14 October 1966 · Guards who fled · Glienicker Brücke and Klein Glienicke
A border-boat sailor deserts with three friends from Staßfurt at the Jungfernsee
On the evening of 14 October 1966 a sailor of the NVA boat company of Border Regiment 48 deserted to West Berlin while on leave in town, taking three young men from his home town of Staßfurt with him. They broke through in the Neuer Garten in Potsdam, on the shore of the Jungfernsee.
According to Stasi report no. 775/66, a sailor of the boat company of Border Regiment 48 (4th Border Brigade), born 1945, from Staßfurt and in the NVA since 3 November 1965, deserted to West Berlin between 20.00 and 20.45 on 14 October 1966 while on leave in town. He took three civilians with him, born 1941, 1945 and 1948, all from Staßfurt; they knew each other from home and had kept up a correspondence.
The three had come to Potsdam on 13 October to meet him; because he was on guard duty that day, they arranged to meet on the 14th and spent the night in a hotel in the Behlertstraße. On 14 October the four were last seen together at about 20.00 in the Potsdam funfair. At about 20.45 a patrol in the Badeturm–Hasengraben section of the Neuer Garten found that four people had broken through; on the shore of the Jungfernsee lay two coats, three jackets and a briefcase with newspapers, pullovers and documents.
The Stasi assumed they had come from the Berliner Vorstadt along the Seestraße to the Hasengraben and then across the Neuer Garten. A signal device had been removed, probably by the sailor, and the fences climbed. The guard posted to the south-east was 600 to 800 metres away and could not see the spot, and the border boat on the Jungfernsee was in the boat company's harbour for the change of shift, so the water was not watched from a boat at the time. The sailor knew the shift times because he served in this section.
The report adds that one of the three civilians had tried to leave the GDR across the inner-German border in 1962 and 1965 and had been jailed both times, and that another had served in the border police in 1959, left for the West through West Berlin in 1960 and returned to the GDR in December 1965.
Sources
Whose account is this? Told from a GDR record only: documents of the GDR’s police, Stasi or border troops. No other account of the event is cited.
GDR records
Facts checked against the sources: November 2026
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Cite this page
Berlin Experiences, “A border-boat sailor deserts with three friends from Staßfurt at the Jungfernsee”, Berlin Wall Escapes, 2026, https://berlinwallescapes.com/escapes/jungfernsee-boat-company-sailor-three-friends-1966/ (accessed [date]).
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