GDR Escape via Mongolia and China 1987

The Long Way West: Two East Germans Who Tried to Escape the GDR Through Mongolia and China

In 1987, an East German couple named Jens and Marion fled the GDR not by crossing the Berlin Wall, but by traveling 9,000 kilometers in the opposite direction, through the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and China, to reach the West German embassy in Beijing.

I’ve spent decades cataloguing the paperwork of escape, says Peter Wensierski: forged transit stamps, blood-donor booklets repurposed as identity documents, the bureaucratic residue of people trying to out-administrate a state built to stop them. But the story I’m telling you today doesn’t involve a single forged passport changing hands at a checkpoint. It involves two students, a typewriter with Cyrillic letters, and roughly 9,000 kilometers of the wrong direction.

Everyone who tried to leave East Germany was taught the same geography lesson: West Berlin was 1,400 meters from Jens and Marion’s apartment on Rykestrasse in Prenzlauer Berg. Ten minutes on foot. Instead, in August 1987, the two of them were somewhere in Mongolia, roughly 7,500 kilometers from that street, with Beijing still 1,500 kilometers further on and no visa to get there.

As Jens put it years later, looking back on the logic of it all: everyone assumes you have to go from east to west. But geography doesn’t actually require that. You can go the other way entirely and still arrive.

A Relationship Born in a Darkroom, Cut Short by the State

Jens and Marion met as art and biology students in East Berlin in the mid-1980s, and their plan to escape began only after Jens was expelled from Humboldt University for political reasons.

They met at the Weissensee School of Art, in a darkroom, where Marion was studying stage design and Jens was developing photographs from a trip to the Caucasus. She moved into his one-room apartment near the old Prenzlauer Berg water tower that winter. The building was full of artists, punks, and the kind of people the East German state filed under “unreliable.”

Jens was a field biologist by training and by temperament, a mountain climber who spent his free time in bird sanctuaries. When the zoologist Günter Tembrock accepted him into his class at Humboldt University, it looked like the beginning of an actual career. Tembrock was an East German zoologist who pioneered the field of bioacoustics, known for his recordings of vocal communication in foxes and birds, and was also a science popularizer who presented a television series. For a young biologist in East Berlin, studying under him was close to the top of the profession. Wikipedia

It didn’t last. In 1986, Jens was expelled, officially for insufficient diligence in his Russian classes, in reality because of his environmental activism, his church contacts, and a Stasi file that described him as a “hostile and negative individual.” His academic future was over. What he decided next is the part of this story that I find genuinely remarkable, because most people in his position pointed themselves at the Wall. He pointed himself at Siberia.

How a Blood-Donor Booklet Became a Backup Passport

Jens built his escape on the GDR’s own travel bureaucracy, using a forged mountaineering invitation, a legitimate Mongolian visa, and a faked secondary identity document made from his blood-donor booklet.

This is the part that belongs in any account of GDR document history, because Jens didn’t forge his way out so much as game the system from the inside.

GDR citizens could not freely travel even within the Eastern Bloc. A trip to the Soviet Union typically required a delegation, a tour group, and a fee that could exceed 6,000 marks, more than many East Germans earned in a year. Travelers were issued a Marschroute, a fixed itinerary that police and border guards checked at every stop. Jens had already learned to ignore his on a few previous trips, what East German outdoor enthusiasts called moving “undetected through friendly territory,” getting off trains mid-transit and reporting back to the authorities weeks late with implausible excuses.

For the real attempt, he and Marion needed paper that looked official. They joined the Socialist Mountaineering Club for cover, then Jens bought a typewriter with Cyrillic characters at a flea market and used it to fabricate an invitation from a Soviet climbing association in Tajikistan, supposedly asking the couple to join an ascent of what was then called Communism Peak. The mountain, today known as Ismoil Somoni Peak, was renamed Stalin Peak in 1933 after Joseph Stalin and then Communism Peak in 1962 as part of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization process, and at 7,495 meters above sea level it was the highest point in Tajikistan and in the entire former Soviet Union, a peak impressive enough that East German police didn’t question why two students would be invited to it. Wikipedia

The local police office, working from limited Russian, decided the letter was genuine but not their department, and redirected the couple to a special passport office that issued documents for Olympic teams. Two weeks later, Jens and Marion had legitimate East German travel papers and Mongolian visas, generated entirely from a fake invitation typed on a stolen-character typewriter.

The contingency document is the detail collectors will appreciate most. Jens never carried his real passport into a confrontation with a border official, on the theory that handing over your only valid identification gives an official total control over your fate. Instead, he built a decoy from his GDR social security booklet, a small green document the size of a passport, glued in a photo, and improvised an official-looking seal by inking the edge of a five-mark coin (hammer, compass, and wheat wreath) and pressing it against the photo’s corner. It is, as far as I know, one of the more inventive pieces of document fraud to come out of the Republikflucht era: an entirely domestic GDR document, repurposed as a fake passport, to protect a real one.

A Test Run Through the Gobi

Before attempting the full escape, Jens and Marion made a trial trip to Mongolia in the summer of 1986 to establish whether the route was feasible.

The first journey, in 1986, wasn’t meant to be the escape. It was reconnaissance. A Soviet military pilot named Misha, whom Jens had met by chance on the Trans-Siberian Railway the year before, had told him exactly how to find him again: walk past the barriers at Ulan Bator’s airport, cross the airfield, ask for Misha, he flies supply runs to geologists on Tuesdays and Fridays. They did exactly that, flew with him through a storm in a plane with a windshield crack widening into a hole, and spent weeks in the Gobi Desert and at Lake Hovsgol, Mongolia’s second-largest lake, living in a way that, as Jens later described it, felt more honest than anything available back home on International Workers’ Day.

