SPEAKS GERMAN
Over 20 years, during the height of the Cold War,
BBC producer Austin Harrison
broadcast his German-language programme to his listeners
in communist-ruled East Germany.
BIG BEN CHIMES
Letters Without Signature had a simple format.
Harrison read out and commented on letters sent to him by listeners
on the other side of the Berlin Wall.
Dear Radio London... We place our hopes in you...
Help us...
I trust you...
Thousands of East Germans wrote in with their accounts of everyday
life under their repressive regime.
However, what the letter writers didn't know was that this simple
radio programme would end up at the heart of the Cold War
propaganda battle between East and West.
TRANSLATION: For the Stasi, I think,
Austin Harrison was the number-one enemy of the state.
And so they had to bring him down.
Using never-seen-before secret British Foreign Office documents,
and East German secret-police surveillance footage...
..this film reveals the extent to which the Stasi commander
of Department 20, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kienberg, went to both
discredit Harrison and hunt down and punish the letter writers.
Look, if you think you can undermine this state, you don't stand a chance.
When they declared that I would go
to jail for two years, my mother fainted.
But this film will also ask some uncomfortable questions
about Harrison and the BBC's own motivation in broadcasting
this radio programme.
Was there more to Harrison than just a radio reporter?
Harrison went to East Germany and then he would come back, report
precious little about what he had done,
and you thought, "Well, what does he actually do there?"
This story of state subterfuge, spies and individual acts of bravery
highlights a complicated tit-for-tat propaganda war between the BBC
and the Secret Police service in East Germany, played out
over the airwaves.
The BBC External Service began speaking to the world in 1938.
This is London calling.
THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGES
While the BBC Home Service was funded through the licence fee,
the external services were funded by the British Foreign Office.
The German service came to prominence
during the Second World War.
The story of the BBC German Service has been researched intensively
by historian Emily Oliver.
In the immediate post-war period as the 1940s continue, they notice
at the BBC that they're getting more and more letters
from the eastern zone of Germany, from the Soviet-occupied zone.
That's the point at which the BBC German service decides
it's going to start making a separate programme
for the eastern zone.
And it's going to, as part of this programme, use the letters
it's getting from the eastern zone, and start transmitting a programme
called Letters Without Signature, a letterbox programme.
The programme's appeal was twofold.
It broadcast unbiased news reports and gave East German listeners
the freedom to air their views of the state.
For the governing communist regime, this was treason.
The point was that the notion that people could write letters
to a Western radio station and say what they really felt
about their lives in East Germany, and that these would be broadcast
back into East Germany was a nightmare.
And it just meant that the East German regime's hold
on their own country was weakened because
people would hear that and think, "Yeah, well, I agree with that."
Susanne Schadlich grew up in communist East Germany, but had to
move to the West overnight when her father was denounced as a dissident.
She's written extensively about state surveillance by the Stasi
and how it monitored the BBC.
She discovered the original letters
stored here in the BBC's own archives.
TRANSLATION:I knew there was
20 years' worth of material, and when I first saw it,
I thought, "Oh, my God, that's a lot."
And there's a lot more back there in storage.
Tens of thousands of letters are stored here, written
between the 1950s and the 1970s.
TRANSLATION:These letters are, I think, unique historical documents
because they are personal.
People wrote anonymously, of course, and they wrote about their lives,
desires, hopes, despair, everything - even about repressive measures,
about their fears.
When the Berlin Wall went up and the Iron Curtain came
down in August 1961, the programme's listeners were totally
cut off from the West.
TRANSLATION:There is also a noticeable change of tone in the letters,
they become passionately political.
Much more political than in the years in between.
They really got involved then - they're making demands,
they're appealing to Western politicians, to Kennedy,
for instance, "Save Us".
We place our hopes in you. Help us.
Don't wait too long.
Dear London Radio...
This is the wall of shame.
Code word - teenager in East Germany.
I'm still a child, but
I understand what goes on in the GDR. At school,
they teach us to hate the capitalist countries.
I'm 13 years old and now in the eighth grade.
You surely can answer my question soon?
Please do - I trust you.
Karl-Heinz Borchardt was one of those teenage letter-writers.
He's lived here in the town of Greifswald for much of his life.
It's a small town in the north of East Germany.
TRANSLATION:I would say that I was
probably quite an average GDR teenager.
I was in the young pioneers organisation.
And most of the time, I held some sort of position in my form group,
usually deputy council president.
