East Germany's trade in human beings

People who tried to escape from East Germany during the Cold War could be shot, jailed and tortured. But the government was so short of money that some ended up being secretly sold - to West Germany, the country most of them had been trying to reach in the first place.

"I found myself at a police station on my own. The counter seemed so high because I was only a little girl and I remember the policeman asking: 'Why are you not crying?' I think about his words now and ask myself: 'Yeah, why wasn't I crying?' I suppose I was in shock."

Daniela Walther recalls the night she was caught trying to flee East Berlin. It was 13 August 1961. She was five years old.

Two days earlier her father, Karl-Heinz Prietz who was a reporter at a teaching magazine, had come home with a tip-off that the authorities in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were going to close the border between communist East Berlin and capitalist West Berlin.

"He knew they were going to build a wall," says Walther, referring to the Berlin Wall, which fell 25 years ago, on 9 November 1989.

Knowing it would be all but impossible to move to West Berlin after the barrier was erected, Walther's father convinced her mother to flee right away.

"She was reluctant to give up her teaching job - teaching was her raison d'etre - but she agreed," says Walther.