In the summer of 1984, two young people from Leipzig, who had just finished school, tried to escape from the GDR through the NRB. Their plan failed, they were detained at the Bulgarian-Turkish border and a little later they were sent back on a special Stasi plane. The East German secret service also had an airline - one of the most secret in the world, as one of the failed fugitives, Harald Stute, wrote for the RND media network.
For both of them, the flight by plane seemed incredible at the time - not everyone was familiar with the feeling of rising in the air. But it is definitely a bitter irony - because the flight was carried out in handcuffs and under the eye of an armed guard.
Last day in Sofia
On the morning of September 6, 1984, Stute took one last look from prison towards Sofia - after a month earlier he and his classmate had been detained by the Bulgarian border guards on the border with Turkey - while they were looking for a hole in the Iron Curtain. They tried to escape through Ahtopol - they thought the border was there. They realized too late that it was miles further, as even the maps in the Eastern Bloc had been manipulated - the borders had been shifted to mislead people who wanted to escape. The East Germans sought assistance from the Ahtopol fishermen - they refused them, but informed the militia, which brought the trip to an abrupt end. The two ended up behind bars, and for a long time no one informed them what awaited them from there.
Stute told RND that the system in the GDR suffocated him - with its unified thoughts, lifestyle and attitudes. He wanted to escape so that he could build his own life in the West.
After a month in the Bulgarian prisons, the obscurity was put to an end - the two were visited by an employee of the GDR embassy in Sofia, probably a Stasi officer, who informed them that they would be sent back, and by plane. They were taken in handcuffs to a bus in which eight other fellows of their fate were already sitting. From the bus they were taken to the plane - again with handcuffs and armed guards, warning them most seriously that their guards would not hesitate to use their weapons.
The plane was marked with the logo of the East German airline "Interflug", which was a fake, as Stute found out years later. Because in reality the disguised Tu-134 machine belonged to State Security, explained Stute to RND.
The East German services actually had not only their own football team and their own corporate empire, but also their own airline. Initially, the fleet had one An-24 aircraft to transport captured East Germans from the fraternal socialist countries to prisons in the GDR. It was subsequently sold and two new Tu-134s were purchased. Their service was taken over by "Interflug" and the staff was mostly from the STASI. One of the machines was at the disposal of the high-ranking functionaries of the Stasi, and the other brought back to the GDR the captured East Germans who tried to escape.
2016 - the end of the secret plane
After returning to the GDR, Stute spent half a year in the investigative custody of the Stasi in Leipzig, after which he was sentenced to two years and two months in prison. After 13 months, however, he was bought by the federal government, which was then a common procedure - political prisoners were a kind of commodity for the GDR. And after they had served half of their sentences, they were "sold" in the West - against goods that the regime needed: coffee, chocolate, bananas, raw materials.
Much later, Stute set out to search for the plane that belonged to the secret East German Stasi airline, and found a similar machine in the Aviation Museum in Cottbus. She wasn't "his", but she looked a lot like her. Otherwise "his" plane after the liquidation of the airline "Interflug" at the end of 1991 it was sold to the Russian airline Komiinteravia, which in 2006 was absorbed by the Russian airline Utair. In the end, the plane was scrapped in Gorky in 2016.