Axel Hannemann – from a cargo barge into the Spree
A 17-year-old apprentice from Cottbus jumped from the Marschallbrücke onto a westbound cargo barge; when the skipper stopped, he jumped into the Spree and was shot a few metres from the West Berlin bank.
Axel Hannemann was born in April 1945 and grew up in Cottbus, where he still lived with his parents and was serving an apprenticeship. His family knew nothing of his plans. In a farewell letter he asked them to understand and wrote that he saw no other way out.
On 5 June 1962 he travelled by train to East Berlin and went to the Marschallbrücke, where GDR customs checked cargo ships allowed to pass through West Berlin. At 5.15 p.m. he jumped from the bridge onto a barge that had cleared customs and was heading west.
The skipper refused to take him, stopped the vessel and alerted customs and the border guards. After a scuffle with the skipper, Hannemann broke free and jumped into the river to swim to the West Berlin bank. Two border policemen fired at him from close range, and a few metres from his goal he sank, fatally hit in the head. The East Berlin fire brigade recovered his body two hours later.
West Berlin police and journalists behind the Reichstag documented the recovery. The West Berlin police offered a reward of 3,000 marks for information identifying the shooters. The guard who fired the fatal shot had died by the time of the trials in the 1990s; in September 1993 the second shooter was convicted of joint manslaughter and given a two-year suspended sentence.
Sources
- Hannemann, AxelChronik der Mauer
- Dokumentation: Sie starben an der Berliner MauerDer Tagesspiegel
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