It was only in the seventh or eighth grade that I started to become
critical of development in the GDR.
At that point, Western radio stations also began to play a role.
Borchardt began to write to Harrison in 1968, aged just 16.
That was the year that Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia.
And immediately halted the democratic reforms
of the socialist government in Prague.
This led to expressions of outrage from people in East Germany.
Such as Karl-Heinz Borchardt.
TRANSLATION:Dear employees of London radio's German service.
I like your programme very much, because it shows the views
of citizens who are not represented in our press.
I'm 16 years old and would like to write to you about the reactions
among young people to the incidents in Prague.
I don't think the West has opposed this intervention strongly enough.
Does a country that has fought so hard for a little bit of freedom,
have to march on forever down the well-trodden path
of domination by Moscow?
Kind regards from a letter-writing schoolboy.
Another letter-writer to the BBC was Rolf-Joachim Erler.
Now a retired cleric,
he grew up under the communist regime in East Germany.
He's been a pacifist all his life, and was an outspoken supporter
of democracy and Western ideals.
This made him an outsider, and at odds with the communist state.
Erler had an unusual childhood.
He and his mother lived on one side of the wall.
His father, a US soldier, on the other.
The only way the family could be together was when his father
made secret trips to the east.
TRANSLATION:It was very dangerous, of course.
For one thing, because the Americans absolutely wouldn't allow my father
to travel to the Soviet Occupation Zone.
And equally, it was dangerous for him to show up inside the Soviet
Occupation Zone in Dresden as an American.
So he had to wear civilian clothes.
But then on one of these trips, disaster hit the family.
TRANSLATION:And then someone noticed,
"Wait a minute. That's an American.
"He's speaking English."
And they informed on him.
And the result was that my mother had to flee overnight,
and she had to leave me with my grandparents,
where I was safe and secure.
Erler grew up with his grandparents in the East,
and from his earliest days in school, was left in no doubt
of his outsider status.
TRANSLATION:I used to be called up to the teacher's desk.
"Rolf! Come up here to the front!"
And was paraded in front of the class.
"Here, take a look at Rolf!
"His mother has betrayed our republic.
"His father is an enemy of the state.
"His grandparents and great-grandparents,
"all capitalists. Right, Rolf.
"Now go back to your seat and better yourself."
So I was always an outsider as a child.
The radio was his one source of solace.
His link to the outside world.
TRANSLATION:This was my childhood bedroom.
Everything was pretty basic
back then, of course. My bed was right in front here,
so I could listen to the radio in bed in the evening.
Listeners to the programme felt they were safe
to write in, because the BBC had a strategy in place which allowed
letter-writers complete anonymity.
TRANSLATION:If people, wanting to write to the BBC,
had addressed their letters directly to BBC London,
they would have been intercepted straight away.
The BBC developed a system of cover addresses in West Berlin.
Gunter Burkart was a producer with Letters Without Signature
in London at the time.
TRANSLATION:The cover addresses, where the addresses to which people in Berlin were supposed to write,
they were never real addresses but former bombsites or houses
where other people lived.
This meant that the letters were able to pass
through the Berlin Wall...
..the most closely watched border in the world, and reach the West.
And then the West Berlin Postal Service would know to forward
these letters to the BBC's Berlin office.
And from there they would be sent by diplomatic mailbag to London.
And in London, they would be treated very securely.
They were kept in a safe overnight, so there was very restricted access
as to who got to see these letters, because of the risks to East Germans
writing to the BBC.
TRANSLATION:And every letter was given a code word.
People had either chosen one themselves, or we gave them one,
ideally relating to the content of the letter,
so that when they were listening, the letter-writers
would know, "Ah-ha,
"that's my letter coming up."
TRANSLATION:And then one time, I'll never forget this,
I heard my own letter being read out.
And I quickly called my grandmother, who was standing nearby,
and she was horrified when she heard the letter being read out.
And of course, she got scared and started berating me.
How could I be so reckless to write to such a station?
We could all end up in jail because of that.
Despite the fact that the communist government had banned listening
to the BBC, Karl-Heinz Borchardt didn't think that writing
to the corporation was illegal.
TRANSLATION:I knew there was some sort of law against subversive agitation.
But I couldn't imagine that the Stasi would mobilise
all of their resources to identify those letter-writers.
That was beyond my imagination.
For the many listeners in East Germany,
the programme was the highlight of their week.
