20 April 1964 · Driving through
Concrete lorry to the canal bank, then a swim
Two lorry drivers drove a loaded Škoda truck from a Teltow concrete works through the border fences down to the canal bank and swam across to West Berlin.
On the evening of 20 April 1964 two drivers from VEB Kraftverkehr Brandenburg collected 6.4 tonnes of precast concrete at the VEB Betonwerk in Teltow, a works that lay right on the border. They waited until almost everyone had left, claiming their seat needed repairing.
One of them walked past the border installations and saw that the guards had left their watchtower to work on signal devices about 80 m away.
At about 20:30 the two drove the loaded Škoda lorry straight at the border: through the works fence, through the triple barbed-wire barrier on the embankment and down the bank, stopping about a metre short of the water. There was no anti-vehicle ditch at that point.
They jumped out and swam across the Teltow Canal, whose middle formed the border. West Berlin police officers pulled them out on the other bank. The guards arrived too late to fire.
Sources
- Jahrgang 1964: Flucht über den Teltow-KanalStasi-Unterlagen-Archiv (Die DDR im Blick der Stasi)
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