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Originally Posted by
5khours
Quite true because East Berlin being 500 miles away had no border with the Soviet Union. Mistaken geography aside, I crossed the Berlin Wall through Checkpoint Charlie several times in '77, and at the time, the East Germans were actually pretty relaxed compared to the security guards when Narita first opened. The West Germans on the other hand were freaking out about the Badaer Meinhof gang at that time, and I actually spent several hours being hauled in and interrogated at local police stations on a couple of occasions.
My reference to "
crossing the border from the Soviet Union to East Berlin" is in reference to Soviet-era trains traveling from Moscow to East Berlin, where Western passengers could get off and catch onward transportation to the West, presumably from West Berlin. I should have been clearer, but I was referring to what a passenger who took the trip once told me about the tensions he experienced at the arrival station, which likely was very different from your experience at Checkpoint Charlie as someone already in Berlin. Anyway, his experience with border tensions was similar to my own traveling from Moscow to Vienna in 1976. After passing through Poland and Czechoslovakia we arrived at the Austrian border where Austrian soldiers with machine guns and military dogs boarded each end of our train car (the only car on the train that held passengers of all nationalities traveling from the Soviet Union). Once we arrived at Vienna Station, the soldiers and dogs descended the train steps and just stood there waiting on the platform, but were close enough to the car exit that I thought they might be there to block it, leaving me to wonder if I could get off or not. I was very hesitant as no instructions were given and I didn't want to get shot for getting off the train if I wasn't supposed to. It was very eerie and tense, but eventually, I saw others start to make their way off the train and to the station, so I followed. Anyway, my point was that this was far tenser than anything I ever experienced from Narita Airport security, though the machine gun nest there was certainly a Cold War reminder.
In that light, your mention of the Baader-Meinhof Gang (RAF) is apropos. The 70s was the era of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist terror (which was responsible, along with hijackers, for the advent of airport metal detectors and increased security) and Narita Airport security was meant to deter more than angry farmers but also sympathetic "extremists and terrorists" such as the RAF, PFLP (Carlos the Jackal), and the Japanese Red Army, which had carried out the LOD AIrport massacre in Tel Aviv in 1973 where 26 people were killed, were very real threats at the time. So Narita security did have a serious mission.
Last edited by Nagasaki Joe; Mar 6, 2022 at 8:19 pm