In 1986, Volkswagen Canada sent me as their representative to Wolfsburg in West Germany to work on telecommunications standards for the various international Volkswagen companies. (Don’t get too impressed. I was seriously under-qualified for this. I just knew more about it than the rest of the folks at Volkswagen Canada.)

Since there were a bunch of us visiting we decided to spend the weekend in West Berlin.

Back then, for those who either don’t remember or weren’t around, Germany had been divided into East and West. For complicated reasons West Berlin, which was about a 100 km in the middle of East Germany, was considered to be part of West Germany.

Some of us had questions. Like “Won’t we be surrounded by a bunch of machine-gun-toting jackbooted commies?” The answer was “yes” but we went anyway.

We drove to the border to the highway corridor thru East Germany to West Berlin. The border crossing looked like a high security prison. Windowless buildings, towers with guards holding machine guns, razor wire everywhere.

We were told to stop our car in an open area. A heavily armed guard asked us some questions. He took our passports, told us to drive to one of the buildings and walked away.

He walked away!

With our passports!!

One of us said something like “Pardon me but I couldn’t help but notice that you still have our passports. Won’t we need those?”

The guard said something incomprehensible and waved at the building that he’d already indicated. I suppose that we could’ve wrestled him to the ground and taken our passports back but we didn’t.

In the next building, we answered more questions and got our passports back. This is when we started breathing again.

At this point, I may have sworn that I’d never visit a communist country again. But I went to China anyway.