# Who Drowned at the Berlin Wall?

> 24 of the 140 Berlin Wall victims drowned: 18 escapees in the Spree, Havel, Teltow Canal and lakes, and six with no intent to escape, five of them children.

Published 27 September 2026. Web page: https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/berlin-wall-drownings/

Twenty-four of the 140 people who died at the Berlin Wall drowned. Eighteen of them are counted as escapees, who died in the Spree, the Teltow Canal, the Havel or the lakes on the city's edge; the other six had no intention of escaping, and five of those were West Berlin boys who went into the Spree from the Kreuzberg bank while playing.

The first of these deaths came on 5 October 1961 and the last on 3 September 1986. This article lists all 24 and explains what the research says about deaths in the water. For the overall figures, see [how many people died at the Berlin Wall](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/how-many-people-died-at-the-berlin-wall/).

## How we counted

Our data file records a cause of death for each of the 140 people, taken from the heading of their biography in the *Chronik der Mauer* ("drowned on …", "shot dead on …"). We selected everyone whose cause is recorded as drowned: 24 people. Where a heading says someone was both shot and drowned, the file counts the death as a shooting. That applies to four people who are not included here: [Klaus Schröter](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/schroeter-klaus/) (1963), [Max Sahmland](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/sahmland-max/) (1967), [Manfred Weylandt](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/weylandt-manfred/) (1972) and [Manfred Gertzki](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/gertzki-manfred/) (1973). Only one death among the 140 is flagged as uncertain in cause, that of [Willi Marzahn](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/marzahn-willi/), and he is not among the 24.

Of the 24, 18 were escapees and six had no intent to escape. Sixteen died on the sector border inside the city and eight on the outer ring. By the place named in their headings, 15 drowned in the Spree, five in the Havel, three in lakes and one in the Teltow Canal. Eight died in 1961 and 1962. For six of the 24, the date of death is known only approximately.

## What the study says about deaths in the water

The 2017 study by Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke does not treat drowning as a category of its own. It counts escapees who drowned in the border waterways among the 30 people who died in accidents during escape attempts, and names eight who drowned in 1961 and 1962 alone.

Water also runs through the cases the study could not resolve. In 16 cases the records were not enough to decide either way; all of them involved unidentified bodies taken from the water, and in none was an escape attempt or a connection to the border regime clearly established. The study left out suicides in the city's waterways where it could be proved there was no link to an escape attempt. The study also quotes the Stasi's rules for handling death cases, which listed "drowned in a border waterway" among the messages to relatives that had "proved useful". It notes that the mothers of [Hans Räwel](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/raewel-hans/) and [Walter Hayn](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/hayn-walter/) were told their sons had drowned, when both had in fact been shot trying to escape.

## Deaths in 1961 and 1962

[Udo Düllick](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/duellick-udo/), a 25-year-old engineer with the East German railway, had quarrelled with a superior at a works party. Close to midnight on 5 October 1961 he entered the Spree near the Oberbaum Bridge. Guards fired at him and the water police followed by boat; he kept diving under to escape the shots. People watching from the West Berlin side wanted to help but could not go into the river, which was East Berlin territory from one bank to the other. He went under when he was close to the other side. An East Berlin report claimed he was "fatally wounded by the shots fired", but his body showed no bullet wounds, and the post-mortem found he had drowned from exhaustion. His identity was not known at first; at least 2,500 people gathered for a memorial service on the Gröbenufer on 7 October 1961.

[Lothar Lehmann](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/lehmann-lothar/), 19, was doing his military service in a police unit at Gross Glienicke, one of the units guarding the border between the Potsdam district and West Berlin. He had asked his mother for the address of relatives in West Germany, adding: "Won't they be surprised when I get there." On 26 November 1961 he went into the Havel at Sacrow in a life jacket. The cold water appears to have sent him into shock and he lost consciousness; guards pulled him out, and he died that evening on the way to hospital in Potsdam. At his funeral, his death could be spoken of only as an accident.

[Ingo Krüger](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/krueger-ingo/), 21, a cook and sport diver whose fiancée lived in West Berlin, entered the Spree in a diving suit on the night of 10 December 1961. According to East Berlin border police reports, he was already dead when he was pulled from the water at the Marschall Bridge. The exact circumstances of his death were never established: Stasi inquiries are said to have blamed a failure of his breathing apparatus, while investigations in the 1990s concluded that he died of cold shock.