Austin Harrison's voice was a lifeline.
TRANSLATION:First of all, this German English was striking.
He spoke German quite well, and he was an excellent commentator.
A portion of the letter was read out and then he immediately
gave his views on it.
That was fascinating to me. Even as a teenager, it was like watching
a play.
I just wanted to listen to that all the time.
The BBC producer and presenter
of the programme, Austin Harrison, was an almost mythical figure
for his audience, and also for his staff.
He becomes the Berlin representative for the BBC German Service in 1950,
and he stays in Berlin until '55, at which point he returns to London
and he takes over Letters Without Signature.
And he works on that programme for the next 20 years.
But we know very little about Austin Harrison.
He seems to have been a bit of a mystery even to people
who worked with him, it seems.
Harrison was an enigmatic figure amongst his colleagues.
He cultivated a very English-gentleman persona.
His house and garden in Colchester helped to emphasise this.
TRANSLATION:It was a beautiful old house with a big garden,
where he grew roses.
He almost always wore little rose as a buttonhole.
Harrison also had a very unusual
and commercially successful sideline.
He owned and managed a large cemetery.
TRANSLATION:He once told me he had inherited
this cemetery from an uncle.
It was a private cemetery, with a crematorium, in the north of London.
He let everybody know that he owned a cemetery, which was,
of course, for Germans,
I don't know how it is in other countries,
quite amazing that a private person could have a cemetery, and actually
turn it into a business.
And he was very keen that people who
worked for the German service made use of its services when they died.
And he used to quote a slightly perverse version of Goethe,
which ran - I have to say it in German - and then I'll translate it.
HE SPEAKS GERMAN
Which means, the greatest
reward for your life would be a grave at Harrison's cemetery.
TRANSLATION: And he actually said, "Gunter,
"if ever something happens in your family,
"10% off, and music for free, and all that."
Funny.
Austin Harrison was deputy head of the German service.
He and the majority of his staff were from the generation
who had been directly involved in the Second World War.
Amongst them were many Jewish and anti-communist emigres
who had fled Germany.
But from the mid-60s, a new generation of younger
journalists from West Germany joined the team.
Peter Sahla was employed as a young presenter
of a new BBC music programme.
The East German programme was called Soviet Union Programme.
They were purely political, and they were there to show
how beautiful life is in the West and how awful their life
is in the East.
Harrison made regular business trips to East Germany, which staff knew
about, but which were never discussed in programme meetings.
Harrison went to East Germany for the Leipzig Fair and various
other events like that, and then he would come back, report
precious little about what he had done, what he had seen,
what conclusions.
And you thought, "Well, what does he actually do there?"
However, in East Berlin, one organisation knew everything
about these trips.
The notorious East German secret police, the Stasi, kept Harrison
under close surveillance.
Susanne Schadlich has found files which reveal much about the Stasi's
war against the BBC. In an operation called Thrower,
Austin Harrison is named as a key figure.
The BBC is declared to be a place of psychological warfare,
and Harrison is suspected to be a British spy.
TRANSLATION:I think, for the Stasi,
Austin Harrison was the number-one enemy
of the state, or certainly one of the key enemies of the state,
because he had presented Letters Without Signature,
which was regarded as anti-communist propaganda, aiming to discredit
the GDR and possibly overthrow it.
And so they had to bring him down.
For several years, Austin Harrison travelled to East Germany
for the annual Leipzig Trade Fair.
It was one of the rare occasions when foreign journalists
were allowed access, and Harrison took full advantage of this.
But the Stasi files show that they had him
under 24-hour surveillance.
TRANSLATION:In 1958, they had even decided that Harrison was supposed
to be arrested as soon as he entered the GDR.
To them, he was a dangerous secret agent working for MI6.
And there's a very simple reason he wasn't arrested.
He didn't enter the country at that time.
His next visit wasn't until the autumn of 1961,
which was a very delicate time politically.
TRANSLATION:There were renewed discussions about arresting him, but the Stasi
decided not to.
They thought, "We've just built the wall.
"If we arrest a BBC journalist now,
"that won't come across too well."
And so the Stasi stuck to the plan of keeping
Harrison under observation.
Even searching his hotel room while he was out.
The Stasi's final report almost sounds disappointed.
"No secret compartments in the suitcase, just untidy clothes."
"Harrison likes to drink alcohol and then drives home,
"but quite safely."
"He seems to like women, but no relationships
"can be detected in Leipzig."
