Manfred Gertzki's armoured escape attempt at the Reichstag

Manfred Gertzki, born in Danzig in 1942, grew up in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz), trained as a sheet-metal worker and became a mechanical engineer at the Robotron research centre, completing an evening degree with top marks in 1972. He was also a successful discus thrower and shot-putter. After his mother's death in 1967 his only close relatives lived in West Germany.

He prepared his escape carefully, sending some belongings to the West in advance. He riveted two-millimetre metal plates onto oilcloth and sewed them into his jacket, and fitted a motorcycle helmet with a lowerable steel face mask – around 50 kilograms of protection in all. On the early evening of 27 April 1973 he entered the border area next to the Reichstag, where construction work had left the installations partly provisional. He forced the lock of a rear-fence gate with a steel bar and moved along the embankment towards the point where the Wall ended in an expanded-metal fence at the water's edge, which could be climbed around from the river side.

Guards in the nearby 'Schallplatte' watchtower, only 15 metres away, opened fire. He fell or dropped, crawled on and got round the fence, while a second tower about 300 metres away across the river also fired. Two metres and one easily climbed wire fence from the demarcation line, he was hit and lay motionless on the bank.

Passers-by, British soldiers and West Berlin police gathered nearby. A GDR lieutenant colonel failed to drag him back; when a customs boat could not moor, its crew shouted to throw him into the water, and the officer pushed him into the Spree. The weight of the armour pulled him to the bottom, and divers recovered him about two hours later. The West Berlin press called it the 'murder at the Reichstag', but the Stasi kept his name secret, had him cremated as an unknown man and cleared his flat. At a 1997 trial it could not be established whether he died from the bullets or by drowning; only the commander in the distant tower was convicted, receiving a one-year suspended sentence for attempted manslaughter.