Gerhard Hoch

“I still remember one case very well. It was a Romanian factory worker who built machinery parts to be exported to Germany in wooden boxes. These parts were shipped overseas to Germany and in those days there were no containers yet, as they’re in use today. So he squeezed himself into one of the boxes taking enough drinking water and food provisions with him and had his friends close the lid of the box and nail it. The box was placed on a train and dispatched overseas on a ship. It was so tight in there he could barely move a finger for the whole duration of the journey. When he then stood in Furth he probably heard the workers speaking German and he knocked on the wall of the box to make himself heard. We warmly welcomed him in Germany and he was granted asylum here. Another case I remember was a Czech, or rather a Slovak in fact. He took the engine from a Trabbi and used it for a lightweight airplane, a sort of a glider with an engine, to cross the border in the sky. He built this machine himself and flew across the border with it, just a few meters above the trees in fact. It was very close to the border crossing, a little bit to one side of it. He flew across the forest and when he noted an area densely covered with buildings near to Cham, he landed there. The good fellow even wrote a book about his enterprise that sold even here in Germany. He speaks German very well and has a hotel in Slovakia. I don’t exactly remember where. He received asylum as well. In the period off the Iron Curtain, everybody who came here was granted asylum, there were virtually no exceptions to this rule. I don’t remember a single application for asylum that would be rejected and sent back. I mean we didn’t really track that. We filed the application for the seeker and had a questionnaire filled in by him and then we sent the complete documentation to Zirndorf or somewhere else but there was not a single case where it would come back.”

“We didn’t really get the chance to see an awful lot there in Höll. The only thing that occurred there was that a crowd of curious people flocked to the crossing to see Russian tanks. It was because in Höll, there was also a border crossing at that time that was closed for the regular citizens and opened only to commercial travellers, like log transports from Czechoslovakia that were allowed to pass because otherwise they’d have to take a tremendous detour. So the German traders went over to buy the wood. That was the only activity across the border, except for another case, when the Pilsner brewery got a boiler and they had to ship it through Höll as the other crossings were too narrow for the transport. There were two or three similar cases. Höll was a tiny border crossing but there had to be at least one patrol there at all times or at least during the day because all the curious people ran over there to see. The border was open and the fence was only 500 meters farther away in the background. They ran farther towards the fence and were then arrested by the Czechs and were kept there for two days if they had intruded a bit farther into their territory. That was our duty in Höll. I still very well remember a group of travellers that arrived in their Volkswagens. I believe they were from the area of Nuremberg. They constantly wanted to see the Russians. One of them asked me what I would have done if the Russians had marched farther ahead. I told her: ‘well, what could I have possibly done? I would have stepped out on the crossing and directed the traffic to make sure the Russian tanks came faster to Nuremberg’. She turned around, got into her VW Käfer and drove back to Nuremberg.”

“Once, there was this case when a group of gypsies from Czechoslovakia wanted to cross the border to West Germany. It happened before I came to serve there but I learned about it from the documents. Of course that they weren’t admitted to Germany – they had Persian passports. So their application for immigration was rejected by us but the Czechoslovak colleagues would not let them go back to Czechoslovakia. Thus they were caught in between the borders in no-man’s land. They had to set up a camp and stayed there for eight days. We took care of them, provided them with drinking water and food, but they weren’t allowed to enter Germany nor return to Czechoslovakia. Well, the Red Cross eventually stepped in and then Austria granted them a shelter. But they weren’t even allowed to travel to Austria via Czechoslovakia. This incident occurred at a time… let me think, I think it was in 1967 or 1968, when a rule was in place that basically said: ‘if you’re coming from my side and you’re not admitted to the other country, for whatever reason, then I have to take you back’. So they had to pitch camp there in the gray zone between the borders. The greatest brutality was the fact that people were just left to stand at the border in scorching heat for hours. And then they were told: ‘you can’t pass’. There were so many who got into trouble because of simply having different pictures on the visa and the passport. The picture on the visa depicted the bearer with a beard while the picture in the passport showed the same person without a beard. In such cases, we helped the people by shaving off the beard using our office equipment – an old office scissors. We cut away the beard so that he could visit his old aunt. So, everything was interpreted pretty strictly back then.“