The Stasi failed to find anything that would compromise Harrison.
I think he was aware of his superiority, a feeling that,
"I am far better than you.
"I represent a far better society than you represent."
I think it was that side that made him into this hated figure
that the Stasi so constructed.
"I am Austin Harrison.
"I am financially independent.
"I come from a country that has a queen," and so on and so forth.
TRANSLATION:He was someone who wasn't afraid to take a risk,
and wanted to find out what people felt, what was going on inside them.
After all, he wrote all the responses to the letters himself,
and he could only do that credibly if he had actually gone there
and talked to people.
But a very different view was taken in East Berlin.
All Harrison's programmes were closely monitored and recorded by the Stasi.
That's the only reason any recordings have survived,
as the BBC destroyed all tapes of the programme.
The Stasi's other priority was to track down
the East German letter-writers.
Their starting point was to locate all the cover addresses broadcast
by the programme.
WOMAN READS OUT ADDRESSES IN GERMAN
So obviously, the Stasi would hear this, but it was extremely difficult
for them to ring round all the post offices in East Germany and say,
"Have you got any letters going to this address?" and to pick
them up, because, I mean, it was just a very big job to do.
TRANSLATION:Postal surveillance evolved
over the years, of course, until it got to the point
where a whole department within the Stasi was responsible
for monitoring Letters Without Signature.
The man leading the investigations against the BBC was
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kienberg.
His office, Department 20, took note of all the cover addresses broadcast
on the BBC.
They then forwarded these addresses to all the main post offices
in the GDR.
By this stage, every major post office in East Germany
had its own secret Stasi office, where they checked all the letters
mailed to the BBC's cover addresses.
The Stasi put huge resources into trying to shut down the BBC
programme, endless Stasi lists show the enormous number of
cover addresses used, over years, by the BBC.
But despite the Stasi scrutiny, up to 3,000 letters a year regularly
got through to Harrison's radio programme in London.
The BBC were well aware of the Stasi's
efforts to intercept the mail, and they took measures to counter them.
TRANSLATION:I think that's the reason the programme was moved to
the Friday night slot, because the Stasi had to communicate the addresses
to the 14 district post offices, which couldn't receive them
until Monday, if they didn't work on Saturdays.
And then it took a while for the people doing the checks
to internalise the new address, as it were.
TRANSLATION:I was still convinced that this route through the cover
addresses was a safe one.
From today's perspective, you could definitely say
that was naive of me.
TRANSLATION:As I remember it,
of course, I knew right away that others would be listening
to that too.
So the Stasi would be listening in as well,
and consequently, I enlisted everyone I knew and all my relatives,
in order to send the letter to Austin Harrison through another
Western address first, asking them to put it in another envelope
with this cover address.
That way, the letters actually reached Austin Harrison.
But the Stasi developed ever-more refined methods and
machines to intercept suspicious letters without leaving a trace.
TRANSLATION:At some point, they introduced
handwriting comparisons.
They started analysing the ink in different biros.
They took saliva samples from the glue on the envelopes,
which were then compared with blood samples of the people
they were targeting.
They built up a file of handwriting samples in order to be able to make
comparisons against a vast store of samples later on.
They went to incredible lengths to expose the letter-writers.
Susanne Schadlich has looked in detail at Karl-Heinz Borchardt's Stasi files.
A naive schoolboy when he wrote to the BBC, he made some
very basic errors.
He posted the letters from his own town, and describes himself
as a 16-year-old high school student.
This gave the Stasi, who had by now intercepted his letters,
plenty of detail to go on,
because there was only one high school in Greifswald.
This is the first time Karl-Heinz has been back to it in 50 years.
He was in class one day, when the Stasi arrived to carry
out handwriting checks on every student over the age of 16.
TRANSLATION:I remember our form tutor coming in
and telling us that the essay
we had to write would be used for comparisons by the
Ministry of State Security.
They told us that and I still didn't suspect anything.
The Stasi net was closing in. Borchardt's application for identity
cards and other samples, were sent to a special department in Berlin
for closer analysis.
The result was clear.
Karl-Heinz Borchardt was the letter-writer.
On August 31st 1970, Karl-Heinz had just turned 18, when the Stasi
knocked at the door of his family's apartment.
TRANSLATION:There were two cars parked in front of the house, and I realised
that in the one I was supposed to get into, you couldn't open
the door from the inside.
These cars were specially designed for making arrests.
