After East and West Germany signed a Transit agreement in 1971, people trying to escape across the Berlin Wall were less likely to use subterranean tunnels than to conceal themselves in food trucks or rental vans as they passed through checkpoints. Some were helped by friends or family but more turned to professionals, who charged as much as 45,000 marks for their expertise in smuggling people over the border. The East German authorities searched vehicles for stowaways and handed out stiff prison sentences to Fluchthelfer, who were vilified as criminal traffickers.
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German lignite coal makes an appearance in the Annals of Tacitus, who described ‘fires breaking from the ground’ in 58 AD. Rain did not quench the flames, and desperate locals thrashed them with clubs as the blaze raced towards Colonia Agrippina, now Cologne. Cheap and peaty, lignite is the world’s most polluting fossil fuel; no country has burned more of it since the industrial age began than Germany. Extraction requires open-cast mining, which has displaced tens of thousands of people, razed hundreds of settlements, and disfigured an area larger than Surrey. Lützerath, a village an hour west of Cologne, will be lignite’s last victim in the Rhineland, soon to be swallowed whole by the vast Garzweiler pit.