The things you find when you're not looking

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I was googling Osterwieck, a town not too far from Goslar. My ancestors had connections with both these towns. I clicked on a link that looked interesting and spent a few minutes reading about Winfried Freudenberg who was born in Osterwieck. He was the last person to die while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall to escape into West Berlin. That in itself was interesting but his method of escape showed the desperation of some of these people. In 1988, at the age of 32, the newly married Winfried and his wife Sabine were living in Lüttgenrode and decided to escape to the west in a hot-air balloon. They had been unable to find work and lived only a few hundred metres from the border. Winfried took a job in a local gas refinery. Early in 1989 they begun cutting polythene tents into strips. They then taped the strips together to make a balloon 13 metres tall and 11 metres in diameter. When they considered the conditions were favourable they too the balloon to Winfried's workplace and began to fill it with natural gas. However a student noticed them and called the local police. On seeing the patrol car and with the balloon not sufficiently inflated to carry them both, Winfried went alone in the balloon. Without Sabine as ballast, the balloon rose too fast and severed a power line shortly after being launched. Because of the danger of an explosion, the police did not fire. After several hours aloft, he passed over Berlin Tegel airport in West Berlin at 2,000 metres. At 7.30am on the morning of 8 March, 1989, he fell into a backyard garden and died instantly. If the couple had waited till later in the year, they might have been able to pass across freely. What a sad ending for the young man. The photo is of a blimp we saw near Lake Constanze.