They sent seven officers from the Ministry of State Security,
who arrested me early in the morning.
In the Stasi's view, they had to, quote, "Remove him, as an enemy
"of our state.
"He is a persistent threat and risks the political and ideological
"education of the students."
TRANSLATION: I'm always shocked by the language
because it's dehumanising.
If, by contrast, you then read Borchardt's letters,
which were written by a schoolboy, by a human being, and you compare
them to the Stasi's language, there's a glaring
difference, of course.
It's brutal language they're using here.
I always get the feeling that they're actually
using Gestapo language.
After seven months on remand, the court reached its verdict.
TRANSLATION:When they declared that I would go to prison for two years,
my mother fainted.
And she had to be taken to hospital.
And of course, it was obvious, or it's obvious to me now,
that they wanted to make an example out of me.
Back in London, Austin Harrison and his team were completely unaware
that a 16-year-old writer had been arrested by the Stasi.
But an emboldened Harrison was, by now, taking greater risks
to cultivate his contacts behind the Iron Curtain.
Bill Treharne Jones was the newly appointed BBC radio correspondent
to West Berlin in 1970.
This role afforded him special privileges.
BBC representative for the German service in West Berlin had military
status, which meant I had a military ID card
and I could cross into East Berlin any time I wanted.
I used to drive to Checkpoint Charlie.
The East German border guards recognised my registration.
They were not allowed to open the door.
They were not allowed to ask me to wind the window down.
I just had to hold up my ID card, press it against the glass,
and they had to wave me through.
Harrison decided to utilise Jones's near-diplomatic status
for a special task.
I had a call from Harrison saying, "I want you to go and talk
"to a very important contact of mine.
"He's written some article for a West German newspaper called Die Zeit,
"so I want you to go and see him and get this article,
"but you must do nothing to annoy him.
"This man is a key contact.
"And, you know, if you mess things up or upset him,
"you'll be in deep trouble."
Jones went to meet Harrison's contact in a fish restaurant
in East Berlin.
The contact was Rudolf Harnisch, a journalist and writer.
He only had one leg.
He lost the other leg fighting during the war on the Russian front.
He's quite tall.
He's polite.
But I never got a real sense
of his character in the way I did with
some of the other people I saw. The Harnisch I was dealing
with dealing with, was not the real Harnisch.
It was just a side of him.
Austin Harrison himself met Harnisch many times.
He had big plans for his new contact, grooming him
to be a new star dissident writer of the East. But Harnisch,
too, had an agenda that he was hiding from Harrison.
In fact, Rudolf Harnisch was a secret informer, an agent
of the Stasi. A former wartime tank officer,
he had also worked for the KGB undercover in West Germany.
Now, the Stasi had set him on Austin Harrison.
Harnisch, under his cover name,
Carlous Winter, reported to his case officers
about his meetings with Harrison.
The Stasi monitored Harrison through Harnisch for six years.
The files reveal that the unsuspecting Briton
was very open with his East German contact, and that Harnisch became
a highly valued Stasi agent.
Having Harrison, he had reason, in his own eyes,
to be very proud that he had the biggest enemy
of the German Democratic Republic
telling him all sorts of things he shouldn't.
But why did the Stasi see Harrison and the BBC
as such a threat?
Maybe the answer lies here.
Whitehall, home to the Foreign Office and MI6.
And also the sole funder of the BBC World Service.
We were basically, of course, not paid for by the people who paid
for the BBC.
We were paid by the Foreign Office.
So we already had a different master,
and we were in some ways, civil servants,
which was somehow a strange thing to get used to
because you're working for the BBC, a very independent broadcaster.
Yet at the same time, you have a very, very important boss
sitting somewhere in Whitehall.
Emily Oliver has been researching the relationship between the BBC
and the Foreign Office.
She's found some astonishing documents in the National Archives
about a secret propaganda branch of the service called the IRD.
The Information Research Department.
The IRD was based in the Foreign Office.
Up to 300 people were working there in the '50s..
And so they basically spread anti-communist propaganda
and they would feed this information to journalists, to trade unionists,
to politicians, but also to institutions, including,
very importantly, the BBC External Services and thus,
the German service.
And it lasted until 1977, when it was shut down, and the activities
of the IRD only became known to the public in 1978.
No-one had actually known that this department existed.
The IRD was especially close to the BBC German Service,
led by Richard O'Rorke and Austin Harrison,
both of whom were ex-military.
