27 August 1976 · Over the wall · Glienicker Brücke and Klein Glienicke
A home-made ladder from the garden at Am Böttcherberg
A painter, his wife and their four-year-old child cut through the rear fence opposite their garden in the Klein Glienicke enclave and climbed the 3.5 m Wall with a ladder they had built themselves.
The family's garden fence ran only about 5 m from the border, separated from the rear border fence by the road Am Böttcherberg.
Late on the evening of 27 August 1976 the husband, a painters' foreman born in 1943, his wife, born in 1954, and their four-year-old child cut the rear fence with pliers and climbed the 3.5 m Wall with a home-made ladder, which they pulled up after them and left on the West Berlin side.
The damage was only discovered the next morning, when a resident told the border troops. In the garden the Stasi found the offcuts from building the ladder and a section of garden fence that had been sawn through.
The day before, the man had sold his car. His application to work as a self-employed painter had been refused in 1974; since April 1976 he had been a volunteer police helper.
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
- Jahrgang 1976: Flucht eines Ehepaares mit Kind nach Westberlin bei Klein-GlienickeStasi-Unterlagen-Archiv (Die DDR im Blick der Stasi)
Facts checked against the sources: September 2026
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Cite this page
Berlin Experiences, “A home-made ladder from the garden at Am Böttcherberg”, Berlin Wall Escapes, 2026, https://berlinwallescapes.com/escapes/klein-glienicke-family-ladder-1976/ (accessed [date]).
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