Winfried Freudenberg's fatal gas balloon flight

Winfried Freudenberg, born in 1956, and his wife Sabine began building a balloon out of polyethylene sheeting in their flat in January 1989. The envelope was about 13 metres high and 11 metres across, held by a net of packing string. To get access to natural gas, Freudenberg took a job in the gas supply department of an energy combine.

On the night of 7–8 March 1989 the couple began filling the balloon at a gas regulator station in Blankenburg in the north of East Berlin. Around 1:30 a.m. a passer-by noticed it and alerted the police. When a police car arrived shortly after 2 a.m., the couple decided that Winfried should take off alone, because they feared the balloon did not yet hold enough gas to carry two. Sabine returned to their flat in Prenzlauer Berg, where two Stasi officers were waiting and arrested her.

The balloon drifted over Berlin for about five hours, far longer than the half-hour he had planned. At around 7:30 a.m. he fell in the West Berlin district of Zehlendorf. The exact cause of the crash is not known. The West Berlin police assumed that he had finally managed to let out gas, so that the balloon sank quickly, and that a gust then lifted it again and the jolt threw him out. He died on impact in a garden a few hundred metres from where the empty balloon caught in a tree.

Sabine Freudenberg was charged with attempting to cross the border illegally and given a three-year suspended sentence, and was amnestied on 27 October 1989. A memorial stele now marks the site in Zehlendorf where her husband died, eight months before the Wall opened.