A kick through the glass wall at Friedrichstraße
Shortly after midnight a man kicked in a glass panel of the partition at Friedrichstraße station and got into the hall where the trains to West Berlin left, but he was arrested on the next westbound train.
Friedrichstraße station lay entirely in East Berlin, but after 1961 it was divided inside: the S-Bahn trains of East Berlin turned back in one hall, while the trains to West Berlin left from the other. A glass partition screened the eastern platform from the western one, and it had already been used for an escape in January 1965, when someone cut through a grille beneath it.
On 10 January 1969, at 0.27 a.m. according to the East German files, a man tried the same route. He smashed one of the glass segments of the partition with his foot and got through into the hall from which the westbound trains departed.
He just missed the S-Bahn to Wannsee. He boarded the next train, which was bound for Spandau, but he was arrested on that train. The authorities recorded the incident as a prevented 'illegal border crossing'. The man's name and what happened to him afterwards are not given in the published account.
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