Volker Frommann jumps from a moving S-Bahn near the border

Volker Frommann was born in 1944 in Unterpörlitz near Ilmenau in Thuringia. As a 16-year-old he and his school friend Rainer Michelidse threw an iron cow chain onto a power line to black out the village's party marking its collectivisation. They were arrested in August 1960 and sentenced to three and a half years for 'acts of violence endangering the state' and theft. Frommann served his sentence in the youth prison at Torgau and was released under an amnesty in August 1962.

In the year after his release he tried to leave the GDR, was arrested in Czechoslovakia, handed back and sent to prison again, apparently until 1964. His later life is only patchily documented. He worked as a metalworker and in a glass-painting workshop, was turned down for theology studies and by the Dresden art college, sought psychotherapy for the after-effects of prison, and married in the second half of the 1960s.

Neither his friend nor his cousin knew what made him try to escape again in early 1973. At about 00.45 a.m. on 1 March 1973 he jumped out of a moving S-Bahn train in East Berlin between the Pankow and Schönhauser Allee stations, about 50 metres from the border area. The Chronik der Mauer says he probably meant to use this stretch close to the border to get through to West Berlin.

He lay badly injured beside the tracks until a police patrol found him unconscious and took him to the Friedrichshain hospital. He had a spinal injury and was in acute danger; he died there on 5 March 1973. His family in Unterpörlitz only heard indirectly, through a nurse who knew his wife, that he had been found badly hurt near the Wall. He is buried in Unterpörlitz.