Today in History - October 3: When people said the word 'Tokyo', they were taken to a hole in the ground

Fifty-seven East Berliners made one of the most successful escapes into the West, starting on October 3, 1964.

A group of students from the West spent months digging a tunnel from an abandoned bakery to a disused outhouse, a 145m distance.

Separating the two buildings was the Berlin Wall, which had been built three years earlier to stop Germans in the Soviet zone of the city fleeing to freedom.

The 12-metre-high wall was accompanied by a signal fence that would trigger an alarm when touched, followed by a floodlit "no-man's land" where guards would machine gun anyone who tried to cross.

In the past two years, dozens of people had been killed trying to get into West Berlin.

A tunnel would theoretically allow refugees to cross the border unnoticed.

The tunnelers worked in treacherous and deeply unpleasant conditions, filling flour sacks with dirt as they dug.

When the tunnel was complete, those wishing to cross the border were told to arrive at the bakery.

They were not told how they would be getting into the West, only given a codeword for entry: Tokyo.

The word was already on the world's lips that week. The 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games were about to begin.

Those who knew the codeword were taken into a cellar, then lowered 12 metres into a hole in the ground.

From there, they had to crawl on hands and knees through a dark tunnel less than a metre in diameter.

And over the course of two nights, 57 people escaped to freedom that way.

Then, midway through the night of October 4, the escapees were sprung by the Stasi secret police, followed by border guards.

In a subsequent firefight, a border guard named Egon Schultz was shot and killed.

The East German press decried it as a murder at the hands of "West Berlin terrorists".

Schultz was celebrated as a martyr.

It was not until the 1990s that it was revealed Schultz had been accidentally shot by his fellow border guards.

Dozens more people would die trying to cross the Berlin Wall, and tens of thousands more were imprisoned. 

The Wall would be largely torn down as the communist government collapsed in 1989.

Now the spot where the tunnel was dug is a park, with metal rods staked in the soil to mark where the Wall stood.

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