Dummies man Ex German watch-towers

Press, 19 February 1986, Page 11

Dummies man Ex German watch-towers

NZPA-Reuter Bonn East Germany was using dummy soldiers made of cardboard to man watch-towers along its heavily fortified frontier with West Germany, the Interior Ministry in Bonn said yesterday. In its annual report on the Federal Border Police the Ministry said its patrols had registered increasing deployment of the dummies during 1985 as real soldiers were relocated to the rear zone of the border strip. “In the forward frontier area the watch-towers were increasingly left unmanned. Cardboard figures were installed in them to fool people trying to escape (to the West),” it said.

Another reason for the cardboard cut-outs could be a growing manpower shortage in the East German border troops, which had begun to recruit women for active service for the first time, the report said.

More than 700 watchtowers dot the border, running 1700 km from the Baltic Sea to the Czechoslovak frontier.

East Berlin has been redeveloping and modernising frontier fortifications over the last two years. The report said that as an apparent result

the number of successful escapes had plummeted from 54 in 1984 to only 30 last year. Eight of those who fled were East German soldiers.

Although East Germany had cleared away the last mine-fields in the border zone last year, the construction of new fences, dog-runs, and more sensitive alarm devices had made the frontier more difficult to penetrate than before.

Border troops were now largely deployed on the eastern side of the zone in more mobile units in a strategy aimed at capturing would-be escapers before they reached the final hurdles to the West.

Patrols by West German border police had gathered evidence of at least 26 escape attempts by East Germans foiled in the frontier strip in 1985. They also had registered 14 incursions by East German soldiers on to West German territory but failed to apprehend any of those responsible. Although observing the East-West frontier remained the prime task of the border force, it was increasingly engaged in dealing with an influx of Third World refugees through normal frontier crossings.