The Swiss newspaper "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" and the British "Times" report that West German has ransomed around 2,600 political prisoners from the GDR by giving the East German state economic assistance (in the form of coffee, citrus fruits, etc.) to the tune of 100 million marks since the end of 1963.
7 February
1966
Willi Block, whose name at first remains unknown, tries to escape into West Berlin territory at the Outer Ring around Berlin near Staaken. He is noticed while crawling through the wire obstacles. He cannot obey the order given by border soldiers to return, as he is caught in the barbed wire.more
In the GDR, the envoy Gerhard Kegel fabulates that each of the two German states and West Berlin has its own nationals. By so doing, he means to declare the unified German nation - which, he admits, still lives on in the imagination of many Germans - to be an illusion.
