> “Are we here in the West??” Only this one question is asked by Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel when they were in the early morning of the 16th.

The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.

(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c

The text in the link is nice to read. I did a Google Translate on it which you can read here: https://pastebin.com/SdkKQkC6

>Ballonfahrt in die Freiheit

Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.

This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.

I keep on thinking it was a lot smaller! Wow!

The 2018 film is a really good movie, I would highly recommend checking it out!

I watched Night Crossing in my german class in high school. I remember it being intense.

You beat me to it :D love the podcast. Too bad they stopped uploading from a while ago. You got any suggestions of podcasts in similar space? Nothing ever could scratch the itch like Damn Interesting

I felt so tense and anxious listening to that.

Interesting story. The lack of dramatization might have something to do with making Nazis sympathetic characters. Hogans Heroes aside.

Yeah I'd be curious into how they acquired so much money

That movie was also all over the Disney Channel when I was a kid. Many other movies have related messages.

And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.

So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.

To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.

> Propane gas tanks became registered products

I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.

Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...

This was in the late 80s.

The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.

The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient.

>People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was

Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was

Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points.

It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.

Dustpile of history, sure, but gallows first. Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable.

Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".

The Wikipedia page references Günter Wetzel's website. Reading https://www.ballonflucht.de/en/missverstaendnis.html , he's written down more information - apparently they came to a disagreement about the story, and on that page there's more detail, from his point of view: for the first attempt they did everything in Wetzel's house (whose oldest kid was 4), because of concerns the Strelzyks' children (who were 10 and 14) could blurt something out. After some disagreements (Strelzyks told some relatives about the balloon, Wetzel thinks the balloon was too small) Wetzel gave Strelzyks all they've built (he was also worried about getting caught with the stuff, especially since now the relatives have heard about it) and decided to follow the concept of a ultralight airplane.

That's the reason the first attempt was just the Strelzyks...

I think it's such a crazy idea, even if a 5 year old tell a teacher about it or something, who's going to take the story seriously?

If that's the case the theocratic monarchy in UAE takes the cake, I think, although maybe there are similar amounts elsewhere.

Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.

  Top Countries by Percentage of Immigrants (approximate recent figures):
  Qatar: Around 77% (or 76.7%).
  United Arab Emirates (UAE): Around 74-88% (some sources   show higher figures for earlier years).
  Kuwait: Around 69-73%.
  Bahrain: Around 55%.

One guy did use a plane to land in Red Square. Remember him?

Not as of my knowledge. Coincidence I suppose, or desire by them to keep it private.

Remember the GDR called the Berlin Wall the "Antifascist Protection Barrier"

A communist country has never existed and never will so we will never know.

Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.

They could each have their own balloon. Your mom would be trapped in East Germany, however.

Although you're probably less inclined to try to escape your country in a hot air balloon if food is so easily and cheaply available that it's made you overweight.

> That feat would be impossible for the average US family

Funny, except the US, despite being a supposed fascist dystopia, currently has the opposite problem: people trying to enter and stay illegally, hence the wall-building (to keep people out, rather than in) and ramping up of immigration enforcement. How bad must the GDR and its ilk have been (and in some cases, still are) that it's the other way around?