Marion went home in time for the new semester. Jens followed later. Neither of them was ready, yet, to make it permanent.

The Real Attempt: Trans-Siberian, Then a Border Closed to East Germans

In June 1987, Jens and Marion left Berlin by train through Poland and the Soviet Union, reaching Mongolia again, where the real obstacle was that China was a country GDR citizens were categorically forbidden to visit.

A year later, in June 1987, they boarded a train at Berlin’s Ostbahnhof and traveled through Poland to Moscow, then onto the Trans-Siberian Railway through Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Novosibirsk, drinking black tea from a samovar in third class while their dokumenty were checked at every stop.

Mongolia, again, was the easy part. China was not. The GDR did not issue visas for China to its citizens, full stop, and neither did the Soviet consulates in Warsaw or Moscow. Jens’s calculation was that nobody working a consular desk in Ulan Bator would have any way, or any inclination, to telephone East Berlin to verify anything. He bribed the Chinese consular official with a few dollars, and the visas came through.

This is the moment in the story where the Cold War passport system shows its actual mechanics most clearly: a bilateral travel restriction enforced almost entirely through bureaucratic friction and the assumption that nobody would bother checking. Remove the friction, as Jens did with a small bribe in a remote outpost, and an entire exit-visa regime built on consular jurisdiction simply stops functioning.

If you’re curious how the GDR’s wider system of travel treaties and visa exemptions worked elsewhere, I’ve written separately about the East German passport bureaucracy under Stasi oversight, which covers how the same state that made this escape necessary also, paradoxically, ran a surprisingly permissive visa regime with several non-aligned countries.

Betrayed by Monks, Then Across the Border

Shortly before crossing into China, Jens and Marion were nearly caught when Buddhist monks reported their presence to Mongolian intelligence agents.

Waiting for the twice-weekly train to Beijing, they visited a Buddhist monastery, where the monks were unusually, suspiciously insistent that the couple stay inside. Uniformed agents showed up minutes later; the monks had turned them in. Marion produced her student ID, Jens his Free German Youth membership card, and in the moment their guards looked away, they simply left. Two more nights sleeping in the forest, and they finally boarded the train across the Chinese border on the visas the bribed official had issued.

A Yellow River Crossing for Twelve East German Marks

With almost no money left, Jens and Marion paid twelve East German marks for fifth-class river passage toward Beijing, sleeping below deck with other passengers in a windowless cabin.

By the time they reached the Yellow River, they had next to nothing. Twelve East German marks bought two fifth-class tickets on a riverboat toward the coast. At night they slept on thin rice mats below deck in a windowless cabin with a dozen other passengers; by day they moved up to the section reserved for foreign travelers, where a Swiss traveler gave them cash and a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to China. After the openness of the Mongolian steppe, both of them experienced China under late-1980s communist rule as something harder and more closed than anything they’d encountered on the trip so far, and it was here, more than anywhere else on the journey, that Marion began to think seriously about home.

Two Embassies, One Decision

Standing across the street from the West German embassy in Beijing, Marion chose to return to East Germany while Jens continued on to claim asylum.

After more than 9,000 kilometers, they finally stood across the street from the West German embassy in Beijing. Surveillance cameras, uniformed police, and plainclothes security made the building feel, in Jens’s words, unreachable. They didn’t cross the street immediately. Instead, they wandered into a park, watched elderly men practicing tai chi in slow motion, and had the conversation they’d apparently been avoiding since Ulan Bator.

Marion chose to go home, to Rykestrasse, to her degree, to a sister and a father (a senior figure at the DEFA film studio in Babelsberg) whose careers might have suffered if her defection became known. She traveled back through Mongolia and Moscow into Poland and, before crossing into the GDR, reported her passport stolen at a Polish police station. She had actually burned it: the Chinese entry stamp inside, proof she’d been somewhere East Germans were forbidden to go, would have ended her story very differently at the border. The Polish officials grumbled but issued replacement papers, and she went home with a clean record and an unrecorded passport history that, as a piece of document evidence, simply no longer exists.

Jens crossed the street alone, applied for asylum at the West German embassy, and eventually received a new passport that took him home to West Germany via Hong Kong, Dubai, and London. He landed in Cologne and flew on to West Berlin in December 1987.

For collectors, Marion’s burned passport is the more interesting artifact, precisely because of its absence: a document destroyed specifically to erase the evidence of a forbidden border crossing, replaced by GDR-issued substitute papers that record nothing of what actually happened. If you’re interested in how the GDR’s records and passport issuance evolved as the regime entered its final years, I’ve also written about the last passport issued before German reunification, a fitting bookend to a system that, within two years of this escape, would simply cease to exist.

Twenty Years Later

Jens and Marion reconnected decades after their escape, both having built quiet lives centered on the natural world they’d risked everything to reach.

They saw each other a handful of times after 1987, including once in Prague before the Wall fell in 1989, and then went their separate ways. Both eventually settled into rural life surrounded by the kind of landscape that started this whole story: Jens in the Spreewald, writing ecological assessments and identifying birdcalls from his garden; Marion in the Fläming region, raising sheep and running a felt workshop.

When I read accounts like this one, what strikes me isn’t the daring, exactly. It’s the inversion. Nearly everyone who left East Germany treated the Wall as the only real obstacle, a hundred and fifty kilometers of concrete and wire that had to be beaten directly. Jens and Marion treated the entire map as negotiable. The actual barrier wasn’t geographic at all. It was a stack of bilateral visa restrictions, consular jurisdictions, and travel documents, the same kind of paper I’ve spent years collecting, and that paper, it turns out, had gaps a determined person could walk straight through, provided they were willing to walk nine thousand kilometers to find them.

Further reading: DDR Reisepass Geschichte – Buch mit seltenen Originalen

 

Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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