Eight people escape over the Flutgraben from the VEB OLW works

The Stasi situation report No. 560/61 of 14 September 1961, covering 11 to 14/15 September, named VEB OLW Treptow as 'a further focus' of border breakthroughs 'in recent days': eight people had fled from the works grounds across the Flutgraben, and two others had been arrested while trying. The report does not say how the eight crossed the channel.

The works' building stands on the Flutgraben where it joins the Spree. According to the Landesdenkmalamt there was neither a border strip nor a wall in front of it: the side of the building facing the Flutgraben formed the border, and it remained a workshop of VEB OLW. A 2009 newspaper report on a history project about the building says that seven employees got to West Berlin in the first week after the Wall was built.

In a report of 1 November 1961 the Stasi again named VEB Bergmann-Borsig and OLW Treptow, together with building sites close to the border, as a focus of breakthroughs. Later the windows, stairwells and walkways of the 150-metre facade were closed with bars, sheet metal and brickwork, and border soldiers patrolled inside the building and on its roof. Even so, the Berliner Mauerweg information stele at the site says that about thirty people escaped from this building to West Berlin by 1989, among them four border soldiers.