“I was a bean in a saucepan,” says Andreas Springer, smiling. Now 78, he has only recently begun speaking openly about a night more than half a century ago. In October 1964, Springer, then just 21, was one of the last people to escape East Germany via Tunnel 57, the deepest and longest subterranean passage beneath the Berlin Wall. His story is a real-world Cold War thriller, complete with code words: In the secret network of people helping escapees flee to West Berlin via the tunnel, men were “beans,” and…
