March 1978 two East German men, Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel, living with their wives and four children at Poessneck, near the East German frontier, began working on several ideas for escaping to West Germany. Strelzyk was an aircraft mechanic and electrician with his own workshop, while Wetzel was a builder and a gifted handyman. Both were brilliant at bricolage, endlessly resourceful and determined. Together they hit upon the idea of secretly constructing a home-made hot-air balloon in Strelzyk’s attic and workshop. There are various accounts of how they came up with this idea, but one is that Wetzel’s sister-in-law gave them an illustrated magazine article about the annual Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the most famous of all hot-air balloon gatherings, launched in New Mexico in 1972. After that they got all their technical information from the Poessneck public library.
Their balloon had to be very large, capable of lifting eight people to a height of at least five thousand feet, to avoid detection by frontier searchlights, and of carrying them at night over a distance of at least ten miles. They spent months surreptitiously assembling suitable materials, building makeshift propane burners and testing various potential balloon fabrics – including cotton sheets, umbrella covers, waterproof-jacket linings and tenting fabric. The work was shared, but Strelzyk specialised in constructing the burners and the sheet-metal balloon platform, while Wetzel worked on the balloon canopy and rigging. He sewed all the curved balloon strips, or gores, together on a pre-war, pedal-operated sewing machine. Everything had to be bought in small quantities from different shops to avoid alerting the network of Stasi informers; they drove as far as Leipzig to cover their purchases, sometimes claiming that they represented camping or sailing clubs. Their balloon trials were carried out at night in remote areas of the Thuringian forest.
In the end, with infinite patience and ingenuity, they built three versions of their escape balloon. The first, a sixty-foot-high cotton balloon with a capacity of seventy thousand cubic feet, failed to inflate properly, due to porous fabric and a weak burner using two domestic propane cylinders. It had to be abandoned and painstakingly destroyed in April 1978. After more than a year of experiments and setbacks, they came up with a second design with a better, four-cylinder burner and tighter fabric. But during this anxious time Günter Wetzel, increasingly haunted by the risks to his family, reluctantly withdrew from the scheme, and began to consider more conventional methods of crossing the border.
The second balloon was designed to take only the three members of the Strelzyk family. Symbolically, they chose American Independence Day, 4 July 1979, for their launch. But the balloon still lacked lifting power. It flew too low, became drenched by rainclouds, and began to sink earthwards just as the border came in sight. The Strelzyks crash-landed in the bare no-man’s land two hundred yards short of the actual frontier fence. By good luck they were just outside the frontier ‘death zone’, where the barbed wire, anti-personnel mines and automatic guns would have proved fatal. Astonishingly, the crumpled shape of the balloon was not immediately spotted by the border guards, probably because of the heavy rain. Under cover of darkness the three Strelzyks scrambled out of the wreckage, collected all the personal belongings they could carry, and somehow managed to slip back undetected to Poessneck, covering nine miles on foot before dawn. But the balloon equipment that they were forced to abandon meant that the Stasi had clues to their identity, and would soon be hot on their trail. Discovery within a matter of weeks was inevitable.
At this desperate moment, the two families joined forces again. Working around the clock, the Strelzyks and the Weltzers constructed a much bigger balloon using piecemeal sections of artificial taffetas and dress materials, hastily purchased from small shops all over East Germany. An electric engine was attached to the sewing machine, and the propane burner was redesigned. In a matter of six weeks they had a new balloon looking like a huge multicoloured quilt. When fully inflated it stood nearly ninety feet high, and had a hot-air capacity of over 140,000 cubic feet, double that of the previous balloon. Its burner was powered by four propane tanks feeding into a simple five-inch-diameter stovepipe, capable of producing a narrow, violent flame which at maximum pressure shot fifty feet into the air – within thirty feet of the inner crown of the balloon. This could in theory lift well over 1,200 pounds (544 kilograms), the equivalent of seven adults and a child plus all the balloon equipment. But everything depended on the durability of the home-made envelope, the strength and direction of the wind, and the general flying conditions (including air temperature and humidity) on the actual night of the flight.
Unable to obtain materials for a conventional wicker basket, they constructed instead an open metal platform four and a half feet square. The four propane cylinders stood in the centre of this platform, and the eight passengers carefully distributed their weight around them, having to crouch within inches of the platform’s outer edge. The youngest Wetzel was held in his mother’s arms. The ten guy ropes connected to the balloon were tethered to iron stanchions welded along the edges of the platform, which provided some handholds. There was also an outer guardrail made of loops of washing line, but this only came up to the adults’ waists. The stovepipe burner was ignited by a household match, and at full power burnt with a tremendous roar about six feet above the passengers’ heads, shooting flame high into the centre of the balloon. When this ‘flame-thrower’ was extinguished, they would float in absolute darkness and silence, standing virtually unprotected in the air, with no sound but the creak of the ropes against the balloon fabric, somewhere invisible above their heads. It was a magnificent, dreamlike, insane contraption. But it flew.
At 2 a.m. on the night of 16 September 1979, with a brisk eighteen-mile-per-hour breeze blowing towards West Germany, they took off from their secret base in the Thuringian forest, about six miles from the frontier. They cleared the fir trees, and with a tremendous blast from the propane burner, the balloon rose rapidly to 6,500 feet. But as it turned on its axis in the dark, they soon lost all sense of direction. Clinging together on the tiny metal platform, they peered down in silence, looking for car headlamps which would indicate roads, or the chain of lights which would mark the border.
After about twenty minutes, to their alarm, they suddenly saw searchlights springing up almost directly beneath them. They had the choice to drift downwards, steadily sinking but hoping to avoid detection in the dark, or to fire up their burner and try to climb clear. They chose to fire the burner, and with a huge sustained burst of flame, which they felt must surely be visible for miles around, rose to nearly nine thousand feet. Under either the increased heat or the air pressure, the crown of the balloon split. They began to sink again, but the balloon remained inflated, and by continuing to fire the burner until their propane ran out, they managed a crash-landing in an open field a hundred yards from a high-voltage pylon. Günter Wetzel broke his leg, but otherwise they were all unhurt, although they had no idea on which side of the border they had arrived. Peter Strelzyk walked over and shone a torch on the ‘Danger of Death’ sign fixed to the base of the pylon. It belonged to a West German electricity company. They had flown to freedom – and to fame – in exactly twenty-eight minutes. ‘We could have made it as far as Bayreuth,’ remarked Wetzel.10 fn4
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The theme of escape, either literally from some form of imprisonment, or symbolically from the troubles of the earth itself, constantly recurs in the history of ballooning. When Dr Alexander Charles made the first ever flight by a true hydrogen balloon, two hundred years before the escape of the Strelzyks and the Wetzels, on 1 December 1783, it was the feeling of absolute and almost metaphysical freedom that overcame him.
Flying with an engineering assistant, Monsieur Robert, Dr Charles launched from the Jardin des Tuileries in central Paris, and travelled over twenty miles north-west to the country town of Nesles. His balloon was a mere thirty feet high, but was equipped with a proper wicker basket, a venting valve, and sacks of ballast to adjust its height and control its descent. His departure was witnessed by nearly half a million people, among them the American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin. After they had landed safely at
