14 March 1964 · By train · Friedrichstraße station
The wheelchair on the S-Bahn to Zoo
Two young men, one of them posing as a frail wheelchair user, cut the padlock off the lift to the westbound platform at Friedrichstraße and let the S-Bahn staff help them onto a train to Bahnhof Zoo.
On the evening of 14 March 1964 two young men, aged about 19 and 23, asked a guard at Bahnhof Friedrichstraße where the lift to the westbound platform B was. The guard, suspecting nothing, told them.
The lift entrance lay outside the area covered by the checkpoint's guards; a post there had been withdrawn about six months earlier. The pair cut through the padlock with a large wire cutter and rode up to the platform, where the S-Bahn to Wannsee was about to leave.
One sat in a wheelchair. They asked the train crew whether the train went to Bahnhof Zoo and to help them board, since the young man was supposedly too frail to walk. According to the crew, the two also let themselves be helped off the train again at Zoo.
There the 'invalid' got out of the chair and the two behaved so exuberantly that the station supervisor sent them off the platform. They left the wheelchair behind.
Sources
Whose account is this? Drawn from a GDR record and a press report.
GDR records
- Jahrgang 1964: Flucht nach Westberlin über die S-BahnStasi-Unterlagen-Archiv (Die DDR im Blick der Stasi)
Press
Facts checked against the sources: September 2026
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Cite this page
Berlin Experiences, “The wheelchair on the S-Bahn to Zoo”, Berlin Wall Escapes, 2026, https://berlinwallescapes.com/escapes/wheelchair-s-bahn-friedrichstrasse-1964/ (accessed [date]).
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