31 January 1963 · Swimming · Hennigsdorf, Nieder Neuendorf and the Havel
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 student on a work placement 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 (Schloss) of Nieder Neuendorf, 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. According to the parish account, icebreakers ran 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
Whose account is this? Told from historical research only.
Historians and memorials
- 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)
Facts checked against the sources: September 2026
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Cite this page
Berlin Experiences, “Two trainees swim through the ice floes of the Nieder Neuendorfer See”, Berlin Wall Escapes, 2026, https://berlinwallescapes.com/escapes/ziegler-kohl-nieder-neuendorfer-see-ice-1963/ (accessed [date]).
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