Documents show the frequent exchanges
between the propaganda specialists of the Foreign Office
and the senior BBC journalists.
Harrison reported nothing back to his BBC programme about his frequent
trips to East Germany over the years, but he delivered detailed
reports on them to the IRD.
Harrison also sent these reports to the West German government.
Documents from a Berlin state archive reveal how much
this confidential help was welcomed.
I have never heard of this, but I am not surprised.
It really fits into what I often ask myself.
There is more to it than what I am presented here.
The feeling that there is more to it than we think there will be.
We, the staff, basically very naive, going about our business
and thinking we are working for the BBC,
whilst we were actually working for the Foreign Office.
I think this is what a lot of my colleagues never really grasped.
But the most controversial reports to the IRD concerned the letters
sent by the naive East German letter-writers to Harrison's programme.
Documents from the National Archives show that the chiefs of the German
service provided IRD with analysis and selected letters
from their East German postbag.
This material was then secretly shared
with the West German government.
Every two weeks, as a matter of course, these reports on listener
research, which contained extracts of letters, are passed
on to the Information Research Department at the Foreign Office.
The letters from East Germany and these listener research reports,
even though they're anecdotal information, they provide
information that the British Foreign Office and the West German
foreign office just wouldn't have had access to otherwise.
We don't know exactly what they did with it.
But it was clearly valuable to them.
Letters Without Signature had become crucial trading goods
in the Cold War propaganda battle.
But for its listeners, this was all unknown.
I think if it had, it would probably have stopped most people
from writing to the BBC,
and it gives credence to the Stasi allegations,
which say, "Well, these people are corresponding with Western
"government agencies and they are providing material
"to anti-communist functionaries.
"And so, they are harming our state."
While Harrison was sharing the contents of the letters with both
the British and West German foreign services, Karl-Heinz Borchardt
was serving his sentence at the bleak Dessau prison
for youth offenders.
For Borchardt,
the young student forced to leave his family and home...
..this was a life-changing and traumatic experience.
TRANSLATION:One key experience was this young lieutenant who talked
to me at the entrance and then he ended the conversation by saying,
"You're lucky to be living in the GDR today.
"Under the Nazis, we'd have sent you up the chimney long ago."
At the Dessau youth prison, communal punishment and constant threats
were everyday occurrences.
The young people were kept under close guard, even when playing
in the courtyard.
HE SPEAKS GERMAN
TRANSLATION:One time, the ball landed on the lawn
directly below the prison wall.
Someone ran after the ball,
and from the guard tower, they immediately opened fire
on this boy.
They fired several shots with a machine gun.
I can only assume that it was a good marksman
and that he missed deliberately.
But after that,
we couldn't play football any more.
There are no official numbers about how many letter-writers
were either arrested or convicted for writing to the BBC.
However, an internal Stasi report from 1973 shows that in that year
alone, up to 15 investigations were launched into so-called
"subversive actions against the state",
or writing letters to the BBC.
Rolf Erler is also making a journey into his past.
Luckily for him, his letters to the BBC were never intercepted.
But as a student, he faced another threat -
conscription into the army.
As a Christian pacifist, this would have been unthinkable,
but refusing would mean risking a prison sentence.
In 1973, he felt his only option was to flee the country, and he met
with a West German people smuggler.
TRANSLATION:A driver told me,
"As soon as we get to the bridge
"across the Elba, I will stop for a moment,
"and then you have to jump into the boot quickly,
"so we don't draw attention to ourselves."
And then we continued the journey with me inside the boot.
Two hours later, they reached Marienborn, a large border crossing
between the two German states.
TRANSLATION:So, I arrived in a garage like this one,
still in the car boot.
And I was pretty clueless, hoping there would only be a short delay.
And then suddenly, the boot was opened
and they shone a torch in my face.
They told me to get out and someone said,
"If you do a runner here, you'll get a bullet through your lung.
Rolf was subjected to hours of interrogation.
They asked him whether he had committed any other subversive acts.
TRANSLATION:Oh, please don't let them ask me about the BBC.
I tried to avoid that topic, of course, because I knew
that if we started talking about Letters Without Signature,
they'd ask me, "Well, did you write in as well?"
Of course, I didn't know at the time what had and hadn't got through.
And if they had intercepted just one letter, I would certainly have faced
a much higher sentence than what they kept threatening me with.
His correspondence with the BBC remained undetected.
But even so, the sentence was severe -
five years in prison for attempted desertion of the republic.
