Balloon escape

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With a sensational balloon escape on September 16, 1979, the Strelzyk and Wetzel families from Pößneck ( Thuringia ) managed to escape across the inner-German border from the GDR to West Germany with a self-made hot air balloon .

Preparing to escape

Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel were work colleagues in the plastics factory VEB Polymer Pößneck. In months of work, together with their wives, they procured the necessary amount of fabric, sewed a balloon from it, made a gondola and experimented with a burner. A required volume of 2,800 cubic meters was calculated for the balloon envelope.

The families built a total of three balloons. The first consisted of lining material from a leather bag factory, which, however, proved unsuitable when an attempt was made to fill it, which is why the families destroyed it.

The second balloon was made of taffeta that Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel had bought in a department store in Leipzig . They pretended to be members of a sailing club. Since the constructed gondola was too small to carry both families, the Wetzel family got out of the plan, and the Strelzyks attempted to escape alone on the night of July 3rd, 1979. After taking off on a meadow between Oberlemnitz and Heinersdorf , the balloon envelope soaked up with water, so that the balloon lost altitude earlier than planned and finally fell two kilometers from the border on GDR territory near Hornsgrün after a 34-minute drive . The Strelzyks were able to return home unnoticed, but had to leave the balloon and other personal items behind in the forest. A people's policeman , who a few days later was privately in the forest to collect wood, discovered the remains of the balloon, but did not report his find because he had entered the restricted area along the border without authorization. Finally, on the morning of July 20, 1979, a hunter discovered the balloon and reported the find to the local ABV of the People's Police. The State Security then initiated a manhunt, which was unsuccessful. On August 14, 1979, the authorities placed a complaint in the People's Watch in which the population was asked for information about the objects found near the balloon - a barometer , a pocket knife and a water pump pliers - in connection with an unspecified “serious crime”.

Meanwhile, the two families were working on a third balloon. Unlike its predecessors, this time they obtained the material in numerous small posts in many different locations. The envelope of the balloon was 28 meters high and 20 meters wide and was sewn from four different fabrics: umbrella silk, taffeta , tent nylon and bed linings . The gondola consisted of a 1.40 m by 1.40 m wooden platform with an 80 cm high railing made of four corner posts and a clothesline.

Escape route

Immediately after the last lengths of fabric had been bought and sewn in Jena on September 15, 1979 , the families decided to start the same night due to the favorable weather conditions. The meadow near Oberlemnitz, from which the unsuccessful escape attempt on July 4th had started, again served as the starting point. The eight people crouched with their backs to the railing and held on to the four propane gas bottles in the middle. The journey lasted 28 minutes, in which a distance of 18 kilometers was covered. The balloon landed in a wooded area near Naila in the Hof district . After landing, the women and children initially hid in the forest while the two men explored the area. Eventually they came across a Bavarian police patrol who confirmed to them that they had reached the Federal Republic.

After the escape

According to Günter Wetzel's website, the two families broke off contact shortly after they had fled together due to some discrepancies. Peter Strelzyk opened a specialist electronics store in Bad Kissingen , Günter Wetzel became a master mechanic near Hof . A friend of Strelzyk was imprisoned in the GDR for helping people escape; After he was allowed to leave Germany in 1982, Strelzyk hired him as an employee. It later emerged that the Ministry of State Security (MfS) had recruited him as an unofficial employee while in custody and possibly specifically instructed him to do business damage to Strelzyk. The Wetzel family was also under observation by the MfS.

After the end of the GDR , Strelzyk and his wife moved back into their row house in Pößneck, where they had lived during the GDR era. Peter Strelzyk died on March 11, 2017 at the age of 74 in Jena .

The refugees donated the balloon gondola to the city of Naila, which they passed on to the Berlin Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie together with ten lengths of balloon fabric. The balloon envelope has been exhibited in the Museum of Bavarian History in Regensburg since May 2019 .

Film adaptations

  • 1982: The balloon flight was depicted in the American film With the Wind Westward and described by the Strelzyks in a book.
  • 2018: Michael Herbig's escape was filmed again as the German thriller Ballon .

Similar escape attempts

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Philipp Schnee; Jochen Leffers: "A fabric sack, hot air in, let's go". Spiegel Online , September 27, 2018, accessed September 27, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b Norbert Koch-Klaucke: "Ballon": Spectacular GDR escape story comes back to the cinemas. Berliner Zeitung, September 13, 2018, accessed on October 4, 2018 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Escape in a balloon. BStU , accessed on October 4, 2018 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e Peter Hagen: Balloon escape attempt ended in 1979 at Hornsgrün: Contemporary witness reports why he hid his find. October 21, 2017, accessed October 4, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Peter Hagen: Ballonflucht 1979: A meadow near Oberlemnitz served twice as a launch site. Ostthüringer Zeitung, October 20, 2017, accessed on October 4, 2018 .
  6. ^ Günter Wetzel: The separation. ballonflucht.de, accessed on September 27, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Marius Koity: Pößneck: Balloon refugee Strelzyk died. Ostthüringer Zeitung , March 13, 2017, accessed on March 14, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Balloon refugee comes to Regensburg. Mittelbayerische, October 26, 2018, accessed on July 24, 2019 .