40 Years ago, there was a famous escape from East Berlin. It's hard to imagine today, but at the time a big chunk of Germany, including almost half of its capital Berlin, was effectively occupied by the Soviet Union. The contrived puppet state was called the Deutsche Demokratische Repiblik (DDR). Yes, that's right, it must have been a piss take - the German Democratic Republic. It was so democratic they needed to build a wall around it to keep their citizens in. In fact the whole border between East and West Germany was strictly locked down from the tip of Czechoslovakia all the way to the Baltic Sea. Most of it wasn't a wall, exactly, but it was still fenced off and basically hermetically sealed. Just in case anyone tried, it was patrolled by armed militia who had orders to shoot anyone that tried to cross. Bizarrely, deep inside the DDR, towards the eastern border with Poland, there was an island of true democracy and freedom, a relic from the end of the war in the f...