Peter Grohganz drowns in the winter Spree

Peter Grohganz was born in 1948 in Premnitz, west of Berlin, and trained as a metalworker. As a teenager he agreed to inform for the Stasi and later spied on fellow officer cadets, but in 1969 he was dismissed from officer school over a theft and the Stasi dropped him. In the 1970s he worked on building sites, was fined for threatening a deputy mayor and had further convictions for theft.

After his divorce in March 1980 he could not get a flat of his own. On 5 April 1980 he wrote to Erich Honecker asking to be allowed to leave the GDR. The letter was passed to the Stasi, and his repeated visits to the local authority led nowhere; in May he also went to the West German Permanent Mission in East Berlin. In September 1980 he withdrew the application, saying it had been written in anger, and asked the Stasi in vain for help getting a proper identity card.

From October 1980 he worked at the Brandenburg steel works. On 10 December 1980 he took three days' leave and never came back, leaving a note for a colleague: 'You will be surprised when I don't return', with instructions to send his remaining pay to his children.

On the morning of 9 February 1981 the crew of a GDR border boat found a lifeless body caught in a water barrier in the Spree east of the Oberbaumbrücke, near the Flutgraben. The partly decomposed body was towed away and recovered at the Elsenbrücke. Papers in his trouser pocket identified him. The Chronik der Mauer describes his death as an attempt to escape to West Berlin through the ice-cold Spree in mid-winter.