Two young men from Prenzlauer Berg cross the Wall with a window-cleaner's ladder

In an interview with Der Spiegel, given in West Berlin about eight hours after their escape, Rene Klein and Ronald Klotzer, both 19, one a road builder and the other a building cleaner, said they had decided to go to the West the previous afternoon over three or four beers in the 'Bornholmer Klause', a pub in Prenzlauer Berg, after trouble at work. Klotzer changed his clothes at home, his mother made them supper, and they told friends in their courtyard at the corner of Schönhauser and Bornholmer Straße that they were leaving; nobody believed them.

That evening they went to the Stadion der Weltjugend, crossed its grounds, climbed a fence and got onto the grounds of the police hospital. They chose it because it lay directly on the border and because Klotzer, a glass and building cleaner whose brigade cleaned the hospital, had a works pass and knew the site; from the second-floor windows he had seen the border strip. Klotzer fetched his cleaner's ladder from the building where his work things were kept.

They described four obstacles: an opaque corrugated-metal wall; about six metres further a wall of some four and a half metres topped by fibreglass rods with five or six wires, which they said carried current and which gave them a shock; a barbed-wire fence of almost two metres slanting towards them, which Klein crossed from the ladder while Klotzer held it; and the last wall. As they pulled the ladder through the fence an alarm sounded and a green light lit up somewhere in the air. They ran with the ladder to the last wall; someone shouted 'stehenbleiben' and, according to Klein, the shooting began when he was on the ladder or already on top of the Wall, from where he tried to pull Klotzer up. Klein said he saw the shots strike the Wall at one and the same spot and believed the guards had missed on purpose.