Hasso Herschel, the Man Behind Tunnel 29, Has Died at 91

Hasso Herschel, one of the best known of the Berlin escape helpers, died on 21 May 2026 near Melzow in the Uckermark, north of Berlin. He was 91. The Berlin Wall Foundation, which recorded a long eyewitness interview with him and at whose events he was a regular presence, announced his death with the line: “We will not forget him and his commitment.”

He was born in Dresden on 15 March 1935. At eighteen he took part in the demonstrations of the 17 June 1953 uprising and was expelled from his school for it. In 1955, visiting his parents in Dresden, he was arrested and sentenced to five years in a labour camp on a charge of economic crimes. He left the GDR in October 1961, two months after the border was sealed, walking out on a Swiss passport prepared for him by others.

Tunnel 29

Within a year he was digging his way back in. Tunnel 29 ran about 135 metres from the cellar of a disused factory on Bernauer Strasse in the West to a building on Schoenholzer Strasse in the East. On 14 September 1962, 29 people came through it – among them Herschel’s sister Anita and her family. An NBC television crew filmed the dig and the escape, and the footage became the Emmy-winning documentary The Tunnel; the sale of the rights helped pay for the work.

The Foundation says he was involved in three tunnels in all. By his own account he helped around 1,000 people out of East Germany over roughly a decade, using tunnels, cars with hidden compartments – a Cadillac among them – and passports swapped between people who resembled one another. In 2012 he received the Federal Cross of Merit alongside fourteen other escape helpers, and from 2019 he was an honorary member of the Berliner Unterwelten association. In later life he ran a restaurant in Berlin and, from 1994, lived in the Uckermark.

Where to see it

At the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse, the line of Tunnel 29 is marked above ground, so you can walk its length across the former border strip. It is the closest thing there is to standing in it.

Sources: Stiftung Berliner Mauer, contemporary German press reports.