Staaken
The village on the western edge of Spandau that the border cut through.
19 August 1961
A Konsum delivery van rolls through the wire at Staaken
The guards knew the van – it delivered to the Volkshaus restaurant every day – so nobody stopped it until it sped up and drove over the new wire fence into West Berlin.
5 December 1961
The last train to freedom
Locomotive driver Harry Deterling drove a passenger train at full speed through the terminus at Albrechtshof and across the border into West Berlin.
9 December 1961
Dieter Wohlfahrt, escape helper shot at Staaken
A 20-year-old West Berlin resident with Austrian citizenship was shot while cutting through the border fence at Staaken to help a woman escape; the plan had been betrayed and he bled to death in the border strip.
7 February 1966
Willi Block – trapped in the wire and shot at Staaken
Caught in a roll of barbed wire in full view of West Berlin police, former border policeman Willi Block was shot dead after a stand-off; the regimental commander himself fired.
11 September 1966
Bulldozer through the Staaken border
Two married couples and a three-year-old child flattened the Staaken border fences with an armoured 18-tonne bulldozer until a tree stopped them in Spandau.
2 October 1977
Two young women in a car boot at Staaken
A West Berliner working for an escape-helper group tried to take two women in their early twenties out in his boot through the Staaken crossing – one of them the daughter of an SED factory director, who wanted to marry her Turkish boyfriend in West Berlin.
2 June 1984
Trabant against the Staaken barrier
A 38-year-old driver tried to force his Trabant through the Staaken crossing but crashed into a heavy barrier at the passport control line.
10 March 1989
Tipper truck and ladder in Staaken
Three men tried to flatten the border fences in Staaken with a tipper truck and climb the Wall with a ladder, but the truck stuck in the second fence and one of them was shot.