Gerhard Hoch

“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.“

“We had contact to the leading figures there all the time. Even in the era of the Iron Curtain, we were keeping contacts with them. When there were official issues to tackle, we got in the car and drove over, or they’d come over to us and we dealt with the problems, in particular with the freight traffic. One case I remember was for instance the loss of a service pistol by a Czechoslovak customs official. He inspected a truck loaded with Bibles intended for West Germany and in the course of the thorough inspection of the cargo space, he lost his pistol somewhere in the truck. Then the truck came over to us and we didn’t spend that much time with it, its clearance was fast tracked and within two hours it could leave the crossing for Germany. Three hours later, we received a call from the Czechoslovak colleague who told us that he had probably lost his service pistol in that truck. So I had to call a search for that truck because if that pistol and ammunition had gotten into the wrong hands and possibly on the black market, it would be a major problem. So I called a search for a Czechoslovak truck with this and that license plate and it was indeed stopped in the region of Amberg and the pistol was really found in it. But then a quarrel broke out because the customs officials wanted the truck to come back for an inspection as there was allegedly something wrong with it. But we only wanted to hand over the lost and found pistol and let the truck continue on its way. So I told them that it had already passed through clearance at our side and that it was not possible to send it back. So eventually we only sent back the pistol and not the truck. The pistol was handed over in person by our chief who was the representative for cross-border issues.”

“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.”