Rolf Fülleborn

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Rolf Fülleborn (born August 1, 1943 in Dresden ; † April 14, 1963 near Lenzen ) was a fatality on the inner-German border .

Life

In 1958, Fülleborn finished primary school and began an apprenticeship as an inland navigation operator , which he completed in July 1961. During his apprenticeship he applied several times to the Deutsche Seereederei in Rostock , but was rejected because of the large number of applicants . He also could n't find a job with the German inland shipping company .

First attempt to escape and imprisonment

On October 15, 1961, Fülleborn tried to flee the GDR for the first time . He swam from Wittenberge through the Elbe . Because of the cold, he got out of the water downstream and walked along the Elbe dike towards the border. In the thick fog he ran into two drunken border guards, as he later reported. He was sentenced to one year in prison on October 17, 1961 by the Seehausen District Court. He served part of his sentence in the Schwarze Pump detention center. On June 20, 1962, he was released early on parole for good conduct. Fülleborn was banned from working as an inland boatman and an entry ban for all GDR border districts.

Second attempt to escape

On April 14, 1963, Fülleborn said goodbye to his parents in order to visit a friend in Karl-Marx-Stadt , according to him. At Elbe kilometer 489 between Mödlich and Vietze in the Lenzen (Elbe) area on April 15, 1963 at around 7.50 a.m., a West German customs boat observed a male corpse being pulled out of the water by GDR border soldiers. According to the report of the customs officers, the person was between 20 and 30 years old, wore flippers and a white device around the belt with a snorkel attached. A white plastic bag was attached to the back. The recovery and examination of the dead lasted until about 12 noon.

The parents were informed of the find on the afternoon of the same day; the father identified the deceased on April 16, 1963 as his son. Without the parents' knowledge, the body was taken from Lenzen to Wittenberge on April 18, 1963 and buried there. The family later obtained a reburial in a cemetery in Dresden, where Rolf Fülleborn was buried on August 13th.

When investigating the case in the 1990s, the Central Investigation Agency for Government and Association Crime found no evidence of a criminal offense and therefore closed the case.

Web links

literature

  • Klaus Schroeder, Jochen Staadt: The victims of the GDR border regime on the inner-German border 1949–1989: A biographical manual , Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2017, ISBN 978-3631725948 , page 186 ff

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mike Wilms: Inner German border. The forgotten victims of the death strip. In: berliner-kurier.de. June 17, 2017, accessed February 6, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Fülleborn, Rolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German inland boatmen, fatalities on the inner-German border
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 1963
Place of death at Lenzen