Klaus Kratzel killed in the S-Bahn tunnel at Bornholmer Straße
Having returned to East Berlin after a family quarrel, bricklayer Klaus Kratzel tried to get back to his wife and children in the West along the railway at Bornholmer Straße and was apparently struck by a train.
Klaus Kratzel, born in Berlin on 3 March 1940, had fled with his wife, baby daughter and in-laws to West Berlin on 18 August 1961. In January 1965, after a quarrel about debts, he left his family and applied at Friedrichstraße to return to the GDR.
He soon regretted it. In letters to his in-laws in West Berlin he wrote in veiled terms that he would soon 'change flats', and in early August 1965: 'I'll only come if I have a good chance.'
At about 11.30 p.m. on 8 August 1965 he was found dead in an S-Bahn tunnel north of the closed Bornholmer Straße station, in the border area through which trains between Schönhauser Allee and Pankow ran regularly. Everything indicates that, having drunk to steel his nerves, he was hit by a train while trying to cross the tracks towards Wedding.
The border troops could not establish how he had entered the area; their report concluded that he had intended to break through towards the Grüntaler Straße in West Berlin. His mother was told only that he had had an accident 'on the railway'.
For years his family suspected he had been shot; investigations after 1990 ruled this out.
Sources
- Kratzel, KlausChronik der Mauer
- Dokumentation: Sie starben an der Berliner MauerDer Tagesspiegel
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