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, broke open 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The lift entrance lay outside the area covered by the checkpoint's guards; a post there had been withdrawn about six months earlier.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. The crew lifted them in, and helped them out 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
- Jahrgang 1964: Flucht nach Westberlin über die S-BahnStasi-Unterlagen-Archiv (Die DDR im Blick der Stasi)
- Ein Mann kaperte 1983 einen Zug und wollte mit ihm in den Westen fahren - er kam aber nur bis zum Bahnhof Friedrichstraße: Republikflucht mit der S-Bahn endete vor dem PrellbockBerliner Zeitung
Spotted an error, or know more about this story? Email us a correction or addition
Related escapes
January 1964
Jumping onto the Moscow–Paris Express behind Friedrichstraße
In January 1964 a group of young East Berliners jumped, alone or in pairs, from a hiding place just behind Friedrichstraße station onto the westbound Moscow–Paris Express. The route was discovered when Karl-Heinz Richter slipped, was badly hurt and was arrested.
January 1965
Through a cut grille between the S-Bahn platforms
A young West Berliner who had fled himself the year before cut a grille beneath the glass wall between the S-Bahn platforms at Friedrichstraße so that his girlfriend could slip through.
10 January 1969
A kick through the glass wall at Friedrichstraße
Shortly after midnight a man kicked in a glass panel of the partition at Friedrichstraße station and got into the hall where the trains to West Berlin left, but he was arrested on the next westbound train.
27 May 1983
The S-Bahn hijacking at Friedrichstraße
A 24-year-old forced his way into an S-Bahn driver's cab with an air rifle and tried to make the train run on into West Berlin; it stopped short of a buffer stop and he was overpowered by officers of the passport control unit.
