"Suspenseful...moving...equal to any fictional thriller." —San Francisco Chronicle
In August 1978, the Iron Curtain still hung heavily across Europe. To escape from oppressive East Berlin, an East German couple, Hans Detlef Alexander Tiede and Ingrid Ruske, hijacked a Polish airliner and diverted it to the American sector of West Berlin. Along with the couple, several passengers spontaneously defected to the West, and were welcomed by US officials. But within hours, Communist officials reminded the West of the anti-hijacking agreements in the Warsaw Pact, and thus the fugitives were arrested by the US State Department.
Thirty-four years after World War II, the United States built a court in the middle of West Berlin, the former capital of the Third Reich, in the building that once housed the Luftwaffe, to try the hijacking couple. Former NJ district attorney, now a judge, Herbert J. Stern was appointed the "United Stat