[Georg Feldhahn](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/feldhahn-georg/), a 20-year-old border policeman, left his post on the Teltow Canal near the Massante Bridge on 19 December 1961. East Berlin investigators at first assumed he had got across. A West Berlin customs officer found his body in the canal in March 1962. His sister learned of his death only in the 1990s.

[Philipp Held](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/held-philipp/), 19, had moved from Worms in West Germany to the East with his girlfriend in September 1961 and then found he could not go back. He disappeared on 8 April 1962. East German border police found his body in the Spree on 22 April; it had become caught in the wire of an underwater barrier. His mother was told he had died in an accident, and his remains were cremated without her permission.

[Erna Kelm](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/kelm-erna/), 53, from Sacrow, the only woman among the 24, drowned in the Havel on 11 June 1962. An angler saw her body from the West Berlin bank that morning. She was wearing a swimming belt under her clothes, and her identity card was hidden in her sock.

[Horst Plischke](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/plischke-horst/), 23, went into the Havel north of the Glienicker Bridge in the early hours of 19 November 1962. According to West Berlin press reports, shots were fired, but he could not be found. His body surfaced in the Jungfernsee when the water thawed in March 1963. Because he had drowned and had not been shot, Berlin prosecutors ended their investigation on 3 May 1995.

[Günter Wiedenhöft](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/wiedenhoeft-guenter/), 20, had been arrested in October 1962 while scouting the border in Treptow and sentenced to eight months in prison for attempting to leave the GDR illegally. He was not taken into custody straight away, and he made a second attempt before his sentence began. He appears to have gone out onto the ice of Griebnitz Lake around midnight on the night of 5 to 6 December 1962; the lake had frozen near the shore, but the border troops kept a channel open. Guards heard the ice crack and fired. He must have fallen through the ice; his body, found in March 1963, bore no bullet wound.

## Divers with home-made equipment

[Norbert Wolscht](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/wolscht-norbert/) and [Rainer Gneiser](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/gneiser-rainer/), both 20 and friends since their schooldays in Freiberg, Saxony, are said to have joined forces in the summer of 1963. They prepared by training for long-distance swims and working out how to build their own diving gear. In the night of 27 to 28 July 1964 they went into the Havel with oxygen tanks and diving suits, probably from the stretch between Potsdam and Babelsberg where their bodies were later found. Both drowned in circumstances never explained. The autopsy attributed Norbert Wolscht's death to the failure of his breathing apparatus; Rainer Gneiser's body was found on 5 August. According to his brother, Rainer Gneiser's gravestone was not allowed to show his first name or dates.

## Later deaths in the water, 1963–1986

[Wolf-Olaf Muszynski](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/muszynski-wolf-olaf/), 16, had been missing from Friedrichshain since 6 February 1963. Residents found his body on the West Berlin bank of the Spree near the Oberbaum Bridge on 1 April 1963.

On 19 January 1965 two workers on the Kreuzberg bank heard cries for help and saw a man of about 30 swimming towards them. About ten metres from the West Berlin bank he went under, probably from hypothermia, according to a West Berlin police report. His identity remained unknown, and Berlin prosecutors closed their preliminary inquiry into the case of the [unidentified fugitive](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/unidentified-fugitive/) in 1995 without new findings.

[Franciszek Piesik](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/piesik-franciszek/), 24, a Polish citizen, crossed the Oder into East Germany and made his way to Hennigsdorf. On 17 October 1967 he stole a motorboat; after guards spotted it, he took to the water and tried to swim across the Nieder Neuendorfer Lake, in water of little more than ten degrees. His body was recovered from the West Berlin side on 28 October. He was buried in Heiligensee, the district he had hoped to reach.

[Bernd Lehmann](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/lehmann-bernd/), 18, left home late at night and swam from Treptow Park towards the Osthafen; his clothes were found in bushes near the Soviet memorial in Treptow early in the evening of 28 May 1968, the date given for his death. Barbed wire had been strung in the water there, which he did not know; about 20 metres short of the Flutgraben channel, in the Osthafen basin, he was caught in the underwater barriers and drowned.

