• But Erich Honecker never got to use it when he fell from power in 1989

By Allan Hall

PUBLISHED: 12:47 GMT, 26 March 2012 | UPDATED: 17:50 GMT, 26 March 2012

He ruled over a socialist paradise and promised his people trapped behind the Berlin Wall he would always be there for them.

But that never stopped East German leader Erich Honecker from building an emergency exit - just in case things did not go as planned.

Now the escape tunnel he constructed in the middle of Berlin has been discovered and opened to the public.

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His fall, when it came in 1989, was so swift that he never got the chance to flee through the 150ft long bolt-hole constructed beneath the Schlossplatz in the east of the city.

It led from his office in the former Palace of the Republic - known to all as 'Erich's Lampshop' due to the number of lights inside - to an exit in the former royal stables of the German emperors at the edge of the Spree river.

 

The plan was for him and his politburo friends to high-tail it on a boat to sail away should the cold war turn hot and the city fall to the capitalists.

Christof Fröschl, in charge of the stables, is now the guide for the tunnel constructed out of reinforced concrete.

He said: 'It was an escape tunnel specifically for Honecker and his highest aides in the event of a calamity overcoming the German Democratic Republic.'

The tunnel was made from the same reinforced concrete used for the numerous nuclear bunkers Honecker had built across his land.

It exited in the only building left of the Kaiser's former city palace.

The communists blew up the heavily war-damaged building in 1950 because they deemed it a symbol of 'decadent imperialism'.

It was built in the 1970's - a time when the Soviets still controlled East Germany.

It was when people were being shot every week at the Berlin Wall and the 'velvet revolution' of 1989 that would eventually cause the demise of both Honecker and his totalitarian nation seemed unthinkable.

Squads of Stasi secret police labourers built the tunnel under the strictest secrecy. It would have been unthinkable to let the people, or the west, know that such paranoia existed in the politburo.

Berlin authorities intend to rebuild the so-called Stadtschloss in the near future - funds permitting.

They will then use the former escape tunnel as an underground access path for workers to get to the nearby state library.

Honecker ruled from 1971 until 1989. He died, aged 81, in the Chilean capital of Santiago in 1994.