Berlin - The waning days of Eastern European Communism were coloured by the hordes of people escaping to the West, first via the opened Austro-Hungarian border, later wholesale as all the borders dropped.

But those escapes were presaged by many dramatic escapes over the forty-year history of the Iron Wall ... many of those at the Berlin Wall, which separated West Berlin from the Communist East Germany.

When it went up in August 1961, many East Germans could not comprehend its meaning. Numerous escape attempts were made, with people trying to climb under or over the initial primitive concrete and barbed-wire barrier.

Some failed to make it, getting shot and killed by Communist border guards.

Harry Deterling, an East German engine driver hijacked an eight- coach train to take 24 friends and relatives through the Wall in December 1961. Seven other passengers on the train were miffed and demanded to be returned to the East.

Many escapes in the early history of the Wall were made underground via tunnels dug beneath the hated barrier.

Wolfgang Fuchs was the Scarlet Pimpernel of Berlin. He was 24 when he escaped under the wire with his wife and two children in the early days of the barrier.

But freedom for himself was not enough. He recruited courageous helpers, some of them students from Berlin's Free University under the leadership of Germany's first astronaut Reinhard Furrer - later to die in a tragic air crash - and dug two tunnels beneath the Wall.

One took seven months to build and stretched 140 yards from the cellar of a bakery in the West's Bernauerstrasse to a lavatory in a house near the Eastern side of the Wall.

Fuchs, later to become a chemist in West Berlin's Neukoelln district, watched through field glasses from the top of a house overlooking the Wall on the Western side as those about to escape approached its Communist end.

The secret escape hole was dubbed "Tunnel 57" because 57 people crawled through it to the West before a shooting incident on October 4, 1964 led to its discovery and destruction by border guards.

Dozens more refugees were to escape, however, through a second nearby tunnel, also masterminded by Fuchs and his willing band of helpers.

However, escaping "underground" soon became impossible. Houses on the Eastern side near the Wall were cleared or destroyed as the border area was extended and patrols stepped up. The Communists even blew up a city church deemed too close to the border.

Initially a primitive construction made of barbed wire, bricks and fencing, the Wall was "modernized" within a few years, running 160 kilometres through the heart of the divided city and around the West Berlin perimeter, complete with watchtowers.

At its most sophisticated, it comprised nine distinct lines of obstacles with two 1.5-meter fences needing only the slightest touch to trigger alarms, along with 45-meter-long runs patrolled by dogs.

Trip wires were fixed to flare launchers. Brilliant quartz lights illuminated the sandy ploughed area known as The Death Strip, with its steel spikes.

The Wall itself was perfected and stood 4.5 meters high. It was smooth and topped by a slippery white pipe which made getting a grip impossible.

Not that this stopped disaffected East Germans continuing to make escape attempts. Heike Dietrich, then 25, made his getaway to the West pinned between two surfboards clamped on a roof rack of a friend's car.

April 1983 saw two young man on a flying high wire swoop to freedom by firing a cable attached to a steel-tipped arrow from the roof of a five-storey building in East Berlin down to a lower rooftop in West Berlin's Neukoelln district.

Two other families sailed to freedom in a home-made hot air balloon after piecing together bits of nylon and bed sheets to make a frighteningly fragile escape craft. Separately, a 17-year-old girl made it to the West concealed in a cable drum.

An East-West escape of a different kind was made in October 1976, by Martin Kasten, a young doctor working at a State hospital in Boltenhagen, an East German coastal town. As searchlights swept across the beach every few minutes, he set off on the most perilous swim of his life.

His body smeared with pounds of fat and wearing a frogman's suit, flippers and snorkel, he entered the water at midnight. Eighteen hours later he was fished out of the sea, exhausted, by a Swedish ferry board bound for the West German port of Travemuende.

Cmmunist patrol boats had criss-crossed the Baltic on the look-out for would-be escapers like the strapping doctor. But had failed to spot him.

"I was well off there, my then 68-year-old father had a private practice and I could have taken it over. I also had two sisters living there," said Kasten later, explaining his decision to risk his life.

"But that wasn't the point. I wanted to be a surgeon but I knew I would have to join the (Communist) Party to get on, and I didn't want to do that.

"I just couldn't accept the conditions in the GDR. I weighed all this up, then I told myself: 'You're young and unmarried. You don't want to start off a family here.'" (dpa)