MG Midget two seater plus extra legroom for freedom

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Have a good look at the two ladies here, stuffed in the back of an Austin-Healey Sprite. There’s something unusual about it and the ‘B’ registration plate is the clue to it. This picture was taken in Berlin in 1963 to demonstrate how Heinz Meixner smuggled his fiancée Margit Thurau and her mother through the Berlin Wall earlier. Austrian Meixner was denied permission to marry East-German Thurau and thus decided smuggling her and his mother-in-law was the only way. He drove his Sprite without the windscreen and with low-pressure tires so that it would be low enough to run under the Checkpoint Friedrich post in Berlin, and did just that in what can only be described as a heroic attempt to fight freedom. Successfully.

Today, 55 years ago exactly, work started on the Berlin wall and we all know how it ended.

(Words Jeroen Booij, picture courtesy The New Daily Austria)

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