Victims of the Wall

All 140 people

Max Sahmland

1929–1967

Max Sahmland, a 37-year-old Berlin-born former blacksmith and farm worker, was shot by border guards while fleeing across the Teltow Canal to West Berlin on 27 January 1967 and sank in the water.

Black-and-white portrait of a man with short dark hair, wearing a jacket and patterned tie, with the caption "Max Sahmland, 1. Januar 1967, Foto: ullstein bild"
Max Sahmland on 1 January 1967 (photo: ullstein bild), photographed from his memorial stele at Ernst-Ruska-Ufer in Berlin-Adlershof Photo: Assenmacher, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Max Sahmland was born in Berlin on 28 March 1929 and was 16 when the war ended. The years that followed seem not to have been easy for him. After leaving school he worked on the land and later as a blacksmith at the heavy equipment construction company in Wildau. He was married and had two children.

According to a West Berlin police report, he moved to West Berlin in January 1961, leaving his wife and children behind, but returned to East Germany a few months later. Little is known about his reasons, or about why he came back; he reportedly later told the People's Police it was because of problems in his marriage. The marriage broke up. Alcohol repeatedly brought him into conflict with the law. In 1964 he had to serve an 18-month prison sentence for culpably causing a traffic accident, and in early January 1967 the district court in Königs Wusterhausen gave him six months for assault, followed by a stay in a detoxification centre. He did not want to go back to prison and decided to escape to West Berlin with his fiancée, who had a cousin there; he himself had a sister in West Germany.

Two earlier attempts had already failed. The day before the next try, the couple told a friend of their plans, and she chose on the spot to come with them. Shortly before midnight on 26 January 1967, having been drinking, the three set off, cycled to Zeuthen station and took the S-Bahn to Adlershof. From there they walked to a stretch of the border that Max Sahmland knew from his earlier work at a sewage treatment plant. He left the two women in a trench a few metres from the first fence, told his fiancée to be brave, and crawled ahead to cut a gap with a wire-cutter. When bursts of submachine-gun fire startled them, the women ran back and reached home without being noticed.

At about 2:30 a.m. he set off an alarm while trying to get over the signal fence, and guards in the observation tower at the Wredebrücke opened fire. Although already hit, he got under the barrier, reached the bank of the Teltow Canal and began to swim. The guards kept firing even after he had reached West Berlin territory; he was struck by several bullets, one of them in the right lung. Two workers from a cement asbestos plant on the western bank ran to help him, but had to take cover because the shooting continued, and eventually he sank into the canal.

The West Berlin water police recovered his body from the canal on 8 March 1967, six weeks later; he was identified by the identity card he was carrying. In February 2000 the Berlin Regional Court acquitted a former border guard charged with attempted manslaughter for firing thirty shots towards him, because it could not disprove his claim that he had deliberately aimed a few metres wide.

His fiancée was arrested on 28 January 1967 and sentenced to two years and eight months in prison; she served twenty months in the Stasi prison in Potsdam and in Hoheneck women's prison. Her friend received a year and seven months. Max Sahmland's mother, who lived in East Berlin, was apparently not told that his body could be brought to East Berlin, as her letters to her sister suggest, and he was buried on 5 April 1967 in the Park Cemetery in Neukölln, West Berlin. To keep the 70-year-old woman from attending her son's funeral, the Stasi barred her from travelling until the end of April 1967.

Orange column and three grey steles with portrait photographs on a lawn beside a road, with a bench in front and a large modern building behind
Memorial column and steles for Max Sahmland, Michael Kollender and Dieter Berger at Ernst-Ruska-Ufer in Berlin-Adlershof, photographed in 2013 Photo: Assenmacher, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Panel with a black-and-white aerial photograph of a canal and industrial area with three labelled marks, above German and English text
Panel at the Adlershof memorial with a 1989 aerial photograph marking the escape routes and places of death of Dieter Berger, Michael Kollender and Max Sahmland, photographed in 2019 Photo: OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also died on the sector border between Berlin-Neukölln and Berlin-Treptow

Sources

This profile is a summary written for this site from the biography in source 1, which also gives the full account with archival references. Facts taken from other sources are listed below with what they support.

  1. Martin Ahrends/Udo Baron, “Max Sahmland”, biography in Chronik der Mauer, Federal Agency for Civic Education, Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Deutschlandradio. Accessed 23 September 2026. Read online. The biography from which this profile was written, and the source of the dates and place of death.
  2. German version of the same biography. Accessed 23 September 2026. Read online.
  3. Stasi individual report on a border breach at the Wrede Bridge in Berlin-Johannisthal on 27 January 1967, sent to Erich Honecker, 28 January 1967 (BStU, MfS, ZAIG Nr. 1321, Bl. 1-4), transcript in Chronik der Mauer. Accessed 5 October 2026. Read online. Source for: his date of birth, the route via Adlershof, his knowledge of the area from the sewage plant, the trench and the cut wire, the women's flight, the alarm at about 2.30 a.m., and that he still reached the canal after the guards heard him cry out.
  4. Judgment of the Berlin Regional Court (Landgericht Berlin), 9 February 2000, (536) 27/2 Js 162/90 Ks (30/99), excerpt (StA Berlin, Az. 27 Js 162/90, Bd. 5, Bl. 1-3), transcript in Chronik der Mauer. Accessed 5 October 2026. Read online. Source for: the charge of attempted manslaughter and the acquittal in February 2000.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.

Corrections

This profile was corrected on 24 and 28 September and 5 October 2026. Each round of corrections is described in the corrections log:

Further reading

Image credits

  • Max Sahmland on 1 January 1967 (photo: ullstein bild), photographed from his memorial stele at Ernst-Ruska-Ufer in Berlin-Adlershof. Assenmacher, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
  • Memorial column and steles for Max Sahmland, Michael Kollender and Dieter Berger at Ernst-Ruska-Ufer in Berlin-Adlershof, photographed in 2013. Assenmacher, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
  • Panel at the Adlershof memorial with a 1989 aerial photograph marking the escape routes and places of death of Dieter Berger, Michael Kollender and Max Sahmland, photographed in 2019. OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Cite this page

“Max Sahmland”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/sahmland-max/

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.