[Hans-Joachim Zock](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/zock-hans-joachim/), 30, from Halle-Neustadt, had been questioned by the Stasi for hours at a time over incidents at his factory; the Stasi itself recorded that none of this questioning ever established an offence. He died in the Spree between 14 and 17 November 1970, most probably by drowning according to the post-mortem. He was carrying a letter to his aunt in West Germany that set out his reasons for leaving.

[Henri Weise](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/weise-henri/), 22, from Ranis in Thuringia, had seen his applications to leave the GDR refused. On 17 May 1977 he left his father's flat in East Berlin, saying he would be back in half an hour. In July border soldiers found his body in the water barrier at the Marschall Bridge. Investigators in the 1990s could not establish how he died and closed the case in 1995.

[Peter Grohganz](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/grohganz-peter/), 32, born in Premnitz, had written to Erich Honecker in April 1980 asking to leave the GDR, and later withdrew the request. He last worked on 10 December 1980 and never went back. On 9 February 1981 a border boat crew found his body caught in a water barrier east of the Oberbaum Bridge.

[Rainer Liebeke](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/liebeke-rainer/), a taxi driver and licensed motorcycle racer from Gotha, set out with a younger friend to swim the roughly 500 metres across Sacrower Lake in September 1986. He had broken his collarbone in a racing crash earlier in 1986, and the injury probably hindered him more and more as he swam. His friend reached the far bank and got through to West Berlin; Rainer Liebeke did not. He drowned on 3 September 1986, shortly before his 35th birthday, the last of the 24.

## Six who were not trying to escape

[Ulrich Krzemien](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/krzemien-ulrich/), 24, lived in West Berlin. On 25 March 1965 a swimmer entered the Spree from the western bank and swam east. Near the East Berlin bank he asked a guard for help and was merely shown where he might climb out; he tried to get up the bank in front of a watchtower, fell back into the water and went under. A body found on 13 April carried Ulrich Krzemien's identity card; the Stasi took him to be the swimmer, and Berlin investigators in the 1990s agreed. His sister later said that a man who introduced himself as an East German state prosecutor (the biography notes that Stasi officers usually presented themselves this way to relatives) had admitted to her that her brother was shot; questioned in October 1991, however, she said she still did not know whether he had drowned or been shot. Berlin prosecutors soon dropped the case for lack of sufficient suspicion of a crime, accepting the original post-mortem and blood-alcohol findings that he had drowned, helped by a very high intake of alcohol.

The other five were boys aged five to eight who went into the Spree from the Kreuzberg bank while playing, between 1966 and 1975 (one was pushed by a playmate; the others fell): [Andreas Senk](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/senk-andreas/), [Cengaver Katrancı](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/katranc-cengaver/), [Siegfried Kroboth](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/kroboth-siegfried/), [Giuseppe Savoca](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/savoca-giuseppe/) and [Çetin Mert](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/mert-cetin/). The whole width of the river there belonged to East Berlin. West Berlin police and firefighters were not free to go into the water. Only Andreas Senk was recovered from the West Berlin bank, by firemen searching with long poles; the other four were recovered by East German crews and taken to East Berlin. After an agreement in 1975, rescue posts were installed on the West Berlin side along a little over six kilometres of the water border in spring 1976. Their stories are told in [the children who died at the Berlin Wall](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/children-who-died-at-the-berlin-wall/).

## What the cases have in common

Cold is given as the cause or probable cause in three cases: cold shock for Lothar Lehmann and, according to the 1990s investigations, Ingo Krüger, and probable hypothermia for the unidentified swimmer. Günter Wiedenhöft is thought to have fallen through ice, and Franciszek Piesik swam in water of little more than ten degrees. Barriers in the water appear in four cases: Bernd Lehmann drowned caught in underwater barriers, and the bodies of Philipp Held, Henri Weise and Peter Grohganz had become caught in barriers. Several bodies were found only weeks or months after death, among them those of Georg Feldhahn, Horst Plischke, Günter Wiedenhöft, Wolf-Olaf Muszynski, Hans-Joachim Zock and Henri Weise. Udo Düllick, Horst Plischke and Günter Wiedenhöft were fired on, but none of them was hit.

Families were told little, pressed into silence or left in the dark for decades. Philipp Held's mother was told only that he had died in an accident; Lothar Lehmann's parents were told not to speak about the escape; Georg Feldhahn's sister learned of his death only in the 1990s.

