Two trainees swim through the ice floes of the Nieder Neuendorfer See
On the night of 31 January 1963 an LEW apprentice and a 20-year-old engineering student got through the border fences at Nieder Neuendorf and swam through the ice floes of the lake to Heiligensee in West Berlin.
This is a reported escape. It appears in a reputable publication, but its key details could not be checked against a second source. See the note below.
In the winter of 1962/63 Hans-Georg Ziegler, a 20-year-old student at the technical college in Ilmenau, was doing a work placement at the LEW locomotive and electrical works in Hennigsdorf. He lived in the LEW apprentices' hostel in the former manor house of Nieder Neuendorf, right in the border area on the Havel, which has since been demolished.
According to the account shown in the Grenzturm Nieder Neuendorf exhibition, an LEW apprentice asked him: 'Willst du auch abhauen?' ('Do you want to get out too?'). Ziegler agreed. His roommate Karlheinz Kohl and he got hold of ladders and wire cutters to get over the border fences.
In the night of 31 January 1963 the two overcame the barriers and swam through the Nieder Neuendorfer See, which was full of ice floes, to the opposite shore at Heiligensee in West Berlin. Icebreakers of the border troops kept the water open every two hours to stop such escapes.
Their escape made headlines in the Berlin papers, and the two first had to go through Allied security checks. In August 2014 Hans-Georg Ziegler returned to Nieder Neuendorf and for the first time went inside the village church, which had stood in the closed border zone when he lived there.
Sources
- Grenzturm Nieder NeuendorfReiseland Brandenburg (TMB Tourismus-Marketing Brandenburg)
- Aus unserem Gemeindeleben – Archiv 2014, 2. Halbjahr: 'Dem Ruf der Freiheit gefolgt ...'Ev. Kirchengemeinde Nieder Neuendorf (Havelkirche)
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