Horst Plischke – missing in the Havel for four months

In the early hours of 19 November 1962, 23-year-old Horst Plischke went into the Havel north of the Glienicke Bridge in Potsdam to swim to the West Berlin bank opposite.

At about 3.30 a.m. GDR border soldiers discovered the attempt. According to West Berlin press reports several shots were fired. The water and the eastern shore of the Jungfernsee were searched, and the search continued the next day, but he was not found.

On 10 March 1963 two border soldiers found a young man's body in the Jungfernsee, brought to the surface by the thaw. He carried an identity card and a call-up notice for military service, which identified him as Horst Plischke from Potsdam, born in 1939 in Braunau. The GDR authorities concluded that he was the swimmer shot at in November and that he had drowned without being hit.

In the West his fate remained unknown until 1994, when documents in the records of the GDR border troops were found. The Berlin prosecutors closed their investigation in May 1995 because he had drowned rather than been shot. Nothing is known about his reasons for fleeing.