During the years the Berlin Wall stood, roughly 5,000 people managed to escape across it into West Berlin. Before the wall was constructed, around 2.7 million East Germans had already fled to the West, many passing through Berlin while the border there remained open. Once the wall rose and security tightened, escape became far more perilous, driving would-be defectors to increasingly desperate measures, such as leaping from buildings that bordered the wall, tunnelling beneath it, or concealing themselves in vehicles. Winfried Freudenberg went further still. He attempted to cross the divide by taking to the air in a homemade balloon.
Winfried Freudenberg's balloon after it crashed.
Winfried Freudenberg was born in 1956 in Osterwieck and grew up in the nearby town of Lüttgenrode, close to the heavily fortified Inner German border. After completing an apprenticeship as an electrician, he earned his secondary school diploma through night classes, then went on to study information technology, eventually qualifying as an electronics engineer. In the autumn of 1988, he married Sabine, a chemist he had met while they were both students at Ilmenau University of Technology.
The young couple soon came to realise that their ambitions had little room to grow in East Germany. Opportunities to travel, attend conferences, pursue independent research, or even maintain professional contact with colleagues in the West were tightly restricted by the state. The fact that he had lived within the border area, right by the barbed wire, “just a few hundred meters from another country that he could never enter,” had strongly influenced Freudenberg’s desire for freedom.
Soon after their wedding, Winfried Freudenberg and his wife began planning their escape using a gas balloon. Conventional hot-air balloons required burners that were difficult to obtain in East Germany, and, more importantly, produced noise and visible flames that could easily attract attention. Freudenberg therefore chose natural gas, a quieter and less conspicuous alternative.
Winfried Freudenberg
To secure access to the fuel, he took a job with a public utility company that supplied natural gas, while the couple moved into an apartment in the Prenzlauer Berg district of East Berlin. There, working in secrecy, they began assembling the balloon.
The couple started buying small amounts of polyethylene sheets, commonly used for cold-frame windows and for tents. These were cut into two-and-a-half-meter-wide strips and taped together with a special adhesive foil to create a balloon 13m high with a diameter of 11m. To reinforce the structure, Freudenberg fashioned a supporting net from parcel string and draped it over the envelope. Instead of a conventional basket, there was only a narrow wooden beam.
At the same time, the Freudenbergs broke all contact with his relatives in order to protect them from having any knowledge about the escape plan since this might have gotten them into trouble with the authorities. By February the couple had completed all the preparations and began waiting for favourable wind conditions.
On the evening of 7 March 1989, Winfried Freudenberg and his wife decided the moment had come. They packed the folded balloon, ballast, and a few essential belongings, then drove to a gas supply control station on the outskirts of Berlin, near the district of Blankenburg to which Freudenberg had the keys. At midnight he began tapping gas from the station and filling the balloon with natural gas. The balloon slowly began to fill up, and after more than an hour, its outline became faintly visible against the night sky.
Unfortunately, a barman returning home from work at 1:30 in the morning saw the balloon from a distance. Believing that something was afoot, he alerted the East German police.
Shortly after 2.00 am the first police car arrived. The balloon was still not fully inflated. Faced with the imminent risk of discovery, the couple hurriedly decided that because there was not enough lift for two, Winfried would have to go alone. He severed the tether lines, and the balloon rose abruptly into the night. As it climbed, the dangling ballast bags brushed against a high-voltage cable, sending up a shower of sparks and briefly plunging a nearby garden settlement into darkness.
Without the added weight of his wife, Winfried Freudenberg rose far more rapidly and to a far greater height than he had planned. Later reconstructions suggest that he drifted across the border into West Berlin at a speed of roughly 20 kilometres per hour, passing unnoticed in the darkness. He appears to have reached the area around Tegel Airport, where he likely attempted to descend. But the release cord, designed to vent gas and bring the balloon down, seems at first to have failed. Perhaps to draw attention to his plight, he dropped ballast, but the sudden loss of weight sent him climbing higher still.
Evidence suggests he reached an altitude of at least 2,000 metres, where the wind shifted and took him away from his intended course. Freudenberg had calculated that the journey would last no more than half an hour. Instead, he remained aloft for more than five hours. At dawn, the balloon was spotted over Teufelsberg, but it was mistaken for a weather balloon.
Shortly before flying into East German territory again, at 7:30, Freudenberg fell into the garden of a villa in the suburb of Zehlendorf. The remains of the balloon came down about one kilometer away on the median strip of a thoroughfare. Freudenberg's body was discovered hours later in the garden of a villa on Limastrasse. Nearly every bone in his body had been broken. He evidently died instantly.
Winfried’s wife was caught and sentenced to three years parole but later pardoned. The next month, East Germany began allowing its citizens to travel to the West, and several months later, the Berlin Wall fell transforming the political landscape of Europe and rendering such dangerous escapes unnecessary. Winfried Freudenberg was the last person to have died while attempting to flee East Germany.
Freudenberg’s tragic attempt stands in stark contrast to a more famous and successful escape a decade earlier. In 1979, two East German families constructed a hot-air balloon and, after an initial failed attempt, managed to fly to freedom on their second try. That daring escape demonstrated both ingenuity and careful planning, and it has since become one of the most celebrated stories of life behind the Iron Curtain.
References:
# Winfried Freudenberg. Wikipedia
# Winfried Freudenberg the last victim. Berlin on Bike
# Victims at the wall. Chronik-der-mauer
# Ballonfahrt in den Tod. Spiegel
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