Places where the victims are remembered today are described in [where to remember the victims](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/berlin-wall-victims-memorials/). For escapes that succeeded, [berlinwallescapes.com](https://berlinwallescapes.com) documents escapes under, over and through the Wall.

## Questions and answers

**How many people drowned at the Berlin Wall?**

Twenty-four of the 140 people counted as victims of the Berlin Wall drowned, according to the cause of death given in their biographies. Eighteen are counted as escapees; six had no intention of escaping, and five of those were West Berlin children.

**Where did people drown at the Berlin Wall?**

Sixteen drowned on the sector border inside the city: fifteen in the Spree and one in the Teltow Canal. Eight drowned on the outer ring: five in the Havel and three in lakes (Griebnitz Lake, the Nieder Neuendorfer Lake and Sacrower Lake).

**Who was the first person to drown at the Berlin Wall?**

Udo Düllick, a 25-year-old engineer with the East German railway, drowned in the Spree near the Oberbaum Bridge on 5 October 1961 while border guards fired at him. His body had no bullet wounds; the post-mortem found he had drowned from exhaustion.

**Who was the last person to drown at the Berlin Wall?**

Rainer Liebeke, a taxi driver and motorcycle racer from Gotha, drowned in Sacrower Lake on 3 September 1986, shortly before his 35th birthday. The friend he was escaping with reached West Berlin.

**Were the people who drowned at the Berlin Wall shot at?**

Three of them were. Guards fired when Udo Düllick, Horst Plischke and Günter Wiedenhöft tried to cross, but none of the three was hit. Four other people whose biography headings say they were both shot and drowned are counted as shot, not drowned.

## Sources

1. Hertle/Nooke, The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989: Findings (2017): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/
2. Chronik der Mauer: Udo Düllick: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180485/duellick-udo
3. Chronik der Mauer: Lothar Lehmann: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180487/lehmann-lothar
4. Chronik der Mauer: Ingo Krüger: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180489/krueger-ingo
5. Chronik der Mauer: Georg Feldhahn: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180490/feldhahn-georg
6. Chronik der Mauer: Philipp Held: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180493/held-philipp
7. Chronik der Mauer: Erna Kelm: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180499/kelm-erna
8. Chronik der Mauer: Horst Plischke: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180506/plischke-horst
9. Chronik der Mauer: Günter Wiedenhöft: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180508/wiedenhoeft-guenter
10. Chronik der Mauer: Wolf-Olaf Muszynski: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180512/muszynski-wolf-olaf
11. Chronik der Mauer: Norbert Wolscht: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180521/wolscht-norbert
12. Chronik der Mauer: Rainer Gneiser: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180522/gneiser-rainer
13. Chronik der Mauer: Unidentified fugitive: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180527/unidentified-fugitive
14. Chronik der Mauer: Ulrich Krzemien: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180529/krzemien-ulrich
15. Chronik der Mauer: Franciszek Piesik: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180552/piesik-franciszek
16. Chronik der Mauer: Bernd Lehmann: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180555/lehmann-bernd
17. Chronik der Mauer: Hans-Joachim Zock: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/183186/zock-hans-joachim
18. Chronik der Mauer: Henri Weise: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180589/weise-henri
19. Chronik der Mauer: Peter Grohganz: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/183188/grohganz-peter
20. Chronik der Mauer: Rainer Liebeke: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180597/liebeke-rainer
21. Chronik der Mauer: Erna Kelm (German): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/todesopfer/171422/kelm-erna
22. Chronik der Mauer: Horst Plischke (German): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/todesopfer/171436/plischke-horst
23. Chronik der Mauer: Ulrich Krzemien (German): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/todesopfer/171394/krzemien-ulrich
24. Chronik der Mauer: Bernd Lehmann (German): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/todesopfer/171368/lehmann-bernd
25. Chronik der Mauer: Lothar Lehmann (German): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/todesopfer/171443/lehmann-lothar
26. Chronik der Mauer: Franciszek Piesik (German): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/todesopfer/171370/piesik-franciszek
27. Chronik der Mauer: Rainer Liebeke (German): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/todesopfer/171318/liebeke-rainer

Cite as: “Who Drowned at the Berlin Wall?”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/berlin-wall-drownings/