and American service personnel.
“I put in for a pass, got my travel orders and had his fiancee purchase the opera tickets. I put on my dress uniform, filled the car’s gas tank, and drove to the opera, which Michael Otto recalls as “one of the longest performances of ‘The Magic Flute’ in history.”
His friend Peter had taken the subway to meet his girlfriend, and the three met at the Straßenkreuzer after the opera.
Then came a moment that put his heart in his throat.
“As we were preparing to leave the parking lot there was a tap on the window, and a man wearing an East German SED Party lapel pin was gesturing at Jutta,” he said.
Only later did Otto learn that it was her father.
“I drove through the darkened backstreets while Peter removed the back seat and she crawled into the trunk.”
He then dropped Peter at the subway stop, never fully stopping the car, crossed over, and “the three of us had a small celebration” at the subway station in West Berlin before he delivered them home.
A narrow escape
Although it happened in the afternoon, the next day was “the morning after” for Michael Otto.
Threatened by CIA officials if she did not say how she’d come to freedom, she confessed. That led to Otto’s interrogation and the shadow of imprisonment for fear of the consequences to East-West relations had he been caught.
“Had my father not been well-connected with the commanding general,” he writes, “that probably would have landed me in a general court-martial resulting in time at Fort Leavenworth military prison, not a happy ending by any stretch of the imagination.”
Due for discharge the next month, he was given 24 hours to leave Berlin and transferred to Third Army Headquarters in Frankfurt, where he spent his last days there visiting the lovely Taunus Mountains.
After graduating from Wittenberg, Michael Otto took steps to join the CIA and found that his “antics” in freeing Jutta left him with no future there.
All these years later, though, the antics give him reason to take pride in the part his Packard Straßenkreuzer played in ferrying his friend’s fiancee to freedom.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.