Best movies like Escape from East Berlin

It's happening as you read this!

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Escape from East Berlin Starring Don Murray, Christine Kaufmann, Werner Klemperer, Ingrid van Bergen, and more. If you liked Escape from East Berlin then you may also like: One, Two, Three, West, Night Crossing, Night People, Rabbit à la Berlin and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.

East Berlin, shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Kurt Schröder and his family dig a tunnel to escape to West Berlin as they struggle to overcome the obstacles blocking their underground path to freedom.

selected filters: Sort: Default

You may filter the list of movies on this page for a more refined, personalized selection of movies.

Still not sure what to watch click the recommend buttun below to get a movie recommendation selected from all the movies on this list

Know any good movies to watch like Escape from East Berlin 1962. With a similar plot or stoyline. Suggest it.

One, Two, Three

C.R. MacNamara will do anything to get a promotion within the Coca-Cola company, including looking after boss W.P. Hazeltine's rebellious teenage daughter, Scarlett. When Scarlett visits Berlin, where C.R. is stationed, she reveals that she is married to a communist named Otto Piffl -- and C.R. recognizes that Otto's anti-establishment stance will clash with his boss's own political views, possibly jeopardizing his promotion.

West

East Germany. Summer, late 70's. Three years after her boyfriend Wassilij's apparent death, Nelly Senff decides to escape from behind the Berlin wall with her son Alexej, leaving her traumatic memories and past behind. Pretending to marry a West German, she crosses the border to start a new life in the West. But soon her past starts to haunt her as the Allied Secret Service begin to question Wassilij's mysterious disappearance. Is he still alive? Was he a spy? Plagued by her past and fraught with paranoia, Nelly is forced to choose between discovering the truth about her former lover and her hopes for a better tomorrow.

Night Crossing

Two men want to escape from East Germany (under Communist rule) but they will only go if they can take their families with them. Based on a true story.

Night People

A US intelligence officer, stationed in Germany, is caught in a political dilemma when the Russians kidnap a young Army private, the son of prominent American businessman. In exchange for the soldier's return, the Russians attempt to barter a trade for an elderly German couple who they want for treason.

Rabbit à la Berlin

The untold story about wild rabbits which lived between the Berlin Walls. For 28 years Death Zone was their safest home. Full of grass, no predators, guards protecting them from human disturbance. They were closed but happy. When their population grew up to thousands, guards started to remove them. But rabbits survived and stayed there. Unfortunately one day the wall fell down. Rabbits had to abandon comfortable system. They moved to West Berlin and have been living there in a few colonies since then. They are still learning how to live in the free world, same as we - the citizens of Eastern Europe.

Judgment in Berlin

American judge in Germany must decide if the hijacking of an East German plane into West Berlin was justified.

Barbara

In 1980s East Germany, Barbara is a Berlin doctor banished to a country medical clinic for applying for an exit visa. Deeply unhappy with her reassignment and fearful of her co-workers as possible Stasi informants, Barbara stays aloof, especially from the good natured clinic head, Andre.

Cold War

A man and a woman meet in the ruins of post-war Poland. With vastly different backgrounds and temperaments, they are fatally mismatched and yet drawn to each other.

Bridge of Spies

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union captures U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers after shooting down his U-2 spy plane. Sentenced to 10 years in prison, Powers' only hope is New York lawyer James Donovan, recruited by a CIA operative to negotiate his release. Donovan boards a plane to Berlin, hoping to win the young man's freedom through a prisoner exchange. If all goes well, the Russians would get Rudolf Abel, the convicted spy who Donovan defended in court.

A Dandy in Aspic

Double-agent Alexander Eberlin is assigned by the British to hunt out a Russian spy, known to them as Krasnevin. Only Eberlin knows that Krasnevin is none other than himself! Accompanying him on his mission is a ruthless partner, who gradually discovers his secret as Eberlin tries to maneuver himself out of a desperate situation.

Fatherland

Persona Non Grata in his homeland, protest singer Klaus Drittemann must leave East Berlin, his wife and child and emigrate to West Berlin, where the representatives of an American record company are eagerly waiting for him. They plan to exploit his defection from communism both ideologically and financially. But Klaus, as ill-at-ease in the West as he was in the East, is reluctant to be used as an expendable commodity. Leaving his contract unsigned (or signed in his manner), he leaves for Cambridge to meet his father, a concert player, who -just like him - left East Berlin thirty years ago as Klaus was a little boy. He is accompanied by a young French journalist, Emma, who knows where his father has been living since he disappeared for more than a decade. The young lady is cooperative but might hide things from him...

Funeral in Berlin

Colonel Stok, a Soviet intelligence officer responsible for security at the Berlin Wall, appears to want to defect but the evidence is contradictory. Stok wants the British to handle his defection and asks for one of their agents, Harry Palmer, to smuggle him out of East Germany.

The Man Between

A British woman on a visit to post-war Berlin is caught up in an espionage ring smuggling secrets into and out of the Eastern Bloc.

The Defector

An American scientist is sent by the CIA to East Germany to retrieve a secret microfilm from a Soviet scientist interested in defecting to the West but the Stasi secret police's surveillance complicates matters.

The Promise

East-Berlin, 1961, shortly after the erection of the Wall. Konrad, Sophie and three of their friends plan a daring escape to Western Germany. The attempt is successful, except for Konrad, who remains behind. From then on, and for the next 28 years, Konrad and Sophie will attempt to meet again, in spite of the Iron Curtain. Konrad, who has become a reputed Astrophysicist, tries to take advantage of scientific congresses outside Eastern Germany to arrange encounters with Sophie. But in a country where the political police, the Stasi, monitors the moves of all suspicious people (such as Konrad's sister Barbara and her husband Harald), preserving one's privacy, ideals and self-respect becomes an exhausting fight, even as the Eastern block begins its long process of disintegration.