While Rolf Erler was in prison, the overall political situation changed.
From 1972 on, the relationship between the two
German states relaxed, and they signed treaties making
it easier for West Germans to visit their relatives in the East.
TRANSLATION:That was the de facto recognition of the GDR
and that basically cemented the division of Germany,
which was what many letter-writers had argued against.
And Britain sent its first ambassador to the GDR.
So, of course, it wasn't opportune to continue producing a radio
programme which was a permanent thorn in the side of the GDR.
Despite the relaxation of relations between East and West, the Stasi
kept up the pressure on the letter-writers.
By then, there were hardly any letters from listeners
in East Germany getting through.
The head of the BBC German Service informed the Foreign Office
that postal surveillance by the Stasi had simply
become too efficient.
In 1974, after nearly 25 years,
Letters Without Signature was cancelled with no prior warning,
much to the disappointment
of its listeners in East Germany.
The few letters that did get through show that East German
listeners refused to believe that this indeed was the end.
TRANSLATION:"I have lost any desire to listen to the radio.
"Nowadays, you turn on the radio on Fridays, only to turn it straight
"back off again.
"Speaking for countless listeners who miss this programme deeply,
"we implore Mr Harrison to present Letters Without Signature again,
"with all his helpful responses.
"It's the only way we here can vent our feelings
"about our country's injustices."
Loyal listeners and letter-writers Rolf Erler and Karl-Heinz Borchardt
are meeting for the first time,
in the prison which played a crucial role in both their lives.
Political offenders were taken from this prison in East Germany
to West Germany, ransomed by the West German government
for at least £20,000 sterling per head.
For most prisoners, this was the last stop on their long journey
towards a new life of liberty.
TRANSLATION:The best moment was when you got the certificate
that said you were released from citizenship
of the German Democratic Republic.
That's what it said on those A4 release papers.
And we always said, "That's the most beautiful certificate you could ever
"be awarded in the GDR."
But when Karl-Heinz Borchardt was transferred, he had no idea
where he was going.
He had only discovered moments before, that his own state, the GDR,
wanted to deport him to the West.
TRANSLATION:It was clear to me I was being given an option for which
other people would have risked their lives.
I did realise that at the time.
Karl-Heinz refused to go to the West.
He went on hunger strike and sought help elsewhere.
TRANSLATION:"Dear lawyer,
"I've grown up in Greifswald.
"My parents, my gran, my sister and my friends are all there.
"This proposed deportation clearly goes against my own wishes.
"I therefore ask you to do everything in your power
"to prevent it.
"Please inform my parents immediately that this is happening."
While Rolf Erler started a new life in West Germany, studying theology
and becoming a pastor, Karl-Heinz Borchardt returned to his hometown
of Greifswald.
Until the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the authorities continued to keep him in their focus,
and hindered his university career.
In 1989, the East German state collapsed and the Berlin Wall came
down, finally uniting East and West Germany.
This made the BBC's German Service effectively redundant,
and it ceased broadcasting ten years later.
But how should we assess its longest-running programme,
Letters Without Signature?
For much of that time
it functioned as both a lifeline for news-hungry East Germans
and as an instrument of anti-communist propaganda.
A borderline case, in the truest sense of the word.
I think from today's perspective, we would say, "Well, the BBC
"External Services were working hand in glove with a covert
"Foreign Office department.
"This is clearly state propaganda that's being done here."
Paradoxically, it's possible to maintain this reputation
that the BBC has for telling the truth, but still be broadcasting
in the national interest and pursuing an anti-communist agenda
in its other broadcasts.
TRANSLATION:We sometimes discussed that.
What are we actually doing here?
Are we creating a Cold War or are we really Cold Warriors,
as some people called us?
TRANSLATION:I don't think I was a victim of the propaganda war
between the systems.
Or that I was somehow used by the editors of the programme,
Letters Without Signature.
TRANSLATION:I don't know whether we influenced people.
I can't say.
It was certainly our intention.
Or, at least
we had the will and the hope that we were doing some good.
And what became of Austin Harrison?
He retired from the BBC in 1975,
and died only six years later, at the age of 65.
But in death, Harrison remains as much of an enigma
as he was in life.
His BBC file was destroyed.
And he had his own body cremated in his private cemetery,
with no headstone.
All that remains of the number-one enemy of the East German state
are the tapes in the vaults of the former Stasi headquarters in Berlin.