Skip to main content

Learn something new everyday #1

Today I learned about Wolfgang Engels. He is a former East German soldier. In late April 1963, the man stole a military tank from his base while the crew was at lunch and drove it right through the Berlin wall to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin. The East Berlin populace was so used to seeing tanks out on the streets that they actually stopped traffic to let the guy pass. The tank got stuck halfway through the wall and he got out, under heavy fire and successfully made the escape. He got his freedom, but his mother (a devout communist) disowned him. He became a biology teacher, retired and now works as a Docent at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The badassery of it. The sheer idea that "Tank. Wall. Let's do it" and then actually doing it. Damn. There were other folks who beat the Berlin wall as well. 

 In May 1963, Austrian Heinz Meixner drove a convertible right under the checkpoint gate. He realized the car is just short enough to make it, so he removed the windshield, took the top down, stashed his mother in law in the trunk, and drove with his fiancee straight through and made it!

Norbert Konrad got inspired by the idea and tried it again. Of course the East Berliners weren't going to be fooled twice so they added steel bars under the gate to prevent a second time. 

 There were others too, who used a homemade submarine, a hot air balloon and a micro aircraft. Intense!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Philosophizing The Big Question

Life. What is it? That is a philosophical question. It’s probably the oldest question in history. But does it have an answer? Of course it does. It’s been, what, a thousand years of humankind? Of course someone would’ve answered it by now. And people have, they’ve answered and created careers out of it. Entire lives based on that question. There was Diogenes, a beggar kind of guy who eventually became one of the founding members of a branch in Greek philosophy. This dude existed around the time of Alexander the Great and Plato and Socrates. There’s a story about him; One day Diogenes is out in the beach just chilling when Alexander the Great approaches him and asks “I have a huge empire, it is the greatest, tell me what you want and I will bring it to you!” Diogenes replies with annoyance on his face “Get out of my sunlight.” Alexander, being a proud dude, says “if I wasn’t Alexander, I’d be Diogenes.” To this, Diogenes replies “if I wasn’t Diogenes, I’d be Diogenes”. Diog...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Americuh Reopens

According to our beloved leader of the free world, "America wants to be open, and Americans want to be open”. As of writing this post, The United States of America is now in Phase 1 of reopening from the quarantine lock down. The U.S. does not have enough equipment, funding or the required people to conduct mass testing yet the populace has found itself starting to reopen. As the White House website www.whitehouse.gov says, they came upon the three-phased approach after listening to public health experts. Even though the guidelines make sense if one thinks about it, let's talk about what is happening and what should be happening. The guidelines proposed by the Trump Administration say for an individual: - When in public, social distancing should be a thing at its maximum. Settings where there's more than 10 folks and precautionary measures are not in place, avoid them. - Don't travel anywhere unless you absolutely need to. - Whenever possible, keep working f...
Post a Comment
Read more