The Lives of Others

In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.

The Legend of Rita

Rita Vogt is a radical West German terrorist who abandons the revolution and settles in East Germany with a new identity provided by the East German secret service. She lives in constant fear of having her cover blown, which unavoidably happens after the German re-unification.

6.9 / 10 1999 Comedy
suggested by: sunnydays

Sun Alley

A group of kids grow up on the short, wrong (east) side of the Sonnenallee in Berlin, right next to one of the few border crossings between East and West reserved for German citizens. The antics of these kids, their families, of the "West German" friends and relatives who come to visit, and of the East German border guards, all serve to illustrate the absurdity of everyday life on the Sonnenallee, and therefore throughout the former East Germany.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

British agent Alec Leamas refuses to come in from the Cold War during the 1960s, choosing to face another mission, which may prove to be his final one.

Torn Curtain

During the Cold War, an American scientist appears to defect to East Germany as part of a cloak and dagger mission to find the formula for a resin solution, but the plan goes awry when his fiancee, unaware of his motivation, follows him across the border.

7.1 / 10 2001 Drama Thriller
suggested by: trendspotter

The Tunnel

Inspired by true events, Olympic swimmer Harry Melchior defects from East Germany in the 1960s and hatches a daring plot to help his sister and others flee East Berlin through a 145-yard underground tunnel.

The Looking Glass War

When a Polish sailor jumps ship in Britain, a couple of local intelligence operatives keep him under surveillance. Soon, he’s recruited to infiltrate a missile installation outside of East Berlin and bring back photos of the new rockets.

Man on a String

U.S. spies catch a Moscow-born U.S. citizen helping spies, and they force him to counterspy.

Balloon

Two families attempt a daredevil plan to escape the GDR with a homemade hot air balloon, but it crashes just before the border. The Stasi finds traces of this attempt to escape and immediately starts investigations, while the two families are forced to build a new escape balloon. With each passing day the Stasi is closer on their heels – a nerve-wracking race against time begins.

The Silent Revolution

Stalinstadt, East Germany, 1956. While the Hungarian uprising against Soviets is taking place, teenage members of a classroom of the local school perform a seemingly harmless act that causes unexpected consequences.

Beloved Berlin Wall

Berlin, 1989. Sascha is a young East German border guard and Franzi is a lively young West German woman who's just moved into a flat next to Sascha's watchtower at the Berlin Wall. It takes only a slight mishap and a selfless act of chivalry and the two fall in love. But soon the Stasi believes they are witnessing the start of a revolt. This is the time of mass protests and East Germans taking refuge in the West German embassy in Prague after all. Franzi and Sascha have to find their ways to stand up for their love and strive for the impossible; to bring down the wall.

Heroes Like Us

A young man from an early age falls in love with a girl whose family is not in good standing with the ruling Communist party. His father however is a member of the "Stasi", the secret state police. The father not only hinders his son's relationship with the girl, but he arranges for his son, after finishing school, to become a Stasi spy himself.

Meier

Meier, a paperhanger in East Berlin, inherits from his father in West Berlin. With this money he wants to fulfil himself the dream of his life: a journey around the world. He buys a forged West German passport and pretends to go on a trip to Bulgaria while he really is off to see the free world. When he wants to return to East Berlin he finds himself in an unbelievable predicament and his double life begins. He can't keep away from his East German friends. As with all the best comedies, the action builds up to an eventual crisis. It's a light comedy, which won several national Film Academy Awards. The film is very political, with lots of political jokes/innuendos which only Germans will understand. One is left feeling what a total obscenity that stupid Wall was, dividing one people for 30 years (1-2 Generations) simply by the coincidence on where you just happen to be in the early morning on the 13th August 1961.

Das Wunder von Berlin

East Germany, 1988: working as a state security service agent, Jürgen Kaiser is loyal to the party line, but worried about his son Marco, a punk. As he is arrested after a concert, Marco is forced to join the army, where he surprisingly identifies with socialism and believes he has to defend his country against the capitalist enemy. While Jürgen is astonished, his wife Hanna and Marco's girlfriend Anja, supporting the civil rights movement, don't like his new attitude...

7.4 / 10 2014 Drama Comedy
suggested by: user801rexwa9l4

Open the Wall

A lighthearted look at the opening of the border crossing of Bornholmer Straße in Berlin from the point of view of the confused border guards.

Tunnel to Freedom

13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.

Berlin Tunnel 21

In Berlin in 1961, an American soldier and a German engineer join forces to build a tunnel under the Berlin Wall in order to smuggle out refugees, including the soldier's East German girlfriend.

5.8 / 10 1985 Drama Romance
suggested by: user524mt95l6bg

Westler

Felix from West-Berlin falls in love with Thomas in East-Berlin. At first they keep their relationship going by regular visits from Felix, but the curfew forces him to return every evening. When the East-German authorities become suspicious, Thomas decides to try and flee to the West.

Never Mind the Wall

Germany 1982: The country is divided into two parts. Nele, coming from West-Germany, travels to East-Germany where she meets Captain, singer of a band. They fall in love with each other, but the regime "takes care" of their relationship, meaning: They can not see each other again. Germany 1990: The country is reunited. Nele starts searching their lost love...

Dear Fatherland Be at Peace

1964 in Berlin, not long after the raise of the wall that separated the city: ex-prisoner Bruno is chosen by the eastern secret agency to be sent west with a special order. However as soon as he's crossed the border, he reports to the police. He claims his order was to kidnap someone, but he doesn't know who yet. He's forced to continue feignedly. However the east agents don't really trust him and play a double game...

More related lists

Sort results by:

X close
Default
Clear filters
...