Victims of the Wall

All 140 people

Philipp Held

1942–1962

Philipp Held, a 19-year-old from Worms in West Germany who had moved to East Germany with his girlfriend, drowned in the Spree in April 1962, probably while trying to swim from the Osthafen in Friedrichshain to the West Berlin bank.

Glass panel in a steel frame listing names with small portrait photos, the river behind
Memorial panel for Berlin Wall victims on the May-Ayim-Ufer, Kreuzberg, listing Philipp Held Photo: OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Philipp Held was born on 2 May 1942 in Worms am Rhein in West Germany. His childhood was a sheltered one, though clouded by the death of his father in a car accident in 1955. He trained as an electrician and then began to study engineering. He was his mother's only son, and she was proud of him.

At 19 he met Bärbel W., then 16. His mother disapproved of the friendship, and the young couple felt misunderstood and treated like children. In September 1961, without telling their parents, they crossed the inner-German border into East Germany near Helmstedt and asked to settle there; Bärbel had grown up in East Germany before fleeing west with her mother in 1956. After passing through the reception camp at Barby near Magdeburg, they were allowed to move to Eberswalde, near Berlin, where Bärbel's father and other relatives lived.

Life there proved hard. They struggled with living and working conditions, were not warmly received and felt watched and scolded. Their letters home soon suggested regret, and they seemed to realise that, with the Wall built, the way back was closed. Bärbel, still a minor, applied to leave; for Philipp, an adult with vocational training who had come from the West, an application seemed hopeless. When conscription was introduced in January 1962, he expected to be called up soon and feared that, as a soldier bearing arms and holding secrets, he would never get out of the country. In the end he felt he had no choice but to try to escape. His last letter to his mother hinted at this, and his girlfriend and his landlady knew of his intention, though not the details.

He disappeared on 8 April 1962. At first his girlfriend and landlady believed he had got away; only after days without news did they begin to worry. On 22 April 1962 border police noticed his body in the Spree, and water police recovered it at the Schilling Bridge. He had his identity papers with him in a cellophane bag. His body had become caught in the wire of an underwater barrier and had been in the water for about ten days. There were no bullet wounds. Everything indicates that he drowned attempting to swim across from the Osthafen harbour in Friedrichshain to the West Berlin side, but exactly how, when and where he died has never been established.

A letter dated 26 April 1962 informed his mother briefly that her son had died in an accident. With help from the authorities in Worms she tried to have his body brought home, only to learn to her dismay that he had been cremated without her consent. Distrusting the East German account, she went to the West German press, and rumours spread that he had been shot. When the Berlin public prosecutor reopened the case in 1990, this could not be confirmed; all available records indicate that he drowned while trying to escape.

Read more

Also died on the sector border between Berlin-Friedrichshain and Berlin-Kreuzberg

Sources

This profile is a summary written for this site. Every fact in it is taken from source 1, which also gives the full account with archival references.

  1. Christine Brecht, “Philipp Held”, biography in Chronik der Mauer, Federal Agency for Civic Education, Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Deutschlandradio. Accessed 23 September 2026. Read online. Basis for every fact in this profile, including the dates and place of death.
  2. German version of the same biography. Accessed 23 September 2026. Read online.
  3. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke (eds.), The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989: A Biographical Handbook. Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Berlin Wall Foundation, Berlin 2011. The printed handbook from which the online biography is taken.
  4. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke, “140 Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989” (list), Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Berlin Wall Foundation, August 2017. PDF. Used to cross-check names and dates.
  5. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke, “The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989: Findings of a Research Project”, August 2017. PDF. Source of the classification into escapees, people with no intent to escape, and border soldiers.

Further reading

Image credits

Cite this page

“Philipp Held”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/held-philipp/

Map

The pin position is based on the place of death described in source 1. Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors; course of the Wall in 1989 from Geoportal Berlin (dl-de/zero-2.0). Accessed 23 September 2026.