Victims of the Wall

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Ulrich Krzemien

1940–1965

Ulrich Krzemien, a 24-year-old bricklayer living in West Berlin, is believed to be the swimmer who drowned in the Spree near Osthafen on 25 March 1965 after an East German border guard did no more than point out where he might climb out.

Glass memorial panel with a column of names, dates and small portrait photographs, standing on a riverside promenade with the river and buildings behind it
Memorial panel for the victims of the Berlin Wall on the May-Ayim-Ufer in Berlin-Kreuzberg, listing Ulrich Krzemien among others, photographed in 2012 Photo: OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ulrich Krzemien was born in Berlin on 13 September 1940, the fourth of six children. His father had served in the Wehrmacht and did not come back from the Second World War, so his mother brought up the large family on her own in the hard post-war years. After eighth grade he trained as a bricklayer and from 1958 worked for several East Berlin building firms. One day in the summer of 1959 he did not come home to his mother's flat in Berlin-Treptow; his mother reported him missing, while he looked for a flat and work in West Berlin. A few weeks later he wrote to her that he now planned to live in the West.

While the border was still open he is said to have visited his mother in the East often, and it was there that he was arrested in July 1961. Charged with leaving illegally, slandering the state and resisting state authority, he was sentenced by the Berlin-Treptow district court in early August to a year and two months in prison. He was released on 29 September 1962 and made to stay in East Berlin with a job at a state-owned company. By mid-October 1962 he had escaped again, telling his mother that he had crossed via the Teltow Canal. He wrote to her regularly. He soon became engaged, but the relationship lasted only a little over a year and broke up around the turn of 1964 to 1965; he may not have got over it.

At around 9.30 p.m. on 25 March 1965 an unidentified man swam from the West Berlin bank of the Spree towards the East. About twenty metres from the bank near the Osthafen paper mill, apparently exhausted and, according to a border report, presumably drunk, he called to a guard for help. The guard merely pointed out places where he might climb out. The man tried to scale the steep bank, fell back five metres from the watchtower and went under while the guard looked on.

Only then did the guard act, firing five shots into the air and a red flare to alert the patrol boat. Boats searched with hooks until about 10.30 p.m. Alerted by the shots, West Berlin fire crews, police and two rescue divers arrived, watched by 80 to 100 people on the western bank, but the commander of the 1st Border Brigade ordered from the eastern bank that any western diver entering the water be fired on. On 13 April 1965 a body was found drifting between the Brommy Bridge and the Schilling Bridge, carrying Ulrich Krzemien's identity card. The Stasi was sure it was the swimmer, and Berlin investigators reached the same conclusion in the 1990s, although the body was too decomposed to be identified at first from his passport photo; a comparison with identifying features given by his mother and two of his siblings matched almost entirely.

The day after the body was found, a Stasi officer questioned his mother and told her that her son had drowned during a border provocation; she was to say it had been an accident. She was given a death certificate giving 25 March 1965 as the date of death, but the autopsy report, evidently on Stasi instructions, recorded 31 March. She was not allowed to see him and was pressed to agree to cremation and burial at the Baumschulenweg cemetery. At the end of 1990 one of his sisters wrote to the Berlin Senate that she believed her brother had been shot near the Massante Bridge; a man who had introduced himself as a state prosecutor had given her that news at the time. She filed a criminal complaint, but questioned in October 1991, she said she still did not know whether he had drowned by accident or been shot. The investigation by the Berlin public prosecutor was discontinued soon afterwards for lack of sufficient suspicion; it accepted the original post-mortem and alcohol findings that he had drowned, helped by very heavy drinking, and found no sign of violence by others. What led him, if he was indeed the swimmer, to swim fully clothed into the East in the cold of March is not known.

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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. Martin Ahrends/Hans-Hermann Hertle, “Ulrich Krzemien”, 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

  • Memorial panel for the victims of the Berlin Wall on the May-Ayim-Ufer in Berlin-Kreuzberg, listing Ulrich Krzemien among others, photographed in 2012. OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Cite this page

“Ulrich Krzemien”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/krzemien-